A first date can be a difficult thing to negotiate. Despite your best efforts, it’s easy to let nerves get the better of you, so a little forethought can help you to ensure you make the best of your time with your date. The key to learning about someone is to ask them directly, but how do you know which questions you should ask?

Here are three simple and straightforward questions you can ask during your date, and what the answers will tell you about your prospective partner.

1. How do you practise your faith day to day?

This question will allow you to learn more about how your date deals with their daily life through the prism of their faith. It’s a good test to see how seriously they take their faith, and how they apply the lessons they learn every day. It can give you some sort of insight into how they’re going to approach any problems or difficulties that you may encounter together.

It’s also a symbol of their ability to practise commitment. If they make the effort to include their belief in their daily life, it bodes well for their ability to commit to a relationship.

2. What do you want out of a relationship?

You can’t really hope to settle with someone if you both want totally different things. If you want to think about eventual marriage and children, but they don’t want that sort of commitment, then someone has to make a sacrifice. So it’s important you know as early as possible whether you’re compatible in terms of what you’re looking for from a relationship.

If you don’t get the answer you want, you can still enjoy a lovely date, but you can do so safe in the knowledge that you both know where you stand.

3. When was your last relationship, and why did it end?

It might seem like a personal question, and it is. But if a relationship is on the cards, personal questions come with the territory. This is important to gauge their reaction to their former partner. If all the blame is placed on a former partner’s door for the ending of the relationship, that doesn’t necessarily bode well for that person’s ability to work on problems you may face together.

If their last relationship is still too raw or recent to talk about, it may be too soon for them to be thinking about getting into another relationship. It’s important you, and they, both know that.