What Should Couples Talk About Before Getting Married?

There is a strange pressure around getting married that suggests you should somehow already know everything important about one another by the time you get engaged. In reality, you can know someone deeply, love them very much and still not have talked properly about some of the things that will shape your life together. That is not a problem. It is simply one of the reasons marriage preparation can be so useful.

When couples ask me what to talk about before marriage, I do not think the answer is a giant checklist designed to catch you out. I think it is much more about creating the space to talk about the areas of life where expectations, habits and assumptions can quietly differ. Some of those conversations will feel easy. Some might surprise you. Some may simply confirm that you are already on the same page. The point is not to leave with identical answers to everything. The point is to understand one another better.

Money, and what money actually means to each of you

Money is an obvious topic, but the useful conversation is rarely just about income, bills or who pays for what. Money can represent very different things to different people. For one person it might mean security. For another, independence. It can be tied to generosity, status, control, fear, freedom or simply the way your family handled money when you were growing up.

It is worth talking about how you each feel about saving and spending, debt, joint and separate accounts, big purchases and what financial security looks like to you. But I would also go a little deeper. What happens if one of you earns much more than the other? How would you feel if one person stepped back from work for children or caring responsibilities? What does “fair” look like in your relationship? These are the kinds of questions before marriage that can tell you far more than simply comparing bank balances.

Financial issues are one of the recurring areas of conflict couples can face, which is one reason organisations such as the American Psychological Association encourage couples to communicate openly about difficult subjects rather than avoiding them.

Family, because you are marrying into more than one relationship

Families can be wonderful, complicated, supportive, intrusive, close-knit, distant or some mixture of all of those things depending on the week. It is useful to talk about what role you expect your wider families to have in your married life before you are trying to negotiate it in the middle of Christmas dinner.

How often do you expect to see family? What happens if a parent needs more support later in life? How do you each feel about family dropping in unannounced? What traditions matter to you? If there is conflict between your partner and a member of your family, where do you see your responsibility sitting?

There is no single correct answer. What matters is understanding the expectations you are both carrying into the marriage, particularly the ones you may never have thought to say out loud because they feel completely normal to you.

Children, including the parts beyond “do we want them?”

Whether you want children is obviously an important conversation, but it is only the beginning. If children are part of your plans, it can be useful to talk about the kind of family life you imagine, how you think responsibilities might be shared and what each of you believes about parenting.

You do not need to decide every detail before you are even there. Most people discover that the reality of parenting changes some of the ideas they had beforehand anyway. But understanding one another’s values can be incredibly useful. What did you appreciate about the way you were raised? What would you want to do differently? How do you imagine sharing work, childcare and the mental load? What happens if having children is more difficult than expected, or if one of you changes your mind?

These are not cheerful little compatibility questions. They are real conversations about a future that may unfold differently from the one you currently picture.

Work, ambition and whose career gets to take up space

Careers change a great deal over the course of a marriage. One of you may get an opportunity that involves moving. Someone may want to retrain. One career might require more travel, longer hours or periods of uncertainty. There may be times when one person’s work has to take priority, and other times when that needs to switch.

It is worth talking about how important work is to each of you and what ambition means in your lives. Would you relocate for a job? How would you make that decision? Is there an expectation that one of you would reduce your hours if family responsibilities increased? How do you feel about taking financial risks for a career change?

Again, you are not trying to create a contract for the next thirty years. You are learning what matters to each other and how you might make decisions when your priorities are not perfectly aligned.

How you communicate when you are not at your best

Most couples know how they communicate when everything is fine. The more revealing question is what happens when one or both of you are stressed, hurt, tired or feeling misunderstood.

Some people need space. Others want to resolve something immediately. Some become very quiet. Some talk more. Some use humour. Some become defensive without realising it. None of those responses automatically makes somebody a bad communicator, but they can create difficult patterns if you do not understand what is happening between you.

There is a substantial body of research into couple communication and relationship education. A meta-analysis of marriage and relationship education programmes found modest evidence of improvements in couples' communication skills, including among well-functioning couples.  Other research is more cautious about treating communication as the single thing that determines relationship satisfaction, which is a useful reminder that relationships are more complex than simply learning to “talk better”.

For me, that is the important distinction. Marriage preparation is not about teaching couples a script for how to argue correctly. It is about helping you notice what happens between the two of you and understand your own patterns a little better.

Sex, affection and intimacy

This is an area couples can find surprisingly difficult to discuss openly, even when they have been together for years. People can carry a lot of assumptions about what intimacy should look like, how often sex should happen, who initiates it and what affection means.

Those conversations matter because intimacy changes. Stress, children, health, medication, age, body image, work and life in general can all affect it. What feels easy at one stage of your relationship may require more attention at another.

Talking about intimacy before marriage is not about setting expectations that must then be met forever. It is about making the subject speakable. Can you tell one another when something has changed? Can you talk about what makes you feel close? Can you hear each other without immediately interpreting a difference as rejection?

Research looking at couples during the transition into marriage has found links between open communication before marriage and later sexual satisfaction, although those relationships are influenced by a range of individual and relationship factors.

How you make decisions together

Some couples naturally divide decisions without thinking much about it. One person books holidays. One handles finances. One decides what happens socially. That can work perfectly well, but it is useful to notice where those patterns exist and whether they feel comfortable to both people.

How do you make big decisions? Does one person tend to defer? Does one of you gather all the information while the other relies on instinct? What happens if you genuinely cannot agree? Which decisions do you think should always be joint?

You are not trying to remove every disagreement from your future. You are working out how you want to handle disagreement when it arrives.

What support looks like when life is difficult

This is one of the conversations I think is easy to overlook. People often assume that loving someone means automatically knowing how to support them, but we are not all comforted by the same things.

One person might want practical help. Another may need to be listened to without being given a solution. Someone might want company. Someone else might need quiet. If those differences are not understood, even very caring behaviour can sometimes land badly.

It can be useful to ask each other what helps when you are overwhelmed, what makes things worse and how you tend to behave under pressure. You might also talk about how you would approach periods of illness, grief, unemployment or other major changes. You cannot rehearse every difficult thing life might bring, but you can become more familiar with how each of you responds when life feels less straightforward.

What you want your marriage to feel like

Of all the questions before marriage, this may be one of the simplest and most useful.

What do you actually want your marriage to feel like?

Not what should it look like from the outside. Not what did your parents' marriage look like. Not what are married couples supposed to do.

What do you want the relationship between the two of you to feel like in ordinary life?

Maybe it is calm. Fun. Secure. Adventurous. Affectionate. Independent. Close. A team. A place where both people can keep growing.

You may discover that you use completely different words and mean something very similar. Or you may discover something important about what your partner values that you had never quite put into words before.

You do not need all the answers before you get married

That is probably the most important point.

The purpose of these conversations is not to decide your entire life in advance. You will both change. Circumstances will change. Some of the things you feel certain about now may look very different in ten years, and that does not mean you got them wrong.

Marriage preparation is useful because it gives you a way of talking about those changes. Relationship education has been studied in many different forms, and research suggests it can produce small improvements in communication and relationship satisfaction, while also showing that the mechanisms behind healthy long-term relationships are complex.  That complexity is important. There is no formula that guarantees a successful marriage.

What you can do is begin it with curiosity.

You can understand more about the person you are marrying, what matters to them, what they expect and how the two of you respond when life does not go exactly to plan.

And perhaps that is a better way to think about what to talk about before marriage. Not as a list of questions you have to get through, but as the beginning of a habit.

A habit of talking.

A habit of listening.

And a habit of continuing to get to know one another, even after the wedding is over.