The problem with prenups

If you want to protect your marriage, focus on your mindset—not your money

Taylor Swift’s and Travis Kelce’s choice to sign a prenup may be wise given the couple’s unique financial circumstances. But their contemporaries, i.e. everyday millennials, are not even remotely in the same boat—yet they’re getting prenups all the same. A staggering 47% of millennial and Gen Z couples sign prenuptial agreements prior to marriage.

If the financial asymmetry in a relationship is stark, or perhaps if a couple is on a second marriage with kids, a prenup isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But neither scenario is the reason the modern generation is embracing prenups. Their motive is quite different.

Ironically, it isn’t even about money. It’s about a mindset that assumes divorce is likely and in response says, “I need protection from what you might do in case we split up.”

And it is women who are at the helm of this new phenomenon. Which is doubly ironic—because when men were the higher earners (they still are overall, but this is rapidly changing), they didn’t demand prenups from their soon-to-be-wives. Isn’t that something to think about.

Either which way, the bottom line is that if you’re entering a marriage with someone from whom you feel you need protection, you shouldn’t be marrying that person.

Sadly, millennials and Gen Z have come of age in the era of social media, which walloped this generation with all kinds of terrible advice, money and marriage being no exception. Folks like Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank argue that prenups are critical for women to maintain their financial independence. They also advise couples against merging their money.

But if your goal is to have an intimate, unbreakable marriage—intimacy doesn’t mean sex; it means closeness, of which sex is one part—complete transparency between you and your spouse is critical. Ergo, advice like O’Leary’s won’t get you where you want to go.

Prenups, along with separate accounts, do not foster intimacy; they make marriage a purely business transaction. Now if that’s what two people agree they want—basically a roommate with whom you share space and the bills and the kids—that’s another matter. But I’m going to assume that is not the goal. I’m going to assume you want more.

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The truth is, there’s never been a generation so ill-suited for marriage than the current one—and it honestly isn’t their fault. Young people today are largely products of divorce, and its effects have stayed with them through adulthood: Trust between the sexes is at an all-time low.

This generation—women, especially—has also been groomed to hold on to their independence as though relinquishing even a morsel of it will swallow them whole. This too is the result of being told to “never depend on a man” and to always make sure to earn and to keep money on the side so you can leave a marriage.

This may be hard to hear; but whoever said that, or whoever said anything anti-men or anti-marriage, is the last person on earth whose advice you should take. I can’t remember where I read this next sentence, but it certainly applies: Protect your marriage from the unmarried, the never married, the unhappily married, the can’t get married, and the couldn’t stay married.

It makes perfect sense that women who grew up hearing that marriage is a bum deal or a bad investment of one’s time and energy would fall prey to the idea that prenups (and separate accounts) make a marriage stronger or better—and thus more likely to last. But the real reason young people are vulnerable to such a bogus idea is because they have no idea what actually does make marriage work.

What even is marriage?

Marriage, at its core, is about two people becoming one. Rooted in Genesis, marriage is God’s design to provide companionship, establish the family unit, and provide an environment to raise a family. Genesis 2:24 (KJV) says, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

Moreover, the Book of Common Prayer includes the line “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, and unto thee all my worldly goods I pledge.”

Translation: What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine. We are one.

In a biblical marriage, there is no his and hers. There is only “ours.” Our life, our home, our children, and yes, our money.

Sadly, this rendering of marriage is foreign to many millennials and Gen Z—for two reasons. One, the dramatic decline in religion has made marriage exclusively about love and money. Marriage is no longer a spiritual or religious endeavor. It is not about commitment, sacrifice, and obligation. Those words don’t come up at all when we talk about modern marriage.

The second reason the idea of becoming one is foreign to young people is because, as I wrote above, they are intimately familiar with divorce. They’ve never seen this kind of marriage in action, so they feel compelled to construct new ideas that they think will make marriage last.

And it isn’t just those who are products of divorce that do this. There are plenty of people whose parents stayed married but whose relationships were, for lack of a better word, dysfunctional.

For the record, I completely understand the hesitancy toward marriage when there is no model from which to work. But the solution isn’t to overcorrect and create new problems instead.

Here’s a great example of the modern generation’s lack of knowledge when it comes to marriage: Many are under the impression that a wife and mother who stays home with her kids has no money of her own. That isn’t true—spiritually or legally.

Traditional marriage was set up to protect women since they are the sex that becomes vulnerable once they become pregnant. In the past, husbands were bound by law to provide for their wives and children for this very reason. Even today, in a divorce marital assets such as income, homes, vehicles, and retirement savings acquired during the marriage are split 50/50—regardless of the couple’s individual earnings.

A wife and mother who’s been out of the workforce is entitled to half of everything acquired during the marriage for good reason: She opted out of the marketplace in favor of something equally or (some would say) more valuable: the creation of healthy humans, which leads directly to social capital.

An at-home mother’s value is immeasurable. Consider how much money goes out the door when a mother opts out of doing this work for free and returns to the workforce instead.

Many people also don’t realize that in most married households, it is wives who manage the money since they are the ones spending it on behalf of the household. Women and wives control over 70% to 80% of all consumer purchases, whether they work outside the home or not. It’s rather difficult to make the claim that a stay-at-home mother has no agency of her own when she’s in charge of how her husband’s paycheck is spent.

I use this example to help explain how the modern generation has been misled about marriage. Many people (of every generation, actually) mistakenly home in on the examples of marriages that didn’t work out, especially those in which women were “left high and dry.”

Certainly that happened. But again, the answer isn’t: Marriage is a crapshoot, so women should hoard money in case it collapses.

The answer it to look toward those who have made it work and ask them how they did so. The answer is to shore up one’s marriage, to put the things into it that make it work. To invest in it the way we invest our money. That’s how one gets a good return.

Focus more on your mindset than on your money

In the end, the difference between successfully married couples and unsuccessful ones has nothing to do with money. It has to do with mindset.

When I met my husband thirty years ago, I had more money than he did. What he had that I didn’t was a career path that had far more financial potential than my teaching salary ever would. This was important to both of us, since we knew early on that my being home when I had kids was non-negotiable.

Today, my husband and I together have accumulated more wealth than either one of us would ever have been able to do on our own. Who earned what, or who brought what to the table, is irrelevant. We are a team.

In our world, there is no “mine” and “yours.” There is no his account and her account. There are no secret accounts. There are no passwords we both don’t know. We have complete and total transparency.

This is a mindset, or an attitude, that permeates everything we do. It’s sort of like not having any sugar or alcohol in the house when you’re trying to lose weight. It sets the stage for success.

To be clear, I am not suggesting my husband and I have a conflict-free marriage— far from it. (Plus, that’s impossible. If you never have conflict, you’re not dealing with the truth of your relationship.) I’m saying that trust is at the core of our marriage.

And that’s what prenups come down to: lack of trust. Others will tell you it’s not about trust but about being smart. Or prudent. And who doesn’t want to be smart and prudent? It’s tempting to believe such a thing.

But a prenup says one thing only: “I need protection from what you might do in case we split up.” Separate accounts say the same thing.

Preparing for one’s marriage to end in divorce practically guarantees you will get divorced, just as loading up your house with sugar and alcohol will keep you from losing weight.

It’s your mindset, and the conditions one creates to embolden that mindset, that determine how successful you will be. The psychological aspect of marriage—what you think of it, how you approach it, how you live within it—factors in far more heavily than simply making sure you put this pile of money here and that pile of money over there.

All that does is divide two people. And that is the opposite of what marriage is designed to do.