In the first year, a marriage decides almost everything about itself, and hardly any of it is decided out loud. Who cooks and who decides the menu. Whose timings the house keeps. How often she sees her own parents. Where the money goes. How a disagreement ends. By the time anyone notices, it has already become the way things are.

For you, far less changed than it did for her. You came home to the house you grew up in. She arrived somewhere new, learned a kitchen that was not hers, and is being watched while she does it.

The First Year starts there. It describes what a first year actually looks like, month by month, including the stretch between three and six months when most people privately wonder whether they have made a mistake. Then it asks you to write out her day as you believe it goes, and go and ask her.

It moves through the household rules you have never had to notice, the work in the house that nobody counts, two families and one calendar, privacy and closeness, money and what is hers in it, and how the two of you argue and come back. It gives you words for the moments that matter most: when your mother corrects her, when your family compares her with someone, when plans are made without her, and when you need to repair something after a fight.

It also asks about your own year. The evenings you gave up without deciding to, the weight of providing, and the fact that nobody has asked you how any of it is going.

60 pages, with reading pages, pages of words to use, and room to write. Written by the counsellors at Hibiscus Counselling in Adyar, Chennai. The companion edition for the bride follows the same seven parts, so the two of you are working from the same picture of the year.