I’d say rather it confirms what I’ve observed of people.
All of life is risk. One shouldn’t avoid participating in life due to fear of risk, but one should take reasonable precautions.
What’s reasonable to you and what’s reasonable to me may be different.
(So sayeth I, married 27 years, together 35 years, no pre-nup. Seemed reasonable at the time. 
)
In addition, some people are more constant than others or circumstances change and wants and needs with said circumstances. And some people go into marriage with their eyes more open than others. If they had inaccurate preconceived notions about it, they may regret vows they really meant just months or years before.
I saw something on TV about a special new class of marriage in Louisiana (?). If you enter into the contract, the stipulation was that you had to wait for the divorce and counseling was required to get the divorce.
Just a question: what about those pre-nups I’ve seen references to on TV shows (to wit, Law & Order) that specify that a cheating partner receives a lot less than if both partners agree to break up without infidelity? Do those actually exist? Would they hold up in court? That sounds like the kind of thing I’d be interested in.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
I don’t agree. I think things can happen that change situations, and change people. Just because things are not okay now doesn’t mean they were never okay, or that one person (or both) never meant their vows.
As for your middle point- a pre-nuptual agreement doesn’t keep the assets separate during the marriage IIRC. It usually states that at the dissolution of the marriage, each partner takes away from the marriage what they brought to it (this doesn’t cover assets acquired during the marriage, which are split depending on state laws, etc).
If I or my husband had brought significant assets to our marriage, a pre-nup would have been prudent. At one point, there was a chance he would be inheriting some property in northern CA, and it would have been covered to keep it his alone, as it was in the previous generation. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me, adore me and worship me.
I have a friend who is in a marriage with a much older man, and they have a pre-nup. Among the particulars was a clause similar to Trump’s, that if she left the marriage in the first 10 years, she would receive almost nothing. But she was dirt poor and he was filthy rich coming into this marriage, so he was simply protecting his assets in case he had grossly misjudged her. He hadn’t, by the way.
It’s a deal breaker if my partner refused to sign one.
I’m inclined to agree with you, but before the gentleman and I got married, we had a talk with a friend of mine who’s a divorce lawyer first. The reason he wanted to do it is his family has been known to behave badly when it comes to inheritances and he had some assets he wanted to make sure would be protected if anything happened to him or our marriage. I objected rather strongly to the idea at first, but I’m glad we did it. It gave us a better understanding of our individual finances and how exactly state law applied to them. It’s also given us a better understanding of what the larger implications were as we did combine our assets. As it turned out, after talking with the lawyer, we decided we didn’t need a pre-nuptial agreement, but it wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker if we had.
I would recommend that couples who are planning on getting married sit down and talk with someone who knows how the law will affect them and their finances before they get married, especially since arguments about money are supposed to be one of the leading causes of divorce. I’d recommend this because it gave us a clearer picture of our financial situation and our attitudes toward money, not because of the divorce rate. The gentleman and I are in this for life and, while we did vow to take each other “for richer, for poorer,” we now have a better idea of where we’ll stand if (when?) the latter happens.
As far as legalities go, a marriage is a contract.
The terms of the contract are set out by related family law legislation, judicial precedent, and the pre-nup. If one does not like the terms set by family law legislation and judicial precedent, then one should have a pre-nup. If one is fully satisfied with the family law legislation and judicial precedent, one has little need for a pre-nup.
Most people gettng married have little concept of family law legislation and judicial precedent, and some will avoid making a pre-nup, leaving them making what may be the single most important contract in their life without having a clue as to the terms. Such is lurv.
It can if the parties want it to.
Despite the best of intentions, often people change.
Sometimes that change destroys a marriage.
If a marriage is destroyed, a pre-nup will help reduce the damage.
It comes down to risk management.
I wouldn’t have signed one going in to my current (and only) marriage because neither of us had a pot to piss in going into the marriage.
However, in the event that one of us is widowed, then I think a pre-nup for any subsequent marriages would be necessary to protect the interests of our children. We created our wealth together and what remains when we both die should go to our children, not to some second wife/husband.
I don’t understand why you feel you need one. Only marital property is subject to equitable distribution. Any assets or liabilities (per FL state law) that either of you have prior to marriage is non-marital. That is, it is not included in the marital estate for division purposes if you divorce later. Your premarital assets are yours forever.* Why do you think you would be liable for any of her premarital debt?
*CAVEAT: unless you specifically take some express action that makes the asset/liability a marital issue (e.g., you put your wife on the title of that new car you bought with premarital car money, or you start making her student loan payments from your separate bank account). Or if you put your inheritance in a joint account, that intermingles the cash and makes it marital.
Okay, it’s complicated. Have you actually talked to a lawyer about this already?
I gotta take you to task for this. You admit that both you and the ex were digging in your heels and yet it took 18 months because of the lawyers? Somehow you and the ex amicably settled things in a couple hours some 15 months later, and this is the lawyers’ fault it took so long? :dubious: Why didn’t you just amicably settle things in the first month? Either or both of you could have stopped digging in your heels at any time and settled things.
Lawyers represent their clients - they don’t make decisions for them. If the client wants to settle, s/he settles! Didn’t you ever see any Seinfeld episodes with Kramer and Jackie Chiles?
A pre-nup can be tremendously useful in having the parties agree what their pre-marital assets and debts are. If the marriage fails after many years, proof of pre-martial assets and debts may no longer exist, other than as set out in the agreement.
We haven’t talked to a lawyer about it yet, but we will definitely be talking to one so we can make a final decision on it. I’m finishing grad school at the moment to become a librarian, and he’s a sculptor who hasn’t “made it” in the field yet. We’re not at a stage where either of us is in a good financial situation, but the potential is there for either of us to be very successful and we’d like to not have to become bitter over how things are split up in the event that we end up divorcing. It’s complicated, and will probably be more complicated in the months coming up to the beginning of our marriage, as I am slowly receiving bits and pieces of my inheritance from my mother. Right now, I’m concerned about getting through tax season without a major hurdle before we start looking into getting a prenup.
I agree with **Seige’s ** and Muffin’s comments - even if you don’t plan on signing a pre-nup, it never hurts for the two of you to sit down with a lawyer, familiar with the family law of your jurisdiction, to give you a summary of what the law says. Informed consent is always better.
The discussion on this thread also highlights the need for a lawyer trained in your jurisdiction, rather than taking advice from people on a message board spanning different countries and continents. There is a lot of variation in how family law deals with matrimonial property, and the value of a pre-nup may vary considerably from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
To illustrate, there are at least three different general models for family law: community of property; partnership in acquisitions; and separate property. In community, everything is held jointly unless the parties agree to exclude it, but in separation, nothing is joint unless the parties make it so. Partnership in acquisitions is in-between: the property that the parties have immediately prior to the marriage is not marital property, but what they acquire during the marriage is marital. And there can be a lot of tweaks and exceptions to these very broad strokes, like the status of the matrimonial home.
And there can be jurisdictions with more than one property regime. In Québec, for example, all three of the above are available. Partnership in acquisitions is the default, but the parties can opt for either community or separation.
You can see that in a jurisdiction with community property, a pre-nup has a lot more significance than a jurisdiction with separate property or the partnership of acquisitions.
And then there’s the example of bequests, which nashiitashii mentions - some jurisdictions may treat a bequest as non-marital property, even if made after the marriage; others may treat it as marital property, unless the testator clearly intended it to go to both parties. As well, some jurisdictions may use the date of death as the key date to determine if it’s marital property, while others might use the date the bequest is actually received.
I have no idea how nashiitashii’s jurisdiction treats these issues, and wouldn’t venture to express an opinion. But it highlights that if she wants to know her rights and obligations before going into the marriage, it doesn’t hurt for her and her fiancé to sit down with a lawyer.
Agreed.
It seems like a number of people think of a pre-nuptial agreement as “asking for a divorce.” But it’s kind of like a car warranty – just because you have an agreement with the dealer about who pays for the repair doesn’t mean you’re asking for the car to break down. Frankly, I think of the pre-nuptial agreement as less important than the process of agreeing on the pre-nup. It requires you and your partner to lay bare your entire financial situation, warts and all, and talk about expectations for your future, including how you want any later-acquired wealth to be held and, perhaps, distributed. If you and your soon-to-be spouse can’t get through that discussion, then I suspect rocky shoals ahead. I would want a pre-nup for just that reason. I don’t have a lot of assets, and don’t really anticipate becoming the next Rockefeller, but I’d like a structured way to talk about finances and wealth before jumping into marriage, and a pre-nup provides that structure.
I can’t really see how - the vows (at least in the form I have in mind) are specifically about what happens when things change. Could you give an example?
Pre-marital counselling was compulsory* at the church where we tied the knot - it was a couple of meetings with mature married couples, discussing our approach to such things as finances, work, sex, children, division of labour, etc.
*That sounds like it was a cult or something - what I mean is it was a necessary condition of having them host the ceremony. If we had declined the counselling, the curate would have politely wished us all the best in our search for a different venue.
People can’t always predict what will happen. My parents have been married for 45 years. About 20 years ago, my father had his first stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. He’s had a couple more since then. Over time, he has become verbally and sometimes physically abusive to my mother. He literally will not let her sit for fifteen minutes without yelling for her. When he was physically to do a little more, he would repeatedly call her cell to annoy her if she went out. She would return home to find he had used the carpet instead of the urinal in revenge. He frequently says he wants her to be as miserable as he is, and he’s doing a damn good job. Amazingly, he is able to control himself when my siblings and I are around.
My father wasn’t the nicest guy in the world before the strokes, and I’m sure the fact that my mother will never leave him plays a part in his behavior. But I’m also sure that when my father was 24 and getting married he didn’t expect that he would act this way when he was fifty.He may not have lived up to his vows, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t intend to. And if my mother had divorced him after he became abusive, that wouldn’t be an indication that she didn’t intend hers.