One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness.

My wife is one of the most extroverted people I know. She could out-talk Oprah and Joyce Meyer simultaneously. But when we first got married, I believed that I was the more extroverted of the two of us. I believed that extroversion was good, introversion was bad, therefore I had to be extroverted. And that wasn't my only area of delusion.

My Myers-Briggs profile is INFP (introspective, intuitive, feeler, perceiver). My friend Rick Blackmon, a psychologist with whom I went through clinical training, tells me that in grad school I swore I was the exact opposite: ESTJ. I have no memory of this. I'm not even sure I remember Rick.

But this much I have learned: human beings come with very different sets of wiring, different interests, different temperaments, different learning styles, different gifts, different temptations. These differences are tremendously important ...