Exit plan

Talia Koren and her husband met on the dating app Hinge in 2022. They got married two years later, but not before signing a prenuptial agreement.

Koren, the 33-year old host of a dating advice podcast, wanted a prenup long before meeting her husband. “I knew, no matter who I would end up with, that it would be really important to me,” she said.

Historically, only celebrities like Beyoncé and Jay-Z or the very wealthy got prenuptial agreements. But in the last decade, these arrangements have become a lot more mainstream. In 2022, 15% of married or engaged people had signed a prenup, up from 3% in 2010.

Statistically, younger Americans are much more likely to sign a prenup. According to a 2023 Axios-Harris poll, 41% of Gen Z and just under half of millennials who are engaged or married have gotten a prenup. Katelyn Parker is a family law attorney with One Accord Legal, a firm in Greenwood Village, Colo. “Probably five years ago, the majority of prenups I was doing were for older couples,” she said. Now, more of her clients are younger couples.

Many couples sign these contracts to make divorce less complicated, and advocates say prenups could actually help married couples avoid breaking up. Some Christians believe prenups might have their place, depending on the circumstance. But others warn the broader trend points to some major problems: A growing number of couples maintain complete independence during marriage, view marriage as a contractual arrangement, and plan for divorce before ever saying “I do.”

JULIA RODGERS FOUNDED Hello Prenup in 2021. The Shark Tank–backed website allows couples to customize their prenups based on questionnaires. She says the growing interest in these types of contracts has several causes. For one thing, online platforms like Hello Prenup and This First have made prenups cheaper and more accessible. While the average attorney-facilitated prenup can cost $7,500, Hello Prenup and This First have packages that cost less than $1,000.

Most singles today delay marriage until their late 20s or early 30s. That means the average couple has accumulated more wealth before marriage than their predecessors. “And they just think, I own a house. I own a business. I want to protect those things,” Rodgers said.

Many couples Rodgers talks to get prenups to keep their student debt separate if they get divorced. Three-quarters of Hello Prenup’s customers are between the ages of 18 and 39 and, on average, have accumulated about $30,000 in debt by the time they get married. In some cases, aging parents passing down wealth encourage their children to sign prenups.

When most people think about a prenup, division of wealth usually comes to mind. But these contracts can also influence how a couple manages money during the marriage.

For example, per their prenup, Talia Koren and her husband keep their incomes separate and pay for some expenses like gym memberships and car payments on their own. They have a joint account for shared expenses like medical payments, rent, and travel.

Koren and her husband individually make “more than six figures a year.” But they weren’t aiming to protect massive amounts of wealth with their prenup. “We’re still early in our careers,” Koren said. “We’re pretty equal in terms of our assets right now.”

The average Hello Prenup customer has a net worth of just under $80,000. That could have something to do with a change in how young people see marriage. “We view relationships so differently than our parents,” Rodgers said. “And I think we view things as more equitable. These are partnerships.”

Today’s prenups go way beyond keeping finances distinct. Rodgers says prenup “embryo clauses” have also become popular. These allow a couple to determine who gets ownership of frozen embryos if a marriage dissolves.

Adya Roy and her husband used their prenup to maintain ownership of companies they started before getting married. But the contract also has some more personal stipulations: If the 29-year-old content creator ever gets divorced, her prenup stipulates that she will retain legal custody of her dog. She’ll also keep her family’s heirloom gold, something her Indian heritage prompted her to protect.

“I don’t want that to end up with him and his future wife,” Roy said. “That’s the last thing I need.”

MICHELLE KNIESS, an attorney with Mosaic Family Law and Mediation, says maintaining independence with a prenup can “prevent the oneness of marriage” that the Bible prescribes.

Kniess allows that some circumstances might merit a legal agreement. For instance, if a person gets remarried and wants children from the first marriage to inherit certain assets, a prenup might make sense. “I think with careful planning and approaching it from the right heart, there are ways to protect things, absolutely,” Kniess said.

But Kniess believes these circumstances should be the exception, not the rule. For one thing, it’s pretty easy to challenge a prenup. “It’s somewhat of a waste of money when you could just work on the foundational elements of being the right spouse and viewing property properly,” Kniess said. “That is a more powerful tool than a contract.”

Ultimately, Kniess sees the popularity of prenups as a warning sign about the state of marriage: “I think we as a society tend to view it as more of a social contract than a covenant.” That prevailing view may be the root of the prenup problem, she added.

And many couples think that social contract isn’t necessarily permanent. From that perspective, Julia Rodgers thinks of a prenup as a necessary precaution, kind of like putting on a seat belt. “Not because you expect to get in a car accident, but because you just do it,” Rodgers said. “That’s how you protect yourself.”

Greg Smalley, vice president of marriage and family formation at Focus on the Family, agrees prenups could function like a seat belt, especially for couples who have personal businesses to steward or enter the marriage with significant amounts of debt. But he says a prenup won’t create a key element of relational safety: trust.

And many couples decide to get a prenup because they harbor doubts about the relationship or whether marriage can actually last for a lifetime. Smalley isn’t anti-prenup, though. He just opposes getting one out of fear. He cautions couples not to begin by saying, “Well, I don’t really see a marriage working out there, so we’ve got to have an exit strategy.”

Attorney Katelyn Parker says that in her 10 years of writing prenups, she has not had one client come back to her to litigate a divorce. “I do think there is a bit of a protective factor in getting a prenup,” Parker said. “They’re finding out, yes, we share the same values or no, we don’t.”

Talia Koren decided she wanted a prenup after watching her parents go through a messy divorce while she was in college.

“I never want to be in this situation,” Koren remembered thinking. “After living through [divorce], why wouldn’t you go into your marriage differently, or just one step ahead of it?”

But that assumption is the problem, said attorney Michelle Kniess. Prenups only come into full force when a marriage ends, which makes them “a contract between two people contemplating divorce” before they even get married.