Questions to Ask Potential Spouse
Questions for two people deciding whether to marry, covering children, debt and savings, the household work nobody counts, holidays, ageing parents, serious illness, and what ended each of their last relationships.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What do you think we are good at, as a couple?
Why ask it
An easy opening that carries real information: whether they can name something specific about the two of you together, or only something complimentary about you. Couples who cannot describe their own strengths have usually not discussed the relationship much at all.
What is the argument we keep having?
Why ask it
Every couple has one. The point is whether you both name the same one, because if you do not, you have just found the more useful conversation. Anyone insisting there is no recurring argument is either very new to this or not paying attention.
How do you know when I am upset, and what do you do about it?
Why ask it
This tests observation rather than good intentions. Strong answers are behavioural: you go quiet, you start cleaning, you suddenly get busy. Someone who says they would simply ask has not been watching closely enough to notice.
Where do you want to be living in ten years, and how firm is that?
Why ask it
The how firm half is where the conflict lives. Two people relaxed about the city can end up anywhere. One person rooted in a hometown and one determined to leave it are facing a decision rather than a preference, and it deserves to be made deliberately.
How much do you want to work? Is there a version of your life where you work far less?
Why ask it
A way of asking about ambition without using the word. It surfaces whether one of you is planning a demanding decade while the other is planning to be at home, which is entirely workable when known and corrosive when assumed.
Do you want children? And if the two of us disagreed about it, what then?
Why ask it
The second half is the real question and almost nobody asks it. Couples who have never said what happens if we cannot agree tend to settle it by attrition instead, which leaves one person quietly resentful for a very long time.
How would we split the invisible work: appointments, birthdays, forms, remembering things?
Why ask it
Name the categories out loud, because this work is invisible precisely to whoever is not doing it. Watch whether they can list any of it unprompted, which is a better indicator than any promise about sharing things equally.
Whose family do we spend the holidays with, and how do we decide that each year?
Why ask it
Small, annual, and one of the most dependable sources of conflict in a marriage. You want a rule, alternating years, splitting the day, one family per holiday, because rules survive a difficult December and goodwill does not.
If one of our parents needed care, what would we do?
Why ask it
Most couples face this and very few discuss it beforehand. Listen for whether they think in terms of money, of someone moving in, or of one person leaving work, and whether they are quietly assuming that person is you.
How much debt and savings do you have? Can we look at the actual numbers together?
Why ask it
Ask to look, rather than to be told. Full disclosure before marriage is ordinary and revealing: someone unwilling to show you the figures has told you something considerably more important than the figures.
Would we put our money together? What would each of us keep separate?
Why ask it
Joint, separate, and part-joint all work in practice. What does the damage is a mismatch discovered after the wedding, usually the first time one person spends money the other had counted as shared.
How do you feel about a prenuptial agreement?
Why ask it
The reaction matters as much as the position. Hearing the question as an accusation suggests that future practical conversations will go the same way. Rules on these agreements vary widely by country and state, so this is a question for a lawyer as well as for each other.
If one of us became seriously ill, what would you want us to do?
Why ask it
Uncomfortable, and this is the situation marriage is actually for. You are asking about care, work, money, and how much they would want to know about their own prognosis. It is also the conversation that leads to the documents most couples never get around to making.
Is there anything about your health, or your family's, that I should know?
Why ask it
Not a request for records. You are asking about anything that would change plans: a heritable condition, a chronic illness, a mental health history, something known about fertility. All of it is easier heard now than discovered in the middle of it.
How do you think about sex over a long marriage, and what would you do if we drifted apart?
Why ask it
Periods of mismatch are normal across decades. What you are really testing is whether the subject can be raised at all, because the couples who fare worst are not the ones with a problem but the ones who cannot mention one.
What ended your last serious relationship, and what was your part in it?
Why ask it
The second clause is the entire question. An account in which they appear nowhere is a preview of how your marriage would be narrated, with you as the only person who ever did anything.
Have you ever been unfaithful, or come close?
Why ask it
Direct, and the come close half is the more useful one, because it invites an honest answer about a boundary and what they did when they reached it. Rehearsed outrage at being asked is itself worth noticing.
What do you need from me that you are not getting right now?
Why ask it
Present tense, deliberately. A need that has gone unmentioned for two years has not become less real, and this is the least confrontational route to finally hearing about it.
What would make you leave?
Why ask it
Rarely asked and unusually clarifying. You learn where their limits are, and quite often you learn about something already present in the relationship in a milder form than the version they are describing.
What are you hoping marriage will change?
Why ask it
The most revealing question here. Hoping for legal security, hoping to feel settled, and hoping the other person will be different afterwards are three entirely different answers, and only two of them are reasonable to expect.
Working through these before you decide
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Pace and setting
Two or three at a time
Attempting the whole list in one evening turns it into an examination and produces careful answers rather than honest ones. Spread them over weeks, on ordinary days, and never immediately after an argument, when everything either of you says is about the argument.
Answer everything you ask
Say your own number for debt, your own limit on unannounced spending, your own honest account of the household work. Asking one-sidedly invites performance, and you need to know your own answers before you can weigh theirs.
Watch conduct alongside answers
How someone treats a delayed flight, a difficult sibling, or a mistake of their own tells you more than their account of how they handle stress. Where the answers and the behaviour disagree, believe the behaviour.
Revisit the big three later
Children, money, and where you will live shift with circumstances. An agreement reached two years before a wedding is not a settled matter, and returning to it is diligence rather than distrust.
Doing the money conversation properly
- 1Each of you writes down debts, balances, income, and monthly commitments separately, then swap the pages.
- 2Check credit reports together where you can obtain them. It is routine, it takes an hour, and it occasionally surfaces something neither of you knew about.
- 3Agree how accounts will work: fully joint, fully separate, or a joint account for shared costs with agreed contributions.
- 4Set a figure above which either of you mentions a purchase before making it. The number matters less than having one.
- 5Decide who pays which bills, and put at least one recurring payment in each name so neither of you loses track of the household's actual finances.
The practical documents people skip
- Wills, updated after marriage. Marriage changes how estates pass in many places, often in ways neither person expects.
- Whoever you want making medical decisions for you, recorded in whatever form your jurisdiction recognises, rather than assumed.
- Beneficiary designations on pensions, retirement accounts, and life insurance, which frequently override a will and are frequently left pointing at a parent or an ex-partner.
- Any prenuptial or cohabitation agreement, discussed with independent legal advice on both sides, well before the wedding rather than in the final weeks.
- If either of you has children from a previous relationship, take advice specifically about that, because inheritance and guardianship rules are where good intentions go wrong.
How these conversations fail
Accepting warmth in place of an answer
We will work it out together is affection rather than a plan. It is a good thing to hear after the specifics have been settled and a way of avoiding them when it arrives instead.
Asking in order to be reassured
If you already know what you need to hear, you will help them say it without noticing. Ask the question, then leave the silence alone long enough for the real answer to arrive in it.
Treating one good conversation as the whole picture
Anyone can give the right answer once, particularly when they can tell how much it matters to you. Consistency across months is the thing to look for, not eloquence on a single evening.
Ignoring the reaction to the question itself
Anger at being asked about money, family, or a past relationship is an answer in its own right, and usually a more reliable one than whatever follows it.
Skipping outside help because nothing is wrong
Premarital counselling is most useful when there is no crisis, because a third person will raise the subjects the two of you have been politely leaving alone. Many therapists and faith communities offer a short structured series for exactly this.