Today, Explained - You need a prenup

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

More young people are insisting on prenups. They’re not just for millionaires and celebrities anymore. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers and Jenny Lawton, fact checked by Andrea López-Cruzado, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. Photo by Chantal CASANOVA/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My mother was surprised that we were getting a pre-up. She didn't, in her mind, it wasn't something that, you know, people like us got, like people of our income range would be getting. She's like, it's for the billionaires. It's the daddy war bucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So she was like, what are you doing? I don't understand. Parents famously just don't understand. But here it today explained, we have also been wondering what's going on with pre-ups. Data shows that many younger couples, so think Gen Z and millennials, are signing these agreements before they get married. Even couples that make more or less the same amount of money come from similar financial backgrounds and don't have many assets to protect. So is romance dead or is it just evolving? Coming up, we ask, you tell.

Been engaged before and it fell apart and after that I decided there's no way I would ever get married without some sort of financial agreement. We do have a pre-up. The point was just to sort of make sure that should we ever get separated or divorced, that what each of us came into the relationship with and what each of us may inherit in the future stays with the individual rather than becoming joint assets that get split. After we were sort of engaged for a year, he sort of said, I need you to sign a pre-nop. And I was like, oh, okay. And I had come from a pretty wealthy family, and he had worked really hard for his money. And I sort of thought, is it for me or for you?

And so we went through it. I never really thought about getting a pre-nup, but she really wanted one. She is worried that someday I would, you know, take her parents. home or something like that. My husband had been married previously and he went through a divorce, obviously. And I wanted to give him some assurances that, you know, if our marriage ever did dissolve, that he wouldn't be left in a lurch because I was angry and bitter at him. Angry and bitter made us laugh.

We called this caller back. I'm Kara. I am 36 years old. and I work in supply chain logistics. I'm Gregory, I'm 35 years old, and I work in software engineering slash game development. How long ago did you guys get married? So we got married back in December of 2024 on a Friday the 13th. So did you know it was going to be the Friday the 13th?

Or was it like, oh, this just happens to be the Friday when everyone can come? No, we leaned in. We wanted it. We wanted to be Friday the 13. For either of you, be honest, was there any doubt about getting married? I didn't have any doubts, but I know that divorce is like a really common thing. And my husband had been married previously. And obviously, you know, he ended up getting a divorce. So, you know, I went in with both eyes open that, you know, no matter how happy things are, things can end.

You know, so there was like some, you know, what ifs. But she's a good partner, and I didn't foresee anything happening at least anytime soon. So, yeah, just kind of went with it. You guys ultimately ended up signing a prenuptial agreement, a pre-nup. Whose idea was it? It was mine. After my husband's divorced, you know, there's like a lot of financial stressors. And it was a big legal headache for him that I knew had left him maybe a little gun-shy.

And so I wanted to let him know that I'm totally. willing and able to sign a pre-up. It was already kind of in my mind, but the fact that she brought it up, that definitely helped. What were the financial stressors after your first divorce? Like, what happened? It was kind of a... I just said first divorce. I'm sorry.

Oh, no. I didn't even catch that. You guys, Friday the 13th, you started it. Okay, maybe retake. What were the financial stressors after your divorce? What happened? So, a few different things. We bought a house together, so the house was kind of the biggest financial expense.

Unfortunately and fortunately, home prices had grown since I purchased the house. So I had to end up getting a loan for half the equity of the house to pay her. So I ended up taking like a $140,000 loan out. There was separate alimony that I had to pay. That was like an additional 25-ish. thousand. And then there's this other separate debt that was also included. It was like another 20. So there's a huge, very large financial hit, I would say. There's a lot of, you know, okay, I don't want to go through this again kind of thing. Yeah. So definitely the pre-up was important to me. I'm going to ask you guys a personal question, okay? Are you guys rich? Does either one of you come from a ton of money? Like the classic pre-up situation is somebody in this relationship is kind of coming into it with a ton of money and somebody else is coming into it with much less.

Is there any imbalance here? I wouldn't say that there's a huge imbalance. And when we were growing up, neither of us came from a financially well-to-do background. And we both went to school. We developed our careers. And I would say we're doing pretty good now. Both of our careers have given us stock options. Nothing crazy.

Again, a modest amount of money. We both have 401Ks. that we've been saving into. I've been saving into my 401k since I was working part-time jobs at grocery stores. So we both have some assets. Gregory is definitely the higher income earner in our relationship, but I would say I'm not too far off. So when we get down to brass tax, a pre-in-up, as I understand it, says, in the event of a divorce, I'm going to get this, you're going to get this. So what's in it? What are you guys actually agreeing to? do or divvy up.

A lot of it's like the things we came into the relationship with are considered ours, right? So like, you know, I got the house. You know, she has her own accounts, our own for our own case. So, you know, it's all separate. But we also decided, you know, because we're trying to start a business together. So like that's 50-50. When you let other people know if indeed you did that you had a pre-nup, did you feel any stigma attached to it?

And I was talking about this with one of my really good friends. I guess I had kind of forgotten to mention to her that I'd gotten a pre-up. I mean, it's not something that really comes up in conversation. So when I was telling her, and I was like talking about it recently, she was like really shocked. She's like, you got a pre-up? And this friend is unmarried. She was like really like surprised. She's like, I don't understand.

Like, I know you guys, you don't have buckets of cash lying around your house. Like, why did you get a pre-up? But that's my unmarried friend. My married friends, and we're all about the same age, we're all in, like, our mid-30s, early to mid-30s. All my married friends do actually have pre-ups. They were the ones that I got the idea from. One argument that I've seen about pre-ups is that it takes, let me put this delicately, because you guys have not been married for very long.

Like, it takes some of the romance out of the idea that you're going to be, together forever because you're, what's the word? You're like hedging your bets, kind of. Is there any part of the argument that this is just like not romantic that resonates with you at all? I would say yes, but there's also a certain romantic part about it being able to talk to your partner and decide on, you know, how things will be split up in the future. Talking to them, like, about that is a pretty big deal, I think. So I'm not going to recommend anybody set up a by going over a pre-up, like, let's pop a bottle of champagne and, you know, break out the pre-up. I don't think it's romantic in that sense at all. But it is romantic in its own way. You know,

I saw what the stressors of the divorce had on Gregory. And I know that he didn't go into his first marriage thinking that it was going to end in divorce. I don't think anybody goes into a marriage expecting it to end in divorce. But I wanted to let him know that I'm in it. I'm in You know, I'm not here for the money. I want to be with you because I love you because I want to make a life with you and grow old with you and plan a future with you. So I'll lay it all out here. Here's all the finances and let's sign this paperwork together. That's Kara and Gregory in Florida. Thanks to them and thanks to all of you who called. Coming up, what is behind the rise in pre-ups? At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation. of good health from the big milestones to the quiet winds.

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Drive design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Do that, do that, do that with acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with acrobat. Poin-ups is what brings us together today. Explained. My name is Jennifer Wilson. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker.

What got you thinking and writing about pre-ups? I just noticed them kind of, you know, all over. You know, you've seen pre-ups on TV shows like Sex and the City. Well, this all looks pretty normal. Charlotte wasted no time having a lawyer look over the papers. Normal. We haven't even gotten married yet, and already we're talking about divorce. A lot of people do pre-ups these days.

Marriage is supposed to be about love and happiness. And the merging and protection of assets. Or, you know, reality shows like real housewives. So speaking of the wedding, what happened? I wanted to get your opinion and see if you think we should explore getting a pre-up. The fuck. 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, you know, screw his, like, gold-digging younger partner out of her share of the assets. But I started seeing pre-ups appear on shows like, you know, love is blind. I think I would be, like, most comfortable with just, like, having separate accounts. Even, like, a pre-up. You know, there was a contestant who worked in HR, and she wanted her fiancé to sign a pre-up. And, you know, neither of them really had much money. Worst case scenario, it's just like people leave with what they came. with and like figuring out like how to split assets and stuff like that before it becomes the thing,

you know? And I expected, you know, the conversation on social media to be sort of, you know, making fun of this a little bit. Like, come on, girl. Like, we, we don't have any money. What aspect? We've blown it all on avocado toast. But, you know, everyone's saying, absolutely, you know, this is just financial hygiene.

This is just being responsible. Here's why Devin from Love is Blind should definitely take his fiance, Virginia, up on her offer for a pre-up. What's crazy to me is, God forbid, somebody would want to protect themselves in case things go wrong. But you literally met this person three weeks ago. You're getting married to them on a show. Why would a pre-up not make sense? You know, and then 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 II. And she had a, you know, a viral video that said, What's in my pre-up and in my purse? You know, it's like sort of a very cutesy conversation about pre-ups. And she got a lot of, you know, support from, you know, people online saying, yes, every woman should push for a pre-up. And that's the whole point of a pre-up,

making joint financial decisions that make sense for your relationship because it's the most loving thing you can do. And also just the numbers of people getting pre-nup. have just risen dramatically. So there was a 2023 Harris poll that showed that 40% of millennials and Gen Zers claimed that they had signed a pre-up. Now, that number struck a lot of the lawyers I spoke to is way too high, although they all told me that they have seen a big uptick in younger couples asking for pre-ups. So I just wanted to dig into this phenomenon. You have laid out what my understanding of a pre-up always was, which is, There's a rich guy. He's coming to the marriage while the money. The woman has no or less money. And so the idea is basically like, I'm going to protect myself from this woman just in case. 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 preen up. And she didn't have money. So what are the differences that we're seeing here?

So 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, you know, proliferated across the market. Many of them, their founders are women. So one is HelloPrenup. Hello prenup is the first digital platform to allow couples to create a prenuptial agreement in hours instead of months and for a fraction of the cost without ever leaving their couch. One is called First and that was actually launched by

Cheryl Sandberg's former chief of staff at Facebook, a woman named Libby Leffler. And, you know, she absolutely has used very much like a lean-in kind of language around pre-ups, you know, the same way that Cheryl Sandberg was telling women, you've got to negotiate your salary. Now, you know, her protege is saying, well, you know, you should renegotiate your marriage contract. I worry that are people like fully reading what the agreement says. Are they negotiating? Always negotiate. You know, you would never, you would never, you know, take on a new job without knowing, you know, your compensation package. This is a quote. You know, why would you, 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 Genzi, who are used to thinking about divorce and separations. And separations. You know, 25% of millennials are the children of divorce or separation. So they're coming to their new relationships with, you know, a certain amount of trauma. And so, you know, 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. Wow. That, you know, that happily ever after, you know, till death do we part are not realistic ways to think about marriage.

I wonder about something. When you were learning about the details of people's pre-ups, what surprised you? Like 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 like a social media image clause. And what that does is you can, in your pre-ups, say, for any disparaging content, about your ex that you post on social media. You have to pay a financial penalty. And you can set that financial penalty. And it's like per post. You can sort of say, you know, $10,000, $20,000 per post. And I think that's because, you know, 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. So Helop pre-nup 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 like who's going to pay for, you know, storage fees. Even something like classic, classic clauses, like the infidelity clause. You know, you have to be very particular about how you define infidelity these days. I mean, we're living in an era of, you know, ethical non-monogamy.

More people are thinking differently about what infidelity is. But also, you know, I interviewed for the piece a divorce lawyer who said that, you know, relationships with an AI chatbot. Those could conceivably violate an infidelity cause. And she actually said that she's already telling her clients to be careful, you know, about how. 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, you know, in a divorce but also in custody. So, I mean, these pre-ups are definitely modernizing. But, you know, there have always been weird pre-up closet.

I mean, the thing is, you can put anything in a pre-up. You know, I spoke to a divorce attorney who had a couple and they wanted something in the pre-up that. that there would be a financial penalty if their BMI went over a certain amount. And they both wanted it. And she said, look, no judge is going to enforce this. And they said, we don't care. We want the motivation. I want to ask you about the question of inheritance because we've covered on this show

before the great wealth transfer. You know what this is. Yes. It's like millennials and Gen Z years are going to inherit like trillions of dollars from their boomer parents over the next decade or 20 years. And I would imagine that the great wealth transfer and younger people expecting to get something from it actually may be juicing the pre-nup industry as well. It's like I know that I'm inheriting an enormous amount of money and I want to kind of bulletproof myself. Do you see that playing into it at all?

Absolutely. And, you know, as much as the story was about, you know, why millennials and Jen Ziers really want a pre-nup, the truth is that in a lot of cases, they're paying. parents who are pushing them to get pre-ups. And I talked to a lawyer who teaches a class in Divorce Law, Columbia. She actually let me sit in for a portion of the class. And she said that, you know, she does a lot of pre-ups. And she said sometimes she's in the middle of a conversation. And she says, please just put your mother on. You can just tell this isn't coming from you. Yeah. Oh, my God. Okay. So you, you, you. heard all of the arguments for pre-ups. And I imagine you found some of them very convincing.

What are the arguments at the end of the day do you think against pre-ups? So, I mean, I think on one level, to me, it feels like people giving up on a kind of broader kind of social repair to the way that divorce happens now. You know, it's a, it's a private. I think also 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, you know, a theater actress. She does not make a lot of money. She, you know, picks up shifts as a cater waiter and at Lulu Lemon. And she married a finance bro. And she insisted on a pre-up and she wanted whoever paid the down payment on like an apartment or house

and you know and covered most of the financials like that they would get that property in the event of a divorce and I thought what why would you you know why would you do that if you're the the lesser earning partner and um she said well you know what if I book a show what if I get a movie Oh. And so I think, yeah, and so I also think that there's a lot of manifesting that can happen in these pre-ups. I spoke to a researcher who studies something called the optimism bias. And she said that pre-up signers suffer from this. So what does that mean? It means that you can hear that the divorce rate is 50%. But when someone says, and you and your partner, do you think you'll ever get divorced? You're a person. You're you're going to say no. Yeah. And that actually can impact what you get in a pre-up, what you think that you want in a pre-up, 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 does it mean to kind of go into the messiness of marriage thinking so much about what's mine, what's yours. I do wonder sometimes, what does it mean to kind of go into the messiness of marriage thinking so much about what's mine, what's yours. I do. I do. I do you mean, do wonder, like, how does that work 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 know that and they were almost using the pre-nup to create some certainty.

Jennifer Wilson is a staff writer with The New Yorker. Today's show is produced by Avasi artsy and edited by Jolie Myers and Jenny Lawton. It was engineered by Patrick Boyden, David Tattachore, and Andrea Lopez-Cruzzado is our fact-checker. The rest of our team, Hadi, Maudi, Mawaddy, Miles Bryan, Peter Balin-Rosen, Danielle Hewitt, Kelly Wessinger, Ariana Espudu, Dustin DeSoto, Estad Herndon, and Sean Ramosfirm. Amina Elsadis, a supervising editor, and Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today, explained, is distributed by WNYC. It's part of the Voxmedia podcast network podcast.

Podcast.network, podcast.boxmedia.com for more. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.