The questions worth asking before you say yes

Why a short courtship needs better questions

Couples who meet through friends and date for three years find out about money, family and temperament by accident. They see each other tired, broke, sick and angry, and by the time anyone proposes there is a large body of unglamorous evidence.

An introduced match does not get that. You get a handful of meetings, a lot of phone calls, and both families on their best behaviour. The questions below are how you deliberately gather what time would otherwise hand you for free.

None of this is unromantic. It is the opposite: it treats the decision as serious enough to prepare for.

Money

Money is the most common source of ongoing conflict in marriages and the topic families are least willing to raise directly. Broad honesty is enough at this stage — you do not need bank statements, but you do need to know whether you are entering the same financial reality.

• What do you earn, roughly, and how stable is it? Casual, contract, commission, self-employed and salaried lives feel very different.
• What do you owe? Student loans, credit cards, car finance, a mortgage, family loans, money borrowed for the migration itself.
• Do you send money home, or expect to? How much, to whom, and is that negotiable? This one ends marriages when it is discovered late.
• Are you supporting parents now, or will you be? What does that look like in practice?
• Joint accounts, separate accounts, or both? Who pays which bills, and who actually tracks the money?
• What is a normal amount to spend without discussing it first? Fifty dollars, five hundred, five thousand?
• Do you want to buy property, where, and how soon? Would a parent be contributing, and what would come with that?
• How much are we each expecting to spend on the wedding, and who is paying for what?

Where you will actually live

This is the question most likely to have two different answers that both sides assume are shared. Ask it specifically, and ask about the first year rather than in principle.

• Which city, and whose job moves if that changes?
• With parents, near parents, or separately — and who decided that? If it is with parents, is it forever or for a defined period?
• If your parents are overseas, do you expect them to move here, or you to move there, eventually?
• What happens when a parent needs care? Which house do they come to, and who does the caring?
• Would you move interstate for my career the way you would expect me to move for yours?
• How often would we visit family overseas, and for how long?

Family and boundaries

You are not only marrying a person. In this community, more than most, you are joining a household with existing habits about who decides what.

The useful questions are not about whether the family is involved — they will be — but about how disagreement gets handled when it happens.

• How are big decisions made in your family? Who has the final word, in practice rather than in theory?
• If your mother and I disagreed about something in our own home, what would you do?
• What would you not tell your parents about our marriage? What would you always tell them?
• Has anyone in your family married outside the community, and how did that go?
• What does your family expect from a daughter-in-law or son-in-law that has not been said out loud?
• How do you handle conflict — do you talk it out, go quiet, or leave the room?

Children

Whether, when, how many, and who does the work. This is a genuine deal-breaker area and there is no version of it that improves by being deferred.

• Do you want children? How many, and how soon after the wedding?
• What if we could not have children — where would you land on treatment, adoption, or not having them?
• Who would take time off work, and for how long? Would that be assumed or discussed?
• Childcare or grandparents? If grandparents, whose, and have they agreed?
• What language would we speak at home? What would we want the children to speak?
• How would we raise them religiously, especially if we practise differently?
• Public, private, or religious schooling — and who is paying for it?

Careers and time

Ask what someone assumes rather than what they support. Almost everybody says they support their partner working; the interesting question is what they picture on a Tuesday evening.

• Do you expect us both to work full-time, indefinitely?
• What are you actually trying to build in the next five years?
• Do you travel for work, do shift work, or work weekends?
• What happens if one of us earns significantly more than the other — does that change who decides things?
• Would you support further study if it meant a few lean years?
• How much time do you need on your own, and how much do you expect us to spend together?

Faith and daily practice

Identifying with a faith and practising it daily are different things, and couples routinely discover the gap three months after the wedding when the kitchen becomes a negotiation.

• What do you actually do — prayer, fasting, temple, mosque or gurdwara attendance, festivals?
• Would our kitchen be vegetarian? Would alcohol be in the house? Would meat be cooked in it?
• Which festivals would we observe, at whose home, and who does the cooking?
• If we practise differently, what would you want from me, and what are you offering in return?
• How would your family respond if I did not participate in something?

Health and history

Uncomfortable to raise, and materially important. Approach it by sharing first: say what is true about you, and the reciprocation usually follows.

• Any ongoing health conditions, medications or surgeries either of us should know about?
• Mental health — history, treatment, and what support looks like when things are hard. Say it plainly, and treat the answer with respect rather than alarm.
• Genetic carrier screening. Conditions such as thalassaemia are more common in some South Asian communities, and pre-marital or pre-pregnancy carrier screening is straightforward and widely available in Australia. Your GP is the person to ask.
• Smoking, drinking, other substances — including how much, not just whether.
• Gambling. This one is rarely asked and is a common cause of hidden household debt.
• Previous marriages, engagements or long relationships, and how they ended.
• Children from a previous relationship, and what contact and financial arrangements exist.

How they behave, not what they say

The most reliable information you will gather is not verbal. Create ordinary situations and watch.

• How do they treat a waiter, a driver, a shop assistant, or a call-centre worker who has made a mistake?
• How do they speak about their own parents when the parents are not there?
• How do they behave when something goes wrong — a wrong order, a delay, a mistake of yours?
• How do they talk about an ex-partner, or about someone who rejected them?
• Do they ask you questions back, and do they remember the answers a week later?
• Do they let you finish sentences in front of their family?

How to ask without running an interrogation

Do not arrive with the list. Take one area per conversation, offer your own answer first, and ask open questions rather than yes-or-no ones. "How does money work in your house?" gets you further than "do you have debt?".

Space it out. Six conversations over six weeks is comfortable; six areas in one sitting is a job interview and you will get interview answers.

Pay attention to the shape of the response rather than its content. A different answer to the one you hoped for is workable. A repeated slide away from the topic is the actual answer, and it is worth more than anything they said.

And write your deal-breakers down before you begin — three or four, no more. Deal-breakers written in advance are convictions; deal-breakers written afterwards are usually rationalisations.

The answers that should stop you

Some responses are not preferences to be negotiated.

• Any demand for money, gold or property as a condition of the marriage.
• Pressure to decide immediately, or a deadline attached to the proposal.
• Contempt — for their own family, for your community, for your work, for people who serve them.
• Wanting your passwords, your location, or an account of who you were with. Monitoring framed as care is still monitoring.
• Deciding what you wear, who you see, or whether you keep working, before you are even married.
• Refusing to let you meet anyone else who knows them.
• Anger that arrives quickly and is always someone else's fault.

Coercive control is a form of family violence, and in several Australian states it is now a criminal offence in its own right. If any of this is familiar, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is free, confidential and available 24 hours. If you are being pressured into a marriage you do not want, Anti-Slavery Australia's My Blue Sky service specialises in exactly that. In an emergency, call 000.

Common questions

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