How the prenup became mainstream

Prenuptial agreements, long exclusive to celebrities and the ultra-rich, have trickled down to the rest of us.

A 2023 Axios/Harris poll found that half of US adults say they’re open to signing a prenup, and that younger people are driving the trend. 

Forty-one percent of Gen Z and 47 percent of millennials who are engaged or have been married said they entered a prenup, according to the poll.

There might be several things driving the trend: new apps that make it easier and cheaper to draw up prenups, influencers touting the value of prenups on social media and in podcasts, and young people being more likely to be the children of divorced parents and therefore more realistic about the possibility that their marriage won’t last.

The New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Wilson did a deep dive into the world of prenups, speaking to divorce lawyers, married couples, and others to better understand why prenups are growing in popularity. She shared some of her findings with Today, Explained host Noel King.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What got you thinking and writing about prenups?

I just noticed them all over. You’ve seen prenups on TV shows like Sex and the City or reality shows like Real Housewives. And in those contexts it makes sense because we’re talking about people with a lot of money. The stereotype is that you’ve got a rich guy and he wants to figure out a way to screw his gold-digging younger partner out of her share of the assets. 

But I started seeing prenups appear on shows like Love Is Blind. There was a contestant who worked in HR and she wanted her fiance to sign a prenup, and neither of them really had much money. And I expected the conversation on social media to be sort of making fun of this a little bit. Like, “Come on girl, like, we don’t have any money. We’ve blown it all on avocado toast.” But everyone’s saying, “Absolutely, this is just financial hygiene. This is just being responsible.” 

All over TikTok, there were these personal finance influencers, often female. There’s one who goes by the handle Your Rich BFF, her name’s Vivian Tu, and she had a viral video that said, “What’s in my prenup and in my purse?“ It was a very cutesy conversation about prenups. And she got a lot of support from people online saying, “Yes, every woman should push for a prenup.” 

And also just the numbers of people getting prenups have just risen dramatically. So there was a 2023 Axios/Harris poll that showed that 40 percent of millennials and Gen Z claimed that they had signed a prenup. That number struck a lot of the lawyers I spoke to as way too high, although they all told me that they have seen a big uptick in younger couples asking for prenups. So I just wanted to dig into this phenomenon. 

You have laid out what my understanding of a prenup always was, which is, there’s a rich guy, he’s coming to the marriage with all the money, the woman has no or less money. And so the idea is basically, “I’m going to protect myself from this woman just in case,” a very gendered scenario that I just laid out but, I also think, rooted in some truth. You said it was a woman on Love Is Blind who was like, “I want a prenup,” and she didn’t have money. So what are the differences that we’re seeing here?

You’re right that there is a really big gendered shift. One of the things I researched for this piece are these apps that have just kind of proliferated across the market. Many of their founders are women. One is Hello Prenup. One is called First and that was actually launched by Sheryl Sandberg’s former chief of staff at Facebook, a woman named Libby Leffler. And she absolutely has used very much like “lean in” kind of language around prenups. 

The same way that Sheryl Sandberg was telling women, “You’ve got to negotiate your salary,” now her protege is saying, “Well, you should renegotiate your marriage contract. You would never take on a new job without knowing your compensation package. Why would you enter a marriage without the same know-how?”

I think that one thing that’s really important here to understand is we’re talking about a particular generation, millennials and Gen Z, who are used to thinking about divorce and separation. Twenty-five percent of millennials are the children of divorce or separation. So they’re coming to their new relationships with a certain amount of trauma. And so there was a little bit of that, but not nearly as much as you would think. I think that this generation is just a bit more realistic, that “happily ever after” or “until death do we part” are not realistic ways to think about marriage.

When you were learning about the details of people’s prenups, what surprised you? What really raised your eyebrows or made you go, “Oh damn, they really thought of something there”?

Companies like Hello Prenup, they are offering all sorts of new clauses. So something called a social media image clause, what that does is you can, in your prenup, say for any disparaging content about your ex that you post on social media, you have to pay a financial penalty. And I think that’s because we’ve seen people’s careers be affected by information about what happened in their relationship becoming public. 

So it’s not totally irrational. Millennials are also getting married later. So things like IVF have come up. Hello Prenup also has an embryo clause where you can decide how you want to, for instance, divide embryos in the event of a divorce, and even who’s going to pay for storage fees. 

Even [with] classic clauses like the infidelity clause, you have to be very particular about how you define infidelity these days. I mean, we’re living in an era of ethical non-monogamy. More people are thinking differently about what infidelity is. I interviewed for the piece a divorce lawyer who said that relationships with an AI chatbot, those could conceivably violate an infidelity clause. And she actually said that she’s already telling her clients to be careful about how much, for instance, you even divulge to some of these chatbots because she said you can actually subpoena those conversations and they can come up in a divorce, but also in custody. 

So you heard all of the arguments for prenups, and I imagine, you found some of them very convincing. What are the arguments against prenups?

I think on one level, it feels like people are giving up on a broader kind of social repair to the way that divorce happens now. It’s a privatized solution. 

I also think these are really complicated legal documents, and I don’t think that everyone knows what they’re doing when they press these buttons on an app. For instance, I interviewed a woman who is a theater actress. She does not make a lot of money. She picks up shifts as a cater waiter and at Lululemon, and she married a finance bro, and she insisted on a prenup. She wanted whoever paid the down payment on an apartment or house and covered most of the financials that they would get that property in the event of a divorce. And I thought, what? Why would you do that if you’re the lesser-earning partner? And she said, well, what if I book a show? What if I get a movie?

I also think that there’s a lot of manifesting that can happen in these prenups. I spoke to a researcher who studied something called the optimism bias, and she said that prenup signers suffer from this. So what does that mean? It means that when someone says, you and your partner, do you think you’ll ever get divorced? You’re going to say no. And that actually can impact what you get in a prenup, what you think that you want in a prenup, because you might agree to less favorable terms. You might even ask for less favorable terms because you want to show your partner that you’re not in it for the money. 

I do wonder sometimes what it means to go into the messiness of marriage, thinking so much about “what’s mine, what’s yours?” I do wonder how that works on a day-to-day basis when you’re living complicated lives and things go awry. And life is so unpredictable and I felt really often that the people I was interviewing knew that and they were almost using the prenup to create some certainty.