Free premarital worksheet
Questions to Ask Before You Get Married
Every couple walks into a marriage carrying assumptions they have never said out loud, mostly because they cannot imagine anyone assuming otherwise. This is forty short prompts designed to find those — now, while a difference is a conversation rather than a crisis.
Worksheet · 11 pagesFree · no cost, everSumarie Engelbrecht
Sound familiar?
This is for you if
We are engaged and everyone keeps asking if we have talked about the big things
We assume we want the same life and have never actually checked
We agree about everything, which is starting to seem unlikely
We want to do premarital work but our church course does not go deep enough
I would rather find the disagreements now than in year three
The assumptions nobody thinks to mention
Couples discuss the visible questions — where to live, whether to have children, roughly what the wedding costs. What goes undiscussed is the layer beneath: whether a spouse is expected to spend every Christmas with your family, what happens to money once it is earned, who is responsible for remembering birthdays, how much time apart is normal, what counts as a reasonable amount of contact with an ex.
These go unmentioned precisely because they feel self-evident. Everyone grows up in a household with a particular set of arrangements and, without ever deciding to, treats those as how it is done. Two people can be deeply compatible and still arrive with two entirely different defaults on every one of these questions.
Why disagreement here is a good outcome
Couples often approach premarital work hoping to find that they match on everything, and read a gap as a warning sign. It is closer to the opposite. Every difference found now is a difference not discovered during a fight in year three, when it will arrive with the added weight of feeling deceived.
What actually predicts trouble is not the number of differences but whether a couple can discuss them without either partner collapsing or attacking. That is the more useful thing to learn from this exercise, and the audit is structured so you find out.
Doing it separately is the whole design
If you work through these questions together, out loud, one of you will answer first on most of them and the other will calibrate — not dishonestly, just naturally. Half the value disappears.
Answering separately and then swapping is mildly uncomfortable and considerably more informative. It also produces a document you can return to, which several couples have found more useful a few years in than it was at the time.
Common questions
Questions people ask
Ideally a few months out — enough time to actually work through anything significant, and far enough from the wedding that a difficult conversation does not collide with the logistics. It is still worth doing later, and worth doing after the wedding if you missed it.
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This guide is for information and is not a substitute for individual counselling. Written by Sumarie Engelbrecht, HPCSA Registered Counsellor (PRC 0042480).