Last week, Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee and wife Esther Duflo became the first couple in history to win the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences for their ground-breaking research to alleviate poverty. The couple, who teach at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and have been married for four years, are also the sixth couple to jointly win the Nobel — you may recognise some of the other famous couples on the list, including Marie and Pierre Curie, and biochemists Gerty and Carl Cori.

If the lives and accomplishments of these feted couples are any indication, building your career and ambitions in the same stream as your partner does come with its fair share of benefits. But then, you only need to look a little further to realise that falling in love with someone who shares the same professional dreams as you do could easily go wrong — take, for instance, one of English literature's most controversial marriages (and most talented but troubled couples), namely Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, whose relationship was mired by professional rivalry, jealousy, infidelity and even domestic abuse. This raises the very pertinent question of what distinguishes successful professional and personal partnerships from the ones that fall apart.