Before You Say Yes to Forever: Ten Questions Worth Sitting With First
By Divya Robin, LMHC, LPC | Couples Therapist in NYC, Hoboken NJ, and Montclair NJ
Getting engaged is one of the most celebrated moments in a person’s life. But after the moment, it gets busy: resizing the ring, announcing online (and thinking of the caption), looking at venues, adding to your Pinterest, responding to the congratulations flooding in from every direction. Everyone around you immediately shifts into planning mode. You spend so much time planning for the wedding that you don’t get to be present. Present to the kind of life you want to create in a marriage. What gets less attention: the harder, quieter work of figuring out whether you and this person are ready for what marriage really is. Not the wedding. The marriage.
I work with couples in New York City, Hoboken NJ, and Montclair NJ some who come in before they get engaged, some right after, some years into a marriage that started without these conversations ever happening. And what I’ve noticed is consistent: the couples who have done the honest pre-work, who have actually sat with the hard questions before committing, are not the ones who never have conflict. They’re the ones who have the tools to move through it.
These are the ten questions I think every couple deserves to sit with before they get married. Not to find the perfect answers. To find out whether you can have the conversation at all.
1. Do we fight well or do we just avoid fighting?
Conflict is not the problem in a relationship. How you handle conflict is. Every couple fights. The question is whether your fights move somewhere toward understanding, toward repair, toward feeling closer even after something hard, or whether they cycle, escalate, go underground, or get avoided entirely.
Avoidance looks like harmony from the outside. Inside the relationship, it’s pressure building with nowhere to go. Before you get married, it’s worth knowing: can we actually disagree and come back to each other? Have we ever had a genuinely hard conversation and gotten through it?
If the answer is no, if your relationship has mostly been conflict-free because one or both of you have been managing around it, that’s important information. Not a dealbreaker, but something to understand before you’re in it for life.
2. What does each of us actually believe about money and have we said it out loud?
Money is one of the most common sources of relationship conflict, and it’s one of the least talked-about topics before marriage. Not the logistics who earns what, what accounts you’ll have but the beliefs underneath the logistics.
What did money mean in the family you grew up in? Was it scarce, abundant, a source of stress, a source of security? What does spending feel like versus saving? What does financial generosity mean to you, and what does financial irresponsibility look like?
Two people can love each other completely and have fundamentally different emotional relationships to money that will create friction for decades if they’re never examined. Before you get married, you want to know not just what your partner earns but what money means to them.
3. Have we talked about what we actually want our life to look like in the actual day-to-day?
Where do you want to live? How important is proximity to family? What does a Sunday look like in your ideal life … and does that match your partner’s ideal Sunday? How much alone time do each of you need? How social do you want your life to be? What do you want to share online and what do you want to keep private?
These feel like small questions. They are not small questions. The day-to-day texture of a life together is built from exactly these things, and couples who have never explicitly talked about them often find themselves years in, living a life that feels like a compromise neither of them chose.
4. What are your actual expectations about roles inside the home and out?
This one lives underneath a lot of the fights I see in couples therapy. The mental load conversation. Who manages what. Who earns what. Who is the primary parent if kids come. What happens to careers when life gets complicated.
Most couples have implicit expectations about all of this that have never been made explicit. They feel obvious of course we’ll split things equally, of course we’ll both keep working, of course we’ll figure it out — until they’re not. Until there’s a baby and someone’s career has to flex and nobody agreed on whose, and suddenly you’re in my office.
Before you get married, it’s worth making the implicit explicit. Not to plan every detail — life won’t cooperate with that anyway. But to know what each of you actually expects and whether those expectations are actually compatible.
5. How does each of us show love and, more importantly, how do each of us receive it?
You can love someone deeply and consistently miss them. Because you’re showing love in the way that feels natural to you, and they’re receiving love in a completely different language.
This isn’t about the five love languages as a concept; it’s about the specific, personal, idiosyncratic ways each of you feels loved and cared for. What makes you feel seen by your partner? What makes you feel taken for granted? What does support look like when you’re struggling? Do you want to be held, given space, problem-solved with, or just witnessed?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions about each other, you will spend years trying and missing. That kind of missing, trying hard and still not landing, is one of the most demoralizing experiences in a long-term relationship.
6. What does each of us need when things get hard and can we give each other that?
Hard things will happen. Loss, health crises, career failures, family complications, seasons where one person is depleted and the other has to carry more. Before you get married, it’s worth knowing: what does your partner need when they’re at their lowest? And are you actually able to provide that?
Not in theory. In practice. Because we tend to offer comfort in the way we ourselves want to be comforted which is not always what our partner needs. And in the hardest moments of a marriage, that mismatch can create a profound feeling of being alone in something you’re technically going through together.
7. Have we talked about kids really talked, not just assumed?
Not just do you want them, though; that question matters enormously and should absolutely be discussed explicitly, but all the things underneath it.
When? What if it’s harder than expected? What does parenting look like to each of you — what values, what style, what boundaries? How important is religion or culture in how children are raised? What happens to the relationship when kids arrive — how do you protect it?
Couples who have assumed rather than discussed are the ones sitting in my office three years into parenthood, realizing they have fundamentally different approaches to raising their child and no shared framework for resolving it.
8. What’s your relationship to your family of origin and how much will they be in our marriage?
You’re not just marrying a person. You’re marrying the family that shaped them, the patterns they learned there, the loyalties and the wounds and the expectations that came with growing up where they grew up.
How close are they to their family? What role do they expect family to play in your lives together? Are there dynamics in their family of origin enmeshment, conflict, estrangement, dependence that will show up in your marriage if they haven’t already?
And the harder version of this question: have they done any work on what they brought with them from their childhood? Are they aware of the patterns they’re carrying? Because those patterns will be in the marriage whether or not they’re acknowledged.
9. Do we actually repair after conflict or do we just move on?
Moving on and repairing are not the same thing. Moving on is when you both tacitly agree to let something go without addressing it. The temperature lowers, life resumes, nobody brings it up again. It feels like resolution. It isn’t.
Repair is harder. It requires someone to come back to the thing to say I’ve been thinking about what happened and I want to understand it better, or I think I reacted in a way that wasn’t fair and I want to acknowledge that. Real repair requires a level of accountability and vulnerability that a lot of couples have never practiced.
Before you get married, it’s worth knowing: do we repair? Or do we accumulate? Because thirty years of accumulated unremediated conflicts looks like distance and resentment that neither person can fully explain.
10. Have we talked about what we’re each afraid of about this, about us, about marriage itself?
This is the one most couples skip entirely. Because it requires admitting that you have fears, which can feel like admitting you have doubts, which can feel dangerous when you’re supposed to be certain.
But fear and certainty can coexist. You can be sure about a person and still be scared about what forever means. About whether you’ll be good at this. About the ways your family of origin makes you worried about repeating patterns. About what it means to choose one life and let the others go.
The couples I trust most the ones I watch move through difficulty with grace are the ones who have made space for each other’s fear without treating it as a threat. Who can say I’m scared about this and have their partner say me too, and stay in the room together with it.
That capacity to hold vulnerability without flinching is one of the most reliable indicators of a relationship that will hold.
A final thought
These questions are not a test. There are no right answers and no passing score. They’re invitations to know each other more completely, to surface the conversations that are easier to have now than after a decade of marriage, to find out whether you can go to the hard places together and come back.
If some of these questions feel difficult to have on your own if you and your partner find yourselves stuck, or avoiding, or talking around rather than through premarital therapy is one of the most useful things I offer. Not because something is wrong. Because the investment you make in understanding each other before you start is the foundation everything else is built on.
I work with couples in New York City, Hoboken NJ, and Montclair NJ — in person and via telehealth across New Jersey and New York. If you’re thinking about getting married and want support navigating these conversations, a free consultation is always where we start.
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Divya Robin, LMHC, LPC is a licensed couples therapist in New York City, Hoboken NJ, and Montclair NJ specializing in premarital counseling, relationship dynamics, anxiety, and life transitions.