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'We are so foreign to each other," the man says, shaking his head in dismay.

This is a friend of mine, and he is talking about a recent column on the disunion between the sexes. "How can we ever make it work?" he despairs.

Which is a good question. But this guy is gay. He doesn't even have the male-female, Mars-Venus obstacle to navigate. And that's the point. It's not just about the gulf between the sexes.

The problem with everlasting love is that two people are two different worlds. And worlds don't mesh. They collide.

The concept of marriage is better than, and very different from, the reality in many cases.

Popular culture is partly to blame. It leads us to believe that a couple, if truly in love, becomes one being. We even say a couple are "an item."

And then there are those love hormones. Blame them, too.

In her bestselling 2006 book, The Female Brain, neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine writes: "The brain circuits that are activated when we are in love match those of the drug addict desperately craving the next fix."

Carole Radziwill, author of What Remains, once joked about a great T-shirt idea she had: "They'll say, 'It's the oxytocin, stupid.' " She was talking about the so-called bonding hormone.

"People think they're in love, but it's just this hormone the body releases after sex to make you feel in love," she said.

So maybe you marry after all the hugs, kisses and activity between the sheets. But then the chemical high wears off. And romantic love morphs into everyday love.

A wedding is an emotional orgasm, the climax of courtship and falling in love. After that, there isn't really an emotional experience that measures up. Okay, buying a house together is rather nice. And, of course, there's the life-altering joy of having children. But does watching TV together on Friday night really do it for you?

Many divorced people I know say they left their spouse because he or she turned out to be someone they never really knew.

"I was definitely looking at the rosier picture," says a friend, whose 15-year marriage ended in divorce. She had met her future husband at a party. Leaning against a wall, he drew her attention because he was Moroccan, handsome, an exotic addition to Toronto's white-bread social world of the seventies.

"I thought he was different, unusual and that he had a way of getting me out of my abstract mind. He grounded me, I thought," she says.

But through the course of their marriage, and the birth of two children, she discovered he was irresponsible and moody. Worse, he often put her down. "I want to cry when I think about it," she tells me. "What I believed about him was all so silly."

And don't think just women fall prey to poor judgment. Men get bamboozled into marriage. (And usually, they are the guys with big dough.) In the late nineties, Anne-Marie Sten wafted into Toronto as the guest of Barrick Gold honcho Peter Munk and his wife, Melanie.

A Canadian nipped-and-tucked beauty, Ms. Sten was once a mistress - one of many - of Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi businessman and arms dealer. She had a spectacular sexual past.

At a party, she met Matthew Barrett, then the 52-year-old once-divorced bachelor-of-the-moment and head of Bank of Montreal. Ms. Sten wore a nipple-grazing sheath. Soon they were an item.

She knew how to work her man; make him feel that he was the centre of her world; hold him in her doting gaze. It was rumoured that she withheld sex, even though she was a goddess, dripping with more pheromones than jewels. He was practically cross-eyed with desire, poor guy.

Five weeks after the party, he popped the question. At 42, and with her prospects diminishing - her acting career had never panned out - Ms. Sten saw marriage as the security she wanted. The union, which caused Bay Street types to question Mr. Barrett's judgment, lasted less than two years.

Is it possible to ever really know another person, enough to be able to happily live the rest of your life with him or her? We are unknowable, in so many ways, even to ourselves. It takes a lifetime to figure out who you are, and yet we often marry young. Like I did. I was 22 and freshly graduated from a women's college when I met my future husband, who was my boss, divorced, and 14 years my senior.

Years into our 18-year marriage, he complained: "You are not the person I married."

"I wouldn't want to be," I replied. "I didn't know who I was."

Rev. Milton Barry, minister of Grace Church on-the-Hill in Toronto, a popular wedding venue in the affluent neighbourhood of Forest Hill, says he tries not to scare couples who come to speak to him about marriage. He advises they take a marriage preparation course.

"In the midst of attraction to each other, they believe that the differences they bring to marriage won't matter," he explains. "But they do matter."

Just after my marriage dissolved I was in London, England, visiting my parents. I talked to them about my disappointment. My father kindly told me not to upset myself too much.

"Your mother and I were just lucky," he said.

They have been married for 53 years. He was 23 and my mother had just turned 21 when they wed. But they also came from the same tribe, so to speak: the Anglo society of Montreal. They saw the world the same way.

Now, we live in a much more diverse world. We travel far from home in our work and personal lives. We value otherness. So when you meet that cute Brazilian on the beach, look him in the eye and feel some spark, you think: "Ah, fate has brought me my soulmate."

Well, good luck trying to navigate that cultural and background divide.

Still, David McKenzie, a Vancouver-based sex therapist and couples counsellor, believes that, "without the possibility of conflict, there is no possibility of a relationship. If there's no conflict, someone is in control."

His take is simple.

"I see marriage as two individuals with firm boundaries who say, 'Let's negotiate how to live peacefully together.' This doesn't mean enmeshment; this idea that what I feel you must feel or what I think you should think, that's sick."

The key to long-lasting love involves more than that, though. Compassion and empathy are important. Canon Barry believes that "authentic love can overcome anything, and authentic love is about being prepared to put yourself in the other's person's shoes; to try in every possible way to look at life from the other person's point of view."

There's one other thing: kindness. It's the most underrated quality in a mate.

Helen Gurley Brown told me as much about a couple of years ago. I was interviewing the author and legendary former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, and she said not to bother with the smooth rich dude, the Prince Charming type, whose good looks and charm sweep you off your feet. Go for the best friend, the one who is kind, she advised.

That's what she did. She has been married to film producer David Brown since 1959. And they're still having sex - lots of it. She's in her 80s and wanted to tell me all about it even though, frankly, octogenarian copulation was more information than I needed.

Unfortunately, however, biology fails us in one fundamental way. It does not provide a hormone that induces kindness in the way it created one that catapults us into marriage.

shampson@globeandmail.com