Questions to Ask Your Spouse About How You Met
Answer these apart from each other, then compare. Couples who have been married thirty years routinely discover something they never knew.
Do these separately. Write your answers down without discussing them, then swap. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why this works on couples who assume there is nothing left to find out.
The shared version of how you met has been jointly maintained for years and it has quietly edited out every place the two accounts disagreed. Those places are still there. They just have not been looked at since about the third year.
Twelve questions, answered apart
1. What did you actually think of me the first time?
Why it works. The honest first impression is rarely flattering and is almost always funnier and better than the official version.
How to ask it. Promise in advance not to be wounded, and mean it. The unflattering answer is the good one.
What it opens up. What they noticed, what they assumed, and how wrong they were.
2. Who did you tell first, and what did you say?
Why it works. It reaches outside the couple to the friend or sibling who got the real-time account.
How to ask it. Ask for the exact words if they have them.
What it opens up. The unguarded version from the week it happened.
3. What were you doing with your life that month?
Why it works. It restores who each of you was before the other, which is the context that makes the meeting matter.
How to ask it. Ask about the job and the flat before anything about feelings.
What it opens up. A person your spouse remembers being and you may never have fully met.
4. When did you know?
Why it works. The two answers are usually months apart and frequently attached to completely different events.
How to ask it. Write down a date and a moment, not a general period.
What it opens up. The gap, which is the most interesting single fact in most couples' history.
5. What nearly stopped it?
Why it works. Every couple has one and the shared version has usually deleted it.
How to ask it. Ask what you would have done if it had gone the other way.
What it opens up. The near miss, and how much of this rested on something small.
6. What did your family say about me at the start?
Why it works. Somebody had a reservation. Twenty years later it is safe and often very funny.
How to ask it. Ask who came round first and what changed their mind.
What it opens up. The extended family's real reaction, which is rarely the version told at weddings.
7. What is a thing I did early on that made you decide?
Why it works. It asks for a specific action rather than a quality, and the specific action is almost never the one you would have guessed.
How to ask it. Ask for something small. It usually was.
What it opens up. What actually mattered, which is worth knowing and worth repeating.
8. What were you most afraid of about marrying me?
Why it works. Asked at twenty years' distance it is safe, and it is a more honest question than what did you love about me.
How to ask it. Do not defend yourself when you hear it.
What it opens up. The real calculation each of you made, which children find genuinely useful to know about.
9. What was our first hard year and what got us through it?
Why it works. The second half is what makes it answerable and it is the part worth recording.
How to ask it. Answer separately. You will name different years.
What it opens up. The mechanics of how your marriage actually works, described from two angles.
10. What do you remember about the wedding that nobody else does?
Why it works. Everyone has the photographs. Nobody has the thing that happened in the twenty minutes before.
How to ask it. Ask what you were thinking while you were waiting.
What it opens up. The private side of a heavily documented day.
11. What has surprised you about being married to me?
Why it works. It is present tense, which keeps this from being purely an exercise in nostalgia.
How to ask it. Ask for one good surprise and one you did not expect.
What it opens up. Where you both are now, in each other's actual words.
12. What do you want our kids to know about us?
Why it works. It is the right last question because it turns two private accounts into something deliberately handed on.
How to ask it. Answer separately, then read them together, and put both into the book unedited.
What it opens up. What each of you would most want kept, which is rarely the same thing.