Marriage Memoirs — Part 4

The conversation before the contract

What to ask, when to ask it, and why your future self will thank you

To My Daughter’s Generation,

This is the fourth and final letter in my April Marriage Memoirs series. And it is the one I wish someone had handed me before I began.

Not because my marriage needed saving — thirty years in, I am still choosing the same man, still finding rooms in him I did not know existed, still asking the questions that have no safe answers and staying on the walk long enough to hear them. But because I have sat with too many women – brilliant, accomplished, deeply loving women who walked into marriage with their whole hearts and almost none of their questions. Women who assumed that love would sort the details. That trust would substitute for structure. That the conversation could always happen later.

Later, it turns out, it has a cost.

Last year my niece got married. She asked me to hold a gathering of family and close friends to talk through the conversations that matter before two lives merge. We could not find the time. Instead, I gave her a copy of my Financial Freedom workbook and asked her and her husband to work through it together. This column is the gathering we never had.

My daughter read The Divorce Economy and called me quiet in the way she gets when something has unsettled her thinking. “Mum,” she said finally. “If I still have to have my own house, my own income, my own everything — what exactly is the point of getting married? That’s just being single with extra steps.”

She was not wrong to ask. Her generation is asking it everywhere — in the quiet of a young woman’s mind who is building something real and beginning to ask whether marriage fits into the life she is designing.

Marriage is not the problem. Unexamined marriage is. The solution is not to avoid commitment — it is to design it. On purpose. By both of you. Before the feelings make everything feel too sacred to interrogate.

Here are the twelve money conversations worth having before you say yes, before you sign anything, and before you merge your lives with another human being who has an entire financial personality you may not yet fully know.

Before You Say Yes

Courtship, Character and Paying Attention

Question 1: How does this person talk about money — or do they talk about it at all?

Before you ask a single number, listen for the silence. The person who clams up, deflects, jokes nervously, or changes the subject when money comes up is showing you something important about every financial conversation that follows in the next thirty years. You are not asking for a bank statement on the first date. You are paying attention to whether this person is comfortable being honest about an area of life that will determine the texture of your marriage more than almost anything else.

Red flag: they make you feel materialistic for caring. Money is not unromantic. Poverty is not romantic. Clarity is an act of love.

Question 2: Are they bold or timid with opportunity?

Watch how they move in the world. Do they see possibility or do they see risk? Do they dream out loud, or do they quietly shrink your dreams with comments dressed as realism? Show them something beautiful — a home, a business idea, a vision — and watch what happens. Do they lean in or explain why it is impractical?

You do not need to marry the richest person in the room. You need to marry someone whose imagination is at least as large as yours.

Question 3: Are they generous or stingy — and not just with money?

Generosity is a personality, not a budget. You will know it from small things: how they tip, how they give, how they celebrate others. Stinginess with money almost always travels with stinginess of spirit. And you cannot build an expansive life with a person whose instinct is always to contract.

Question 4: Do they take care of everyone else at the expense of building anything?

There is a version of a good person — generous, family-orientated, deeply loved — who has quietly made themselves financially unavailable for a partnership. Every resource they generate goes immediately outward: to siblings, parents, cousins, the extended family ecosystem that depends on them. At what point does a person reorganise their financial hierarchy to make room for a spouse and a future? If the answer is unclear, the conversation must happen before the ring, not after.

Before You Sign Anything

Legal, Financial and Clear-Eyed

Question 5: Do you have debt? What kind, how much, and what is your plan?

Debt is not automatically disqualifying. Good debt — a mortgage, a business loan, an investment — is a different creature from consumer debt accumulated through living beyond one’s means. What matters is whether they know the number, own it honestly, and have a plan that does not involve your income as the undisclosed rescue strategy. A person serious about building a life with you will not be offended by the question. They will respect you for asking it.

Question 6: What is your number — and do you believe you can reach it?

What does financial freedom look like to this person? Not because you need identical numbers, but because you need to know whether you are building toward the same horizon or whether one of you is dreaming while the other is convinced that dreaming is irresponsible. The couple who cannot talk about their financial vision before marriage will not suddenly find the language for it after.

Question 7: Whose name will things be in — and what does control actually mean?

This is the question most women discover too late. A woman in our community restructured her business ownership after discovering she was doing 99% of the work on a company registered 80% in her husband’s name. Her words stay with me; it wasn’t emotional. It was strategic. Ownership must reflect contribution and responsibility. Another woman, in a strong partnership, closed a land deal on her own terms — including her husband’s name because that felt right but keeping the document with her. Both women are in good marriages. Neither was acting against their husbands. Both were acting for themselves.

Being on a document and having control over what that document governs are two entirely different things. This is not a distrustful conversation. It is a governance conversation. Have it before the purchase, not after the restructure.

Question 8: What does your family expect — and how does that affect what we can build together?

The village will arrive eventually. Extended family expectations — financial, social, spatial — have derailed more promising financial partnerships than bad investment decisions ever have. Have this conversation in the comfort of the courtship, not in the chaos of the crisis.

Before You Merge Your Lives

Money Psychology, Shared Vision and the Architecture of Us

Question 9: How will we structure our finances — and why?

The structure most likely to serve all people: yours, mine, and ours. Individual accounts that preserve autonomy and dignity. A joint account that funds the shared life. A clear understanding of what flows where and why. The joint account that swallows everything is not a partnership. It is a merger.

Question 10: What is your relationship with risk — and does it match mine?

Money is not just numbers. It is psychology. Two people with fundamentally different relationships to risk will fight about money in the language of values long before they fight about actual figures. Know their risk appetite before you share a balance sheet.

Question 11: Can we dream together – out loud, without embarrassment – about what we are building?

Some of the most important financial conversations my husband and I have had started in a car, on a walk, in an unremarkable moment that turned into a vision. The person who cannot dream with you, who contracts when your vision expands, who needs you to be smaller so they feel sufficient — that is not a partner. That is a ceiling.

Question 12: What happens if one of us earns significantly less — or chooses not to work at all?

For most couples, it is not a question of whether one person will carry more at some point. It is a question of when. A career interrupted by children. A health season that was not planned for. A business not yet paying what it will. A spouse who relocates for the other’s opportunity and starts again. The person who earns less in a season has not stopped contributing. They have changed currencies. Decide together: if the income becomes unequal, does ownership follow it? Or does the marriage hold a more honest accounting of what each person actually brings?

A Final Word

The goal of every question in this guide is not to find a perfect person. It is to find a person with whom you can have imperfect conversations — honestly, bravely, and with enough love to stay at the table until you reach understanding.

Marriage designed is not marriage diminished. It is marriage that is honoured. Two people who chose each other with their eyes open, their names on the documents, their dreams on the table, and their future built together – on purpose.

To my daughter, and to every woman of her generation asking whether it is worth it, it is. Design it that way.

For now, the most important conversation you will ever have about money is not with your bank, your accountant, or your financial advisor. It is with the person you are considering building your life with. Start there. Start now. Start before you need to.

Udo Okonjo is CEO of Fine & Country West Africa and founder of Radiant Collective Capital. She has been building infrastructure for women in leadership and wealth since 2010.