You chose the person. But did you choose the same marriage?

Two people can be madly attracted to each other.

They can laugh constantly.

They can have fantastic sex.

They can have similar backgrounds, similar values and even extraordinarily similar life experiences.

They can feel understood by each other in a way they haven't experienced before.

And they can still be imagining two completely different relationships.

I think this is one of the things we don't talk about enough when we talk about compatibility.

We spend enormous amounts of time asking whether someone is the right person.

Are we attracted to them?

Do we have chemistry?

Do we enjoy being together?

Do our friends like them?

Do we want children?

Do we have similar values?

But perhaps there is another question we should be asking:

Are we actually imagining the same relationship?

Because choosing the same person doesn't necessarily mean you've chosen the same marriage.

Shared pain can feel a lot like compatibility

There is something incredibly powerful about meeting somebody who understands an experience that fundamentally changed you.

Perhaps you've both lost a parent.

Perhaps you've both experienced difficult childhoods.

Perhaps you've both been divorced.

Perhaps you've experienced grief, illness, infertility, abandonment or some other event that changed the trajectory of your lives.

There can be an immediate depth to that connection.

You don't have to explain certain things.

They get it.

And that can create genuine intimacy.

But shared trauma and shared loss aren't necessarily the same thing as compatibility.

They tell you something important about what you've both survived.

They don't necessarily tell you how either of you behaves inside a relationship.

Two people can experience exactly the same kind of loss and emerge from it needing completely different things.

One person may crave closeness.

The other may fiercely protect their independence.

One may need reassurance.

The other may retreat when emotions become intense.

One may interpret love as spending enormous amounts of time together.

The other may interpret love as giving each other enormous amounts of freedom.

Neither response is automatically wrong.

But the differences matter.

Being understood because somebody shares your history isn't the same as being understood in the relationship you're trying to build.

Fun is important. But fun isn't infrastructure.

Then there is the person who is just incredibly fun.

They're exciting.

They're spontaneous.

They make you laugh.

They're the person you want beside you at the party.

They're brilliant on holiday.

You have stories together.

You have chemistry.

You feel alive around them.

Those things matter.

I wouldn't want to build a relationship entirely around sensible conversations about pension contributions and who empties the dishwasher either.

But there's an uncomfortable question worth asking:

What happens when the party ends?

Because eventually somebody has to come home.

Eventually someone gets sick.

Somebody has a terrible week at work.

Children arrive, perhaps.

Money becomes tight.

Parents age.

Sex changes.

Careers become demanding.

Someone becomes overwhelmed.

Someone needs more from the other person than cocktails, holidays and chemistry.

And suddenly you're discovering something completely different about the person you chose.

Not whether they're fun.

Whether they can partner.

What does being married actually mean to you?

This might sound like an absurd question to ask someone you're planning to marry.

Surely everybody knows what marriage is?

Except I don't think we do.

For one person, marriage might mean

You're my person. You come first.

For another

We love each other deeply, but we're still extremely independent people.

One person expects weekends together.

The other expects to continue living almost exactly as they did while single.

One thinks holidays are precious couple or family time.

The other thinks nothing of spending half the holiday networking, working or socialising with other people.

One expects constant communication.

The other experiences that as suffocating.

One thinks, Of course you'll come home after work.

The other thinks, Of course I can go for drinks afterwards.

And here's where relationships can become particularly painful.

Because eventually each person begins interpreting the other's behaviour morally.

You don't prioritise me.

You're controlling.

You're selfish.

You're needy.

You're never here.

You're always on my case.

But underneath some of those accusations can be a much simpler problem:

I thought being together was going to look different from this.

you knew what I was like isn't always enough

There's another argument that comes up frequently in relationships.

You knew who I was when you met me.

And sometimes that's completely fair.

If you marry someone enormously ambitious, it probably isn't reasonable to be astonished that their career remains important.

If you fall in love with somebody highly social, they're unlikely to suddenly want to spend every evening at home.

If someone's public profile, business, sport, art or career is central to their identity, marriage doesn't automatically erase it.

But there's another side to this.

Knowing what somebody does isn't necessarily the same as knowing how they intend to integrate it into a marriage.

You can know somebody works incredibly hard without knowing they expect to work every weekend.

You can know somebody loves travelling without realising they expect to travel without you constantly.

You can know somebody is highly social without knowing that you'll regularly feel alone in a room while they're working everyone else in it.

And equally, your partner may reasonably have assumed that you understood those things because you've been watching them live that way since the day you met.

That's exactly why assumptions are so dangerous.

You can both feel completely misled while neither person technically lied.

Ask the embarrassingly obvious questions

I think sometimes we avoid asking basic questions because they sound unromantic.

What does a normal Saturday look like to you when we're married?

How much time do you expect us to spend together?

How important is your career compared with our relationship?

What happens when those things conflict?

How much independence do you need?

How much closeness do you need?

What makes you feel neglected?

What makes you feel controlled?

What does loyalty mean to you beyond simply not sleeping with somebody else?

What does prioritising your partner actually look like?

How do you expect holidays to work?

How much do we socialise separately?

What happens when one of us needs considerably more support than usual?

How do you behave when you're unhappy with me?

What would make you feel as though this relationship wasn't working?

And perhaps most importantly:

What do you need from me to feel loved in this relationship?

Then comes the question we sometimes find even harder to answer

What do I need from you?

Not what should I need.

Not what sounds reasonable.

Not what I think I can persuade myself to accept.

What do I actually need?

Stop auditioning. Start observing.

Dating also has an unfortunate tendency to turn us into our best representatives.

We're more accommodating.

More spontaneous.

More sexually available.

More interested in their hobbies.

Less bothered when plans change.

More willing to stay out late.

Less likely to complain.

We're falling in love.

Of course we are.

But eventually somebody has to stop auditioning and start living.

That's when you need to pay attention.

Not just to whether this person makes you happy.

Watch how they live.

How do they spend their time?

What consistently gets prioritised?

How do they behave when they're stressed?

What happens when you need something inconvenient?

Can they tolerate disappointing other people in order to show up for you?

Do their actions match what they tell you matters?

How do they handle conflict?

Do they repair?

Can they hear criticism without turning it into an attack?

Can you?

Because the person you're dating is giving you information about the partner they're likely to become.

And you're giving them information too.

The conversation doesn't end at the wedding

Even if you have all these conversations before marriage, there's another problem.

People change.

Life changes.

The relationship you need at 28 may not be the relationship you need at 38.

Then children arrive.

Or careers take off.

Or somebody loses a parent.

Or somebody burns out.

Or you relocate.

Or money becomes tight.

Or suddenly there's more money than you've ever had.

Or somebody becomes ill.

Or one person is carrying far more of the family load than they used to.

The agreement needs renegotiating.

That's why one of the questions I ask my own husband from time to time is incredibly simple:

What do you need from me?

Sometimes the answer is nothing.

Sometimes it takes some digging.

But I think it's a question worth continuing to ask.

And then I have to be willing to answer it too.

What do I need from you now?

Not five years ago.

Not when we met.

Not when we got married.

Now.

Because perhaps a good marriage isn't two people perfectly meeting one another's needs indefinitely.

Perhaps it's two people who keep being willing to find out what those needs have become.

Chemistry gets you together. Partnership keeps asking questions.

There is nothing wrong with choosing someone partly because they are fun.

Please choose someone you laugh with.

Choose someone you fancy.

Choose someone you want adventures with.

Choose someone whose presence makes ordinary life more enjoyable.

And if you've both been through something profound and recognise something of yourself in the other person, that can be an extraordinary bond.

But don't stop there.

Ask what happens after the excitement.

Ask what happens when one of you feels neglected.

Ask what happens when work gets busy.

Ask what happens when your needs conflict.

Ask what they think commitment requires of them.

Tell them what commitment requires for you.

Because you can love the same person while imagining completely different lives with them.

And sometimes what looks from the outside like a relationship suddenly falling apart is actually two people finally discovering an incompatibility that was there from the beginning:

They chose each other.

They just never established what choosing each other was supposed to mean.