I had a divorce behind me and a flat in my name in London. I brought up a prenup expecting an argument. She pulled out a list of what she wanted to add too.

I'm British, 52, and got divorced eight years ago after a twenty-year marriage that cost me more than I'm willing to detail here. When I met June, 41, in Bangkok, where I've worked in financial consulting for six years, I'd already decided that if I ever married again, it would be with a prenuptial agreement in place, no exceptions.

The problem was how to bring it up without it sounding like I didn't trust her, or worse, like I was treating her as a possible gold-digger before we'd even married.

I spent nearly two months putting the conversation off, rehearsing lines in my head that sounded worse each time I repeated them. I finally raised it on an ordinary night after dinner, clumsier than I'd have liked, explaining that I had a flat in London, a settlement from my previous divorce, and that I wanted to protect that before we married — not because I distrusted her but because I'd already been through a divorce that left me with less than half of what I'd built over twenty years.

June listened in silence until I finished. Then she got up, went to get her laptop, and came back with her own list she'd been putting together for weeks: she wanted to protect a small piece of land she'd inherited from her grandmother in a village near Ayutthaya, and the savings she'd spent ten years building up working as an accountant, long before she ever met me.

We ended up laughing at how much we'd each separately worried about the same conversation. She admitted she'd also rehearsed how to bring it up, afraid I'd read it as a lack of love on her part.

We went together to an independent Thai lawyer three months before the wedding, with plenty of time to spare, something the lawyer himself said he appreciated, since many couples show up two weeks before the wedding wanting to rush through something that needs care. The agreement, signed and registered the same day as the marriage at the amphur, covers exactly what each of us had before we met: my flat and settlement, her land and her savings.

We've been married two years now. The agreement document is still sitting in a drawer neither of us has opened since the wedding day. What I remember most about the whole process, though, isn't the paperwork — it's the moment June pulled out her own list without me having to ask. Proof that protecting what's yours, before merging two lives, doesn't have to come from distrust. Sometimes it simply comes from having lived long enough to know what it costs to rebuild something from scratch.