how do you ask about testing without it sounding like an accusation

We are close to meeting somebody for the first time and we have a hole in our preparation that we keep walking around.

We have not worked out how to ask about testing.

Every version we have rehearsed sounds wrong. Ask it early and it reads as though we assume the worst about him. Ask it late and it reads as though we have been thinking it the whole time and only just plucked up the courage. Put it in writing and it looks like a form. Say it in the pub and it lands in the middle of an otherwise nice evening like a brick.

For context, we are both careful people. She had a full check in the summer, so did I, and neither of us has any reason to think anything is wrong. This is not suspicion of him specifically. He has been decent and open about everything else we have asked.

I think the thing snagging me is that everything else we have discussed with him has been about preference, and this is the first question that has a right answer, and if he gives the wrong one the conversation is over. That makes it feel like a test rather than a chat, and I do not want the first serious thing we ask him to be a test.

So what is the actual wording people use? Do you raise it before you meet, at the meeting, or after? Does anybody put it in the initial message and does that put people off? And what do you do with an answer that is vague rather than bad, because I suspect that is the likeliest outcome and I have no plan for it.

The single half of an arrangement, and I will answer this as the person on the receiving end of the question. It is not insulting. It has never once been insulting. What is insulting, or at least deflating, is a couple who clearly want to ask and spend three messages circling it, because then I am the one who has to bring it up to put them out of their misery and I start wondering what else they cannot say. Ask it plainly in the first proper conversation. Say when you were last tested, ask when he was, and offer to go together if the dates are old. Anybody who takes offence has told you something useful for free.

Ours is one line and we have used it for years. We both got tested last month and we would want anyone we saw to have done the same, is that something you are happy with. It puts our own on the table first, which takes the sting out, and it asks a yes or no question rather than an open one.