Prenups are sold as practical financial planning, but demanding one tells your future spouse you're already planning for their betrayal. Is signing a prenup a mature decision or a self-fulfilling prophecy of divorce?
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Add your commentThe 'self-fulfilling prophecy' argument is genuinely one of the weakest I've ever heard on this site. By that logic, having a will means you're rushing toward death. Having smoke detectors means you want your house to burn down. Come on.
I'm a divorce attorney. Fifteen years of practice. Clients who had prenups — even the ones going through ugly divorces — always had LESS trauma, less court time, less destroyed relationships. The ones without them? I've watched people lose their minds, their savings, their kids' college funds fighting over coffee tables. Get the prenup.
Prenups have nothing to do with trust and everything to do with math. I'm a CPA. I've watched clients lose everything in divorces that nobody saw coming. Protecting assets isn't distrust — it's the same logic as wearing a seatbelt. You don't expect to crash. You just know crashes happen.
My ex-husband refused to sign a prenup protecting my inheritance from my late mother. I thought it meant he loved me so much he couldn't imagine us failing. Turns out he just saw an opportunity. Ten years later I lost half of what she left me. Trust your gut AND protect yourself. Both things can be true.
Here's my challenge to everyone opposed to prenups: if you truly trust your partner completely and believe your marriage will last forever, then a prenup costs you nothing. You'll never use it. So what exactly are you afraid of signing?
The problem isn't the prenup itself. The problem is HOW it gets brought up. Sliding a document across the table two weeks before the wedding with a 'sign this or else' energy is a trust issue. Having an open, mutual, early conversation about financial planning is completely different. Context is everything here.
I asked my fiancée for a prenup last year. She cried. I felt horrible. We talked about it for weeks. In the end we both signed and honestly? Going through those hard conversations about money and expectations made us STRONGER. It was uncomfortable but worth every awkward moment.
Counter-point to the grandmother story: survivorship bias. We remember the long happy marriages. We don't hear from the people who stayed in bad marriages because they had no financial protection to leave.
I've been married twice. No prenup the first time — cost me enormously. Had a prenup the second time. Best decision we ever made together. It's been 12 years. A prenup didn't make my second marriage less loving. The first marriage failing wasn't because we skipped the paperwork. These things are genuinely unrelated.
ok but asking for a prenup when u literally have nothing is kinda hilarious. bro what are you protecting, your gaming chair??
Asking for a prenup = distrust. Not asking for one and then losing everything = regret. Pick your discomfort.
I proposed to my partner three years ago. She brought up a prenup before I even could. I was initially hurt — like genuinely felt a sting. But then I realized I was attaching my ego to it. She wasn't saying she didn't love me. She was saying she'd been burned before and needed to feel safe. That realization changed everything for me.
what gets me is that nobody bats an eye when rich people get prenups but the second a middle-class person asks for one suddenly its a red flag?? the double standard is wild
Trust is emotional. Contracts are legal. These are different categories of human experience and conflating them is philosophically sloppy. I can completely trust you as a person and still recognize that circumstances change, that people change, and that legal clarity protects both of us.
Mature decision. Full stop. Growing up means understanding that love and legal protection are not mutually exclusive. Anyone who tells you otherwise is romanticizing vulnerability in a way that primarily benefits people with bad intentions.
The person above is confidently incorrect — prenups are legally enforceable in the vast majority of countries with established family law, including the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Germany, and most of the EU. They can be challenged, yes, but 'courts routinely throw them out' is just not accurate.
There's a gendered dimension nobody's touching here. Historically, women were economically dependent on husbands and prenups were used to strip them of rights. That history matters. The conversation around prenups in 2024 needs to acknowledge that context even as we modernize our understanding of them.
i think the deeper question is why we've built a legal system where marriage has such enormous financial consequences in the first place. like if the stakes werent so astronomically high maybe we wouldnt need prenups at all. the problem is the law not the love
Statistically, marriages where both partners openly discuss finances before the wedding have lower divorce rates. Prenups force that conversation. So if anything, the data suggests they might actually be a self-preventing prophecy, not a self-fulfilling one.
the real flex is being so broke neither of you has anything worth fighting over lmaooo relationship goals honestly
prenups also protect the POORER partner not just the rich one. if you make less money and your spouse built wealth during the marriage you can actually get better terms locked in writing. people act like its only rich guys protecting themselves from gold diggers and thats just not the reality
Bold of anyone to assume their relationship is the exception to a 40%+ divorce rate.
honestly the topic framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. 'demanding one' — nobody is being held at gunpoint. it's a conversation. framing it as a demand is already poisoning the well before the debate starts
There's something deeply unromantic about reducing a marriage to contingency planning. Marriage is supposed to be a leap of faith. The moment you're lawyering up before you've even said I do, part of you has already left the room.
My grandmother would say you don't go into a marriage thinking about how to leave it. And you know what, she was married for 58 years. Maybe some wisdom skips generations.
Anyone who genuinely believes a piece of paper prevents love is too naive to be having this debate.
That comment above is exactly the kind of smug dismissiveness that shuts down real conversations. Some of us have genuine emotional reactions to institutional distrust and that's valid, thanks.
Actually prenups are unconstitutional in some countries and courts routinely throw them out anyway so the whole debate is somewhat moot depending on where you live. Just saying.
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