Most courtships are spent discovering whether you enjoy each other’s company.
That matters. It is also not the thing that determines whether the marriage works, because the compatibility that carries a marriage through twenty years is not about enjoyment. It is about money, family, children, conflict, and what each of you assumes is normal.
Almost none of that surfaces on its own. Couples get engaged having never discussed any of it, and then discover their answers in year three, expensively.
These are the ten conversations worth having first. Not interrogations — conversations, spread over months, revisited as you learn more.
1. What did money look like in your house growing up?
Start here rather than with his current salary, because his salary will change and his instincts will not.
Was money discussed openly or never mentioned? Was there always a crisis, or quiet stability? Did his parents argue about it? Was he the child who had to ask for things and be refused?
What you are listening for: whether he treats money as a source of anxiety, a source of status, or a tool. A man raised in scarcity may hoard or may spend compulsively the moment he has anything. A man raised with plenty may have no instinct for restraint.
Then ask the direct questions: What do you earn? What do you owe? Is there anything you are paying off that I do not know about? Do you have savings?
Hidden debt discovered after the wedding is one of the most common serious breaches in early marriage. Ask now, when the answer costs nothing.
2. What do you send home, and what will you send home?
The single most underdiscussed question in Nigerian courtship, and the source of enormous marital conflict.
What does he currently give his parents and siblings? Is it a fixed amount or whatever is requested? Is there a sibling in school he is funding? A parent with health costs? A family expectation that he will build a house in the village?
Ask what happens after marriage. Many men assume this continues unchanged. Many women assume it reduces. Nobody says either out loud.
What you are listening for: whether he can hold a limit with his family at all, and whether he expects the decision to be joint or his alone.
3. How does your family treat the wives who married in?
You are not only marrying him. Watch how his mother speaks to his brother’s wife. Watch whether the wives in that family have a voice or are managed.
Ask him directly: Where do you think your loyalty sits if your mother and I disagree? What would you do if your family said something disrespectful to me?
What you are listening for: whether he has ever contradicted his family on anything. A man who has never once held a position against his parents will not begin on your behalf.
4. What do you expect the running of the house to look like?
Get specific, because “we will share” means completely different things to different people.
Who cooks on a Tuesday when you have both worked? Who takes a sick child to hospital? If one of you must leave work early, who is it? Will there be house help, and who manages them?
Ask about work: Do you expect me to keep working after children? Would you support a career that requires travel? What if I earned more than you?
What you are listening for: whether his stated views match his examples. Many men say they believe in sharing and then describe a household where the wife does everything.
5. How were you disciplined as a child, and how will you discipline ours?
Extremely important in Nigerian context and almost never discussed before marriage.
Was he beaten? Does he consider that normal and necessary? What would he do if a child were rude, or failed an exam, or lied?
What you are listening for: whether he can distinguish discipline from punishment, and whether he is willing to discuss the question at all. A man who becomes irritated at being asked will not be open to negotiation later, when there is an actual child in the room.
6. How do you behave when you are angry?
You cannot know this from a courtship where everything is going well. So ask, and then watch.
Ask what he does when furious. Ask what his father did. Ask about the worst argument he has had with anyone, and how it ended.
Then observe: how he speaks to waiters, drivers, and security men. How he behaves when a plan collapses. How he responds when you disagree with him about something small.
What you are listening for, urgently: any history of physical violence, any pattern of contempt, any tendency to blame everyone else. Also whether he goes silent for days — stonewalling is not a temper problem but it is corrosive over decades.
This is the question that matters most. Nothing else on this list carries the same weight.
7. What do you actually believe, and how does it show?
Both of you will say you are Christian. That word covers an enormous range.
How often does he read Scripture on his own, not for a message? Does he pray outside of church? What does he think about tithing, giving, church authority, women in leadership? Which church would you attend, and who decides?
What you are listening for: whether his faith is practised or inherited. A man who attends because his family attends and a man who genuinely prays are different propositions, and the difference emerges under pressure.
8. What do you want children to look like — and what if it goes wrong?
How many, and how soon? What if it does not happen easily? What is his view on medical intervention?
The infertility conversation is avoided almost universally in Nigerian courtship, and it is where marriages break under pressure from extended family. Ask what he would do if you could not conceive. Ask what he would say to his mother.
What you are listening for: whether he sees children as something you would face together, or as something you owe his family.
9. What is your history, and what should I know?
Previous marriages. Children. Serious relationships that ended badly. Health conditions, including mental health. Anything a person would reasonably want to know before committing their life.
Ask plainly: Is there anything about your past that would change my mind if I found out in two years?
What you are listening for: not a clean history — almost nobody has one. Willingness to be honest about a difficult one. A man who discloses something uncomfortable voluntarily is showing you something valuable.
10. What does the next ten years look like to you?
Where will you live — this city, abroad, the village eventually? Is he planning to leave employment for business? Is there a relative he intends to bring to live with you? What does he want to have achieved by forty?
What you are listening for: whether his plan has a place in it for a partner with her own plans, or whether he has designed a life and is recruiting.
How to actually have these conversations
Not in one sitting. A ten-question interview will feel like an interrogation and produce prepared answers. Spread them across months.
Ask about his family of origin before asking about his intentions. People describe their childhood honestly and their intentions aspirationally. The childhood answer is more predictive.
Watch behaviour over words. Everything above is confirmed or contradicted by how he actually acts under stress, with his family, and with people who cannot do anything for him.
Answer them yourself too. You have assumptions you have never examined either.
Meet a married couple together. Watching how he responds to a real marriage in front of him tells you a great deal.
The answers that should stop you
Most disagreements here are workable. A few are not, and it is worth being clear about them before you are emotionally committed.
- Any history of physical violence, or any behaviour that frightens you
- An unwillingness to discuss these questions at all, or anger at being asked
- Discovered dishonesty about money, history, or another relationship
- Contempt — for you, for women generally, for anyone he considers beneath him
- A refusal to ever hold a position against his family
Those are not adjustment issues. Courtship is when they are cheapest to act on.
The point of all this
You are not trying to eliminate every difference. Two people who agree on everything do not exist, and marriages are not built on identical answers.
You are trying to find out what the differences actually are, whether he can discuss them without defensiveness, and whether the two of you can negotiate.
That last one is the real test. Not the answers — the conversation. A man who can hear a hard question, think about it, and answer honestly is someone you can build with, even where you disagree.
A man who cannot have the conversation at all is telling you exactly what the next thirty years will be like.
