Dr Susan Carland, Waleed Aly's wife, is his "biggest fan".

But, it hasn't always been that way.

The Project host struggled to win over his wife of 14 years and the mother of his two children.

"He rang me up and said 'Look, I like you, and would really like to pursue this'," Carland told TV Week of the first time Aly asked her on a date.

"I wouldn't marry you if you were the last person on earth," was her stinging reply.

But one year later Carland, who grew up in Sydney's eastern suburbs and became Muslim as a 19-year-old, realised her "huge mistake".

She phoned her future husband to apologise and ask him out on a date.

He accepted her apology, but Carland recently joked to Meshel Laurie that "he never lets her forget it".

The academic and the TV host married in 2002 and now have two children, daughter Aisa, 12, and son Zayd, 9.

On Sunday night,  Aly won the coveted gold statue at the 2016 TV Week Logie Awards. 

While Carland has opened up about rejecting Aly, the 37-year-old presenter revealed his own "dirty little secret" during his acceptance speech.

"If she had my job she'd be much better at it than me," Aly said in a tribute to his wife.

"She's sharper, wittier, funnier and infinitely more charming and likeable and I'm really glad she doesn't have my job because otherwise I definitely wouldn't have it."

He added: "I definitely wouldn't have it but the reason she doesn't is because she has bigger, more important things to do and everyone who knows it knows she changes you and she makes you better.

"She has done that in her work, she has done that in her community and they don't give statuettes to people like that, sadly, but one day if life is fair they might just give her a statue."

Last year, Carland, a former Muslim Australian of the Year, who has a PhD on Muslim women and sexism, tweeted that she would donate $1 to Unicef for "each hate-filled tweet I get from trolls".

She told Fairfax at the time:

"I thought, what's a good thing I can do? What is the complete antithesis of what these people are doing? They are putting so much ugly into the world. I thought what something is good I can put into the world."

She has donated $3750 so far.

While Aly has plenty of reasons to be proud of his wife, Carland is equally proud of her husband.

"I'm just so thrilled for him, it's amazing," the 36-year-old told TV Week of his win.

She also told The Binge podcast that she wasn't expecting the touching tribute her husband gave her during the speech.

"When he started to say all that I had tears in my eyes but I really fought them back because I didn't want it to become about me, I didn't want TV crews to be saying, 'Oh she's crying!' I wanted it all to be about Waleed, so I kept it together."

And although they had a rocky start to their relationship, Carland recently revealed how they keep it together as a couple.

"We're really tight and we ground each other and, without wanting to be mushy, we're so in love," she told Meshel Laurie. "We feel like each other is in the other person's corner and I think that really helps... we just need each other."

Fairfax Media