It’s no secret that planning a wedding is a deeply involved process: there are cakes to sample, flowers to purchase, dresses to try on, and seating charts to mastermind. In recent years, however, more and more people have added another step to the process: signing a prenuptial agreement.
In 2024, 50% of Americans said they supported the use of prenups, according to an Axios-Harris Poll survey. The number represented a sharp increase from even the previous year, when only 42% of Americans supported the concept.
“With my generation and the younger generation, the notion of a prenup is changing,” lawyer Morgan Mazor told Quartz.
Mazor is a partner at Bender and Crane, an entirely women-run law firm, that deals with matrimonial law, typically for affluent clients. “We are getting more young professionals, in fields that have huge potential for growth, who may not have significant wealth right now, but are forward thinking in terms of how their wealth might grow.”
Mazor, who is an advocate for more couples getting prenups, argues that the process of creating the agreement allows for couples to better understand their soon-to-be-shared finances: including pre-existing debt, attitudes about spending, and inherited family assets.
Mazor’s young clients are not unique among their generational cohorts: while only about 20% of married couples have prenups, that number more than doubles for Millennials and Gen Z-ers. Forty-one percent of engaged or married Gen Z-ers and 47% of engaged or married Millennials say they have entered into prenups, according to Harris Poll.
Even among young people who are hesitant about signing prenups, Mazor notes that the process can often be clarifying or revelatory, if they go through with it.
“I had a young couple, in their early 30s, and they were both professionals with graduate degrees,” she said. “But when the client approached her fiancé, he was hesitant, and said ‘I don’t want anything from you.’”
Mazor’s client agreed with her partner, saying that she also didn’t want anything from him, but wanted to be sure their lives would go back to normal after a hypothetical divorce. But when the couple began to review their agreement, it became clear that their financial expectations were very different.
“His expectations were of an economic partnership – he thought he should have certain things, despite saying he didn’t want anything. He told me after they had the conversation, it really opened the dialogue about what their economic partnership would look like in their relationship going forward.”
Valerie Galinskaya, the head and co-founder of the Merrill Center for Family Wealth (BAC-0.43%), which assists approximately 350 families with high net worths navigate the issues specific to those with extreme amounts of wealth, told Quartz that for people who are new to discussing prenups, it often helps to make the context and the purpose of doing so clear.
When sitting down with one couple, Galinskaya explained that she tried to “reframe the conversation” to ensure that, “they viewed a prenuptial agreement not just as a mechanism to protect assets, but also as a mechanism for two young people to sit down and really have an honest conversation to ensure they’re both protected and understand how they’re going to approach money in their family.”
Aside from the long term benefits of better understanding one another’s finances, Mazor also noted that prenups can protect people with more nuanced financial situations. In couples where one partner has children from a previous relationship, for example, a prenup can prevent future disputes about which aspects of an estate belong to a spouse versus adult children.
Additionally, in New York, prenups require that both partners disclose all their assets – which can be especially clarifying if one person is inheriting additional assets from their family.
“We plan for a lot of bad things in our life,” Mazor said. “People get life insurance. People make wills. You’re not expecting to die – you’re not hoping that’s going to happen. But you want to have something in place, just in case it does. And this is just another tool to protect yourself, protect your spouse, and protect your future children.”
Mazor, who also works with people who are in the process of getting divorced, said that when she meets with clients she emphasizes the pragmatic reasons behind getting a prenup, before reminding them how exciting and happy the near future will be.
“You’re going to finish writing the prenup and put it in a drawer and never look at it again,” she said. “And I hope to never see you again, because you’re going to live a happy life.”
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