My my, hey hey ... it's better to burn out, than to fade away
Well as much as I appreciated the Neil Young quote from Drewski, my opinion runs more along the lines of a recent U2 song, which says
Love and love is all we have left
The only thing that can be kept
Love is all we have left
So, what gravitated me toward the woman who became my wife, and really my life, is not that she's beautiful, even though by any measure she is, and not because she's brainy, even though she carried the flag in her K-12 classes in Argentina (which the top student in the class does there), is that we have the same sense of humor. We laugh at the same jokes, have an overall similar philosophy of life, have the same sense of humor, see politics roughly the same, laugh at the same jokes, see religion more or less the same, and, oh yeah, we laugh together. At the same stuff.
First date. The movie was My Life as a Dog which is a Swedish drama about a 12 year old boy who has rotten luck, but keeps telling himself it could be worse, he could be Laika, the poor dog who died when the Soviets sent her into space in Sputnik 2.
We both laughed a lot during this movie. And we noticed that no one else was laughing quite a few times when we were, and honestly some of it was even uncontrolled laughter on both our parts. I think it was then we knew we were right for each other. The rest (5 years of dating, family acceptance across some pretty high cultural barriers on both sides, marriage into the Catholic church even though I grew up protestant, etc) was just a big oh yeah sure we can manage all that. Because we laugh together.
And we still do. I'm just off the phone from her after another 40 min conversation while I was in the car, via bluetooth.
So, forget all the other factors, in my opinion - if you like the same stuff, get the same joke, laugh together when others are kind of scratching their heads and saying sure whatever floats your boat, now, then you'll still be doing it 30 years later.
My 2 cents