NEW YORK — I am a Sagittarius. My wife is a Scorpio. By most accounts, we are the Zodiacal equivalent of vinegar and baking soda.

One needn't dig deep to find stern warnings against this highly volatile, messy and apparently doomed astrological pairing:

"While Sagittarius may get fed up with Scorpio's stubbornness and inflexibility," says the Web site www.astrology.com, "Scorpio could be thinking their Sagittarius mate is just a little too hotheaded."

Got that right.

"Entering this relationship will be like trying to french-kiss a spitting cobra — extremely dangerous!" predicts www.crazyhoroscopes.com, offering this rationale: "The Scorpio female is an emotional person who has a tendency to be jealous, whereas the Sagittarius male is the kind of guy who is outgoing, social and carefree."

Check, and double-check.

"The two of you are so different," muses www.skyviewzone.com, "that it will take a lot of compassion and understanding for you to be together for any length of time."

Ha!

Well, if eight years (five of those with rings on) qualifies as any length of time, then my lifelong skepticism toward astrology would seem to be warranted.

We did flinch a bit when a preliminary background check on our Sun signs revealed the WORST match possible. Even so, I've never paid much attention to the alignment of galactic bodies as a means to deciphering life's big mysteries, and neither has my wife. We've forged ahead through the years, she the serious, focused and passionate scorpion; me the lighthearted, scatterbrained and aloof centaur.

Sure, she gets positively possessive when I'm chatting up a comely co-worker at a party. And maybe I get a little more wistful for my days of touring with the Grateful Dead than a grown man should.

But our marriage, at least as of this writing, has been a roaring success. So forgive me for wondering: Are we the glaring exception to the rule, or evidence that horoscopes are the highest form of hokum?

As it turns out, the devil — or in our case, the guardian angel — was in the details all along.

"I am actually quite pleased to inform you," says sex columnist and love astrology expert Jenni Kosarin, "that you are a very good match."

Kosarin, whose book "He's Just Not in the Stars: Wicked Astrology and Uncensored Advice for Getting the (Almost) Perfect Guy" (HarperEntertainment) came out in October, agreed to take a closer look at our charts, and — my stars! — liked what she saw.

"The problem is that people go out and get these astrology books and they say, 'Oh, Sagittarius doesn't go with Scorpio,"' Kosarin says. "But I don't do that."

What she did do was a little beyond my ability to grasp completely, but it goes something like this:

The Sun sign — the one in your daily horoscope — is only a tiny fraction of a person's whole astrological picture. The Venus sign, she says, is where it's at when factoring a love connection.

"Your Venus is in Scorpio," she says. "So the way you define love, and the way you love, is not like a Sagittarius at all — it's like a Scorpio."

And the plot thickened from there.

"What's interesting is that her Venus is in Libra. If it were in Sagittarius, you two would be perfect. You would be soul mates," she says, then adds, with a hint of apprehension: "But that might be so intense as to scare you away."

(The very word "intense" scares me away all by itself.)

OK, so far, I'm buying this.

But I'm also betting that a second opinion will bring forth the bunkum, so I turn over our birthdates/times/places to Diana Brownstone, a certified astrologer in New York. Surely a different perspective on the vagaries of our vast star-charts will yield the gloomy result I was expecting?

"Interestingly, when I looked at the charts for you and your wife, a major link is that you each have several key 'relationship' planets in each others' Sun sign or rising sign," Brownstone says. "This would make for smooth compatibility, and negate the other compatibility issues that are typically associated with a fire sign (Sagittarius) and a water sign (Scorpio) together in a relationship."

Fire and water, together at last, eh? Now my head is really spinning.

Truth is, the more I learn, the better we start to sound: Brownstone says I have other traits in Scorpio besides the Venus that Kosarin mentioned: Mars (sexuality), moon (women/ instincts) and Mercury (mind/communication).

And it works both ways.

"In her chart, she has Mars (men), Uranus (excitement) and Venus (love) all in the sign of your rising sign: Libra."

We're good, it seems, after all.

Besides, Kosarin says, "I don't believe in predestination. I believe in free will. But astrology influences the way you filter things — it's the way you're born to filter things."

The way I filter the world changed the most on the day my future wife came into my orbit. Which, to the utter dismay of my skeptical side, only serves to drive home Kosarin's most salient point:

"Sag likes adventure, new experiences, other cultures, language, music ... but when they find the right person, they truly settle down."