Questions to Ask Partner Before Marriage
Questions to work through in the months before a wedding: money and debt, whose career moves you, ageing parents, fidelity, illness, wills, and what each of you would never forgive. Written to be asked slowly rather than in one evening.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Why marriage? What do you think it gives us that we don't have already?
Why ask it
Reveals whether marriage means security, family expectation, faith, legal status, or a public promise. Two people often want different things from it and have never compared their answers.
What does an ordinary Tuesday look like for us in ten years?
Why ask it
More informative than a five year plan, because it exposes quiet assumptions about where you live, who cooks, and how often either of you is actually home.
Are we combining money, keeping it separate, or something in between?
Why ask it
There is no correct arrangement, only an agreed one. Be wary of a partner with no view, because they will inherit whatever you set up and may resent it years later.
What do you earn, what do you owe, and what's your credit like?
Why ask it
Blunt, and far better asked before a joint application than after a refusal. A partner unwilling to answer now is unlikely to become more open once the accounts are shared.
How much can either of us spend without checking first?
Why ask it
One agreed figure prevents years of small arguments about whether a purchase should have been mentioned. Couples who set one often land on a number that surprises them both.
Who does what in the house, and does that change if one of us earns much more?
Why ask it
The second half is where this becomes real. Higher income quietly turns into an argument for doing less at home, and it is easier to name that now than to discover it in year three.
Whose job moves us, and what would you turn down for me?
Why ask it
Relocation is where marriages quietly become unequal. Asking what they would refuse converts a general claim about partnership into something you can check.
What do you expect us to do about your parents as they get older?
Why ask it
Care arrives without warning and lands on whoever is nearest or most willing. Expectations about money, spare rooms, and time are much easier to discuss before there is an emergency.
How much time with your family is normal, and what happens if I don't want to go?
Why ask it
Frequency is one question and permission to decline is another. The answer shows how much of your weekends is already committed and whether opting out is treated as an insult.
What counts as cheating to you?
Why ask it
Definitions vary more than people expect: messages, secrecy, an old friend, pornography, an emotional attachment. Assuming your partner draws the line where you do is one of the commonest ways couples get hurt.
If it ever happened, what would you need in order to carry on?
Why ask it
Not a prediction but a description of what repair would require: honesty, counselling, contact ended, time apart. The answer tells you how each of you handles betrayal in general.
How do you argue? What did your parents do when they were angry?
Why ask it
Arguing styles are inherited long before they are chosen. Knowing whether a partner grew up with slammed doors or with total silence explains most of what they do in the first minute of a disagreement.
What do you do when you're hurt: talk, go quiet, or leave the room?
Why ask it
Withdrawal and pursuit are the classic mismatch, and each partner reads the other's response as proof of not caring. Naming your own pattern lets the other person interpret it correctly in the moment.
What do we do if one of us stops wanting sex for a long stretch?
Why ask it
Long gaps happen in most marriages, through illness, medication, exhaustion, or grief. Agreeing how you would raise it matters more than any promise about frequency.
Where do faith or religion come into this, including the wedding and any children?
Why ask it
These questions get postponed until a venue or a christening forces them. Ask about the ceremony itself, what the two families expect, and what any children would be taught.
What would you want if one of us became seriously ill?
Why ask it
Serious illness changes work, money, and who does the caring. It is worth knowing whether your partner would want treatment pursued at all costs, and what they would need from you if you were the one caring.
What are we doing about wills, pensions, and next of kin?
Why ask it
This is the part of marriage couples skip: beneficiaries, pension nominations, who is allowed to make decisions in a hospital. Naming a date to deal with it is more use than agreeing that it matters.
Are there things you'd never forgive?
Why ask it
Everyone has a list and most people have never said it out loud: violence, lying about money, cruelty to their family, one particular betrayal. Hearing theirs is better than assuming the two lists match.
What would you want us to do if this stopped working?
Why ask it
Asking about the end is not pessimism, it is an agreement about behaviour. Answers about counselling, about honesty, and about keeping children out of it are worth having while nobody is angry.
What are you hoping marriage will change, and is that fair to expect?
Why ask it
A closing question with a challenge built into it. Hopes that a wedding will fix distance, doubt, or somebody's drinking rarely survive the ceremony, and saying so now is kinder than finding out afterwards.
Working Through These Before the Wedding
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to go about it
Two or three questions a week, not a weekend retreat
Answers get thinner as the evening goes on. Taking these slowly also lets you notice where this week's answer contradicts last week's, which is where the real conversation starts.
Bring documents to the money questions
Actual figures for debt, savings, pension, and credit make that conversation short and factual. Discussed in the abstract, money produces optimism rather than information.
Say the uncomfortable version out loud
If your honest answer is that you would not move for their job, say it plainly. A softened answer gets recorded as agreement and quoted back to you in three years.
Consider a third party for the hardest ones
Premarital counselling, a religious preparation course, or two sessions with a therapist gives you a structure for the questions about affairs, illness, and endings. It costs far less than the alternative.
Common pitfalls
Asking only in the glow of the engagement
During the engagement everything sounds workable. Ask the difficult ones again a few months later, when the wedding is not the main subject in the house.
Accepting "we'll figure it out"
That is a reasonable answer about the flowers and a poor one about money, children, or faith. Ask what figuring it out would actually involve, and who would do it.
Confusing agreement with compatibility
Two people can agree on every answer here and still want different lives. Watch what your partner does with their time and money now, not only what they say they intend.
Letting the schedule apply pressure
Nothing said under the weight of deposits already paid can be relied on. If a question needs more time than the date allows, move the date.
Worth having written down before the wedding
- How money will be held, and the figure above which a purchase gets discussed.
- Any debt either of you brings, with the real numbers.
- What each of you expects about relocation, and for whose job.
- Wills, pension beneficiaries, and next of kin.
- Anything either of you has agreed to while quietly unhappy about it.