Prenuptial counselling and discussion on various thorny topics are being encouraged nowadays. This, they say, gives the couple a fair idea of what their spouse-to-be believes in or does not believe in and thus prevents the rise of differences in later years.

I skim the list of questions:

n What is your credit status right now and do you believe in saving for a rainy day?

n Do you live on credit? How big are your loans, if any, and how are they being serviced?

n Who do you think should be in charge of doing the housework or getting it done?

n Do pets form a part of your lifestyle?

n Who is going to look after your parents — and mine — when they are old?

I am not even half-way through the list, but I cannot help but murmur, “What if I had asked some of these questions before I got married?”

Had I done that, I would not have felt so ill-used when I spent the first year of our married life, clearing my husband’s loans for motorcycle, music system and other household goods that, to my mind, were really no good for anything since they were already falling apart.

I would also have known that despite being an earning member of society for almost a decade, my husband was proudly broke. What’s more, he resolutely eschewed the idea of saving. Even if the rest of the world husbanded their resources, my husband-to-be refused to follow the crowd and miss out on ‘living’ in the here and now.

Conversely, had he questioned me, he might have realised that of all the ‘new-age ideas’ I shunned, ‘living on credit’ was one I stayed farthest from, and he would therefore have known that he would have to start living within his means or face fire and brimstone on a daily basis ...

Again, if he had dug a bit deeper — beyond the common ground we shared of being dog lovers — he would have known that there was a huge gap between his idea of keeping a pet and my idea of the same thing. Thus, he would have been prepared and put a brave face to it when he had to occupy a distant second place in my scheme of things once our pet arrived — and go further down the ladder when our child put in an appearance.

But of course, all those decades ago, neither of us asked these or any other questions to each other.

Instead, we just took the plunge — and spent the next few decades getting surprised at every turn. Most of those ‘surprises’ were actually rude jolts, even bombshells. They flattened us out; they left all kinds of fallout for us to deal with: But we somehow got up and kept going — and eventually took it all in our stride.

Therefore, I wonder about all the wise young people of today who, unlike us, ask all the right questions and get all the answers before they risk marital blitz. Can everything be cut and dried in advance? Where is the excitement of sudden weirdness/craziness? Where is the mystery and thrill that day-to-day life can bring?

And don’t we eventually find that neither of the partners is the same person we started that journey with decades earlier? (In our case, the happy spendthrift is now the calculator of bank balances, while the careful one refuses to think beyond ‘Today’.)

No amount of prenuptial discussion could have foreseen these changes in just these few aspects of the partnership — and there is more: Much more.

So, had both of us actually asked enough relevant questions about family/friends/ status/beliefs all those decades ago, for sure we would have steered off in different directions, convinced that the twain could never meet.

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.