I've always thought of Oxygen as a bull in a china shop among elements. A reckless and prolific lover (if you will) who uses up other elements, often in an explosive or corrosive manner. Always combining to force change, and - when it comes to materials we use to build our structures, combining to wreck and ruin.
Hydrogen, with its simple structure and single electron is much more that I would describe as the pure, though hugely violent in it's own potential. It takes two of them to combine with oxygen in a unique relationship to form water - a substance almost literally bursting with harnessed energy, which behaves in a manner unlike pretty much everything else in the universe - and thank God (if you'll pardon the old fashioned expression) that it does.
A volatile ménage à trois rather than a traditional romantic love story.
Water is the life-bringer. It is also the ultimate destroyer of everything we see around us. If we were ever to disappear (leave the planet or die out) it would be water that cleanses the world of our visible presence over millions of years, just as it wears down the mightiest ranges of extinct volcanoes or the tallest of mountain ranges. One drop at a time, one ice crystal at a time.
Water giveth, and water taketh away, to once again use that old fashioned language.