Andrea Zevallos declared 2016 her “year of dating.” She was twenty-seven, working at Universal Studios Hollywood, the theme park, and determined to find love. She calculated it would take three dates a week. By December, she was losing hope. “It was exhausting,” she said. Then, while scrolling OkCupid, she noticed a “cute guy” with a “Hamilton” reference in his handle. His name was Alex Switzky, and like her he was a musical-theatre enthusiast and aspiring screenwriter. He was different from the other men she’d met. On their second date, he started planning a third. Zevallos “was used to L.A. guys cagey about any sort of calendar.” One day, Switzky called her. Accustomed to texts, she assumed that he was about to break up with her. “The most millennial response,” she recalled, laughing. At the time, Switzky was a tow-truck dispatcher. “I like the phone,” he said.
Five years later, Zevallos was enrolled in an M.F.A. program in screenwriting, and Switzky was working at Final Draft, a screenwriting-software company. One night, after watching “Ted Lasso” over a plate of tahini noodles, Switzky proposed. Zevallos said yes without hesitation, especially because they had already agreed to sign a prenuptial agreement if they married. “What if one of us gets lucky and sells a script?” she had pointed out. “Who would retain that I.P.?”
If you hear “newly engaged couple” and picture a movie montage of dress fittings and wrinkled brows over seating charts, you are missing an increasingly key scene—the moment when someone pops the latest question, Should we get a prenup? According to a 2023 Harris poll, twenty-one per cent of Americans say that they have signed one, up from only three per cent in 2010. Millennial and Gen Z respondents account for most of that uptick, at forty-seven and forty-one per cent, respectively. These figures are nearly impossible to verify—prenups are typically filed in court only in the event of a divorce. But a recent survey by YouGov, in the U.K., at least attitudinally confirms the findings: more than half of those under forty-five said that they want their future partner to sign a prenup.
It used to be that the prenup plot existed to threaten the marriage one. On “Sex and the City,” when Charlotte is advised to negotiate after being served a prenup that puts her on a vesting schedule, she grumbles, “Negotiate? I can’t even buy stuff on sale.” Now prenups show up across the cultural landscape as part of basic financial hygiene. Bethenny Frankel, formerly of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” appeared on the podcast “Call Her Daddy” and encouraged listeners to get a prenup, citing her ten-year divorce battle; one online comment read, “Louder for the people in the back,” with a clap emoji. Zola, a wedding-planning site, has a “How to Do a Prenup Party in Style” guide, suggesting you commemorate your prenup in a “leather-bound book engraved with both of your names and the date of signing.” It’s quite the vibe shift from the “Seinfeld” episode in which George asks his fiancée for a prenup in the hope that she’ll be so offended she’ll call off the wedding.
Today’s younger generations tend to favor easy exits. Earlier this year, the Times reported that Gen Z is skittish about opening bar tabs. “If we want to move somewhere else, it’s a lot harder to close out and then leave,” one reveller said. If divorce is the ultimate settling up, then it’s fortunate for this cohort that planning to part has never been simpler. The past few years have seen the rise of new apps such as HelloPrenup, Wenup, and Neptune that fast-track the process; the latter has couples discuss their finances with an A.I. chatbot before being matched, by algorithm, with a lawyer. In 2024, Libby Leffler, Sheryl Sandberg’s former chief of staff at Facebook (now Meta), publicly launched an online prenup company called First. There, users could at one point take a quiz with multiple-choice questions, including “When you think of the future, it looks like . . . ?” One possible answer: “Shared goals, different playlists.”
Zevallos and Switzky opted to use HelloPrenup after seeing it on an episode of “Shark Tank.” With the tagline “Love, Meet Logic,” the app, which charges five hundred and ninety-nine dollars per contract, asks standard questions about alimony and real estate but also offers cutting-edge optional clauses. The Social Image Clause sets a financial penalty for posting “humiliating or disrespectful” content about your ex online. With the Embryo Clause, you can decide how you want to allocate your frozen embryos and who will pay for storage fees. There’s also a clause that reimburses for home renovations—save your Lowe’s receipts. For research purposes, I created an account to draft a prenup ahead of my fake wedding to Harry Styles. There was a helpful tutorial: If we live in California but get married in Hawaii, which state should we write the prenup for? I guessed California. A friendly voice replied, “Correct. Ten points for Gryffindor!”
I’m a millennial, part of the generation that has famously spent our down payments for a house on avocado toast. What, I wondered, are people who don’t have much to begin with so worried about losing? “This generation just doesn’t trust marriage,” Kaylin Dillon, a thirty-eight-year-old financial adviser who calls herself the Prenup Coach, told me. Young couples come to her, she said, because she’s willing to strategize both joint and individual plans to grow wealth. After all, roughly twenty-five per cent of millennials are the children of divorce or separation. (By the mid-eighties, most states had adopted no-fault divorce laws, leading to a spike in divorce rates.) Adam Newell, the creator of a “Bravo-focused” YouTube channel called “Up and Adam!,” told me that his parents have been divorced eleven times between the two of them. “Your whole life is uprooted,” he said of the constant moves. Before marrying his husband, he wanted a prenup stating that he could keep his Palm Beach home. Though premarital assets are separate by law, they can become shared if you start, well, sharing them—in some states, for instance, by moving your spouse into a home you purchased solo and opting to significantly remodel together. (The legal term is “commingling.”)
Millennials and Gen Z-ers also account for nearly forty per cent and thirty per cent, respectively, of the country’s student-loan borrowers, who collectively hold $1.8 trillion in debt. Elizabeth Carter, a matrimonial-law professor at Louisiana State University who advises First, told me that if you pay off a pre-marriage student loan with funds earned during the marriage, without a prenup, you could be required to reimburse your spouse for a portion of those funds post-divorce. “I always liked to teach that around Halloween,” she said. “You know, something scary.”
Prenups have also benefitted from a rebrand. In the past, the word conjured visions of a wealthy man trying to sniff out a gold-digger by sealing off his assets. Now prenups are being pitched to young professional women as a way to take charge of their finances and insure better remuneration. Leffler, in an op-ed for Fortune, encouraged brides-to-be to lean in: “We would never launch a startup without equity agreements or join a company without understanding our compensation package. Why are any of us willing to say ‘I do’ without a clear financial framework?” The personal-finance influencer Vivian Tu, a.k.a. Your Rich BFF, posted a TikTok for her 2.7 million followers titled “What’s in my prenup (and my purse)!”
Clause by clause, the contemporary prenup offers a window into how money, the nature of work, and what even counts as an asset are in flux. (HelloPrenup has a blog post on crypto and one called “How to Protect Your Labubu.”) But can an online contract made without a lawyer (unless you pay extra) really anticipate all the plot twists of happily ever after? And is there a price to pay for all this frantic accounting, the Splitwise-and-Venmo-ization of marriage?
Switzky and Zevallos eventually decided that any I.P. they create individually would be listed as “separate property,” though they admitted that the divvying up has proved tricky day to day. “If one of us comes up with an idea, one of the first things that we do is ask, ‘O.K., who owns this?’ ” Switzky told me. “ ‘Is this mine? Is this yours? Ours?’ ”
This fall, I went to a recording studio in Chelsea to meet Julia Rodgers, the Boston-based C.E.O. and founder of HelloPrenup, who was in New York taping episodes of “The HelloPrenup Podcast,” which highlights trends in dating and in divorce law. Lauren Lavender, her C.M.O., greeted me in a light-blue sweatshirt that read “You had me at hello prenup.” We sat in a control room and watched Rodgers interview an attorney named Lisa Zeiderman about the impact of A.I. in divorce cases. Rodgers asked whether a relationship with an A.I. companion could violate an infidelity clause. “Yes, and you can absolutely subpoena messages with a chatbot,” Zeiderman replied. “I tell all my clients, ‘Be careful how much you start confiding.’ ”
The next morning, I met Rodgers for brunch in SoHo at Sadelle’s, one of the last places Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were photographed together before announcing their divorce. (Reportedly, there was no prenup.) Rodgers, who is thirty-eight, scanned the menu through tortoiseshell glasses before settling on avocado toast.
I had first seen Rodgers in a clip from “Shark Tank.” She and her co-founder, Sarabeth Jaffe, had pitched their startup in 2021 while wearing wedding dresses. Initially, it didn’t look as though they were going to get an “I do.” “People who want prenups are going to a lawyer,” Robert Herjavec, one of the show’s investors, or sharks, argued. Then Rodgers said the magic words: “Sixty trillion dollars.” She was referring to the Great Wealth Transfer, the unprecedented sums that baby boomers have begun passing down to their children—some estimates put the figure at more than a hundred and twenty trillion dollars—and want to protect. Millennials “go online,” she said. “They find HelloPrenup. They satisfy their parents. They create a valid prenuptial agreement, and they’re done.” She made it sound as seamless as Seamless.
Two other sharks, Nirav Tolia, the co-founder of Nextdoor, and Kevin O’Leary, a software tycoon, were convinced. “Marriage is the ultimate startup,” O’Leary told me. “Every startup has a business plan. Why isn’t marriage the same way?” Tolia and O’Leary received a thirty-per-cent stake in HelloPrenup. In exchange, Rodgers and Jaffe got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and millions of eyeballs. Now, at least according to internal data, one in five couples nationwide who initiate the prenup process do so through HelloPrenup; the company attracts five thousand users per month and says that it “safeguards” $26.7 billion in assets.
All founders have an origin story involving some intractable problem that they simply could not accept. For Rodgers, it was paper. Her mother was a matrimonial attorney, and Rodgers, as part of her childhood chores, organized stacks and stacks of financial-disclosure documents, including for couples getting prenups. There had to be a better way, she would later say. While attending Suffolk University Law School, she took a class called Lawyers and Smart Machines, on how to automate certain legal processes. “They taught us coding, which I did not excel in,” she admitted. That’s where Jaffe, an engineer, later came in, though the two eventually had their own split. (Rodgers preferred not to go into detail.)
Rodgers began developing her platform a few years after graduating from law school, just before her own wedding, to another lawyer. “We were the first couple to use HelloPrenup,” she said. “We were the test case.” She and her husband had met on Match.com—“old school,” she noted—and got married in 2019, in Newport, Rhode Island, at the picturesque Castle Hill Inn, overlooking Narragansett Bay. “Oh, my God, I had the best wedding. I had the best wedding,” she said.
Surveying the scene at Sadelle’s, we guessed where Affleck and Lopez might have sat. “It’s so crowded,” Rodgers observed. “Maybe in the back somewhere.” We started discussing the end of her own marriage. She and her husband had a baby in 2020, and the onset of the pandemic left them without family help. “He’s a patent litigator. He was very busy. I was working as an attorney, plus trying to build this business,” she said. “It was just, like, pressure on pressure on pressure.” They divorced in 2022.
But the COVID lockdown also primed HelloPrenup for success. No one wanted to visit a lawyer’s office. “Everything was becoming digitized in a really rapid way,” Rodgers said. By early 2021, roughly two and a half million women had left the labor force, in what became known as a she-cession. An article on HelloPrenup’s site sounded off: “Who was expected to stay home, watch the kids, become a pseudo-teacher, take care of household responsibilities and manage to still be at their work-from-home desk eight hours a day? Women.” Amid the ashes of girlboss feminism, Rodgers saw opportunity. “Prenups can solve for the motherhood penalty, because you can have an equalization clause,” she told me, explaining that a greater share of assets could compensate for a stay-at-home parent’s lost earning potential.
Rodgers refers to prenups as “the modern vow,” as they can govern finances and other major life decisions during marriage. Couples today want those choices to be made in the spirit of equality and backed by a contract. “They ask, ‘Are our in-laws going to move in? Are we going to buy a house or do the FIRE method and travel the world?’ ” FIRE is a life style popular with millennials and Gen Z marked by extreme saving and aggressive investment; it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.” An elder millennial, I had to look it up.
In February of 1990, it was reported that Donald and Ivana Trump were divorcing, after thirteen years of marriage. The news dominated the headlines. “They ran it before the story out of South Africa,” one outraged New Yorker told a local TV crew, referring to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison that week. People immediately began speculating about the spoils. “It’s not just a marriage on the line. It’s Donald Trump’s reputation as a dealmaker,” the journalist Richard Roth declared on CBS News. The couple had a prenup—and three “postnups”—allegedly granting Ivana around twenty million dollars, a fraction of Trump’s purported five-billion-dollar fortune. “IVANA BETTER DEAL,” read the cover of the Daily News. In a skit on “Saturday Night Live,” Jan Hooks, playing Ivana, balks at the prenup: “That contract is invalid. You have a mistress, Donald.” (There were rumors that Trump had been unfaithful with a Southern beauty queen named Marla Maples.) Phil Hartman, playing Trump, flips through the pages of the contract before saying, “According to Section 5, Paragraph 2, I’m allowed to have mistresses provided they are younger than you.”
The prenup largely held. Ivana got a measly fourteen million, a mansion in Greenwich, an apartment in Trump Plaza, and the use of Mar-a-Lago for one month a year. But it was understandable that the public thought that Trump’s entire empire might be at stake. In the eighties, prenups were usually in the news for getting tossed out. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Steven Spielberg was ordered to pay his ex-wife, the actress Amy Irving, a hundred million dollars after a judge voided their prenup, which had allegedly been scrawled on a scrap of paper. (Irving conveyed through a representative that “there was no prenup ever even discussed.”)
For much of the twentieth century, judges almost always refused to enforce prenups, fearing that they encouraged divorce and thus violated the public good. They were also concerned that measures to limit spousal support could lead to the financially dependent spouse—usually the woman—becoming reliant on welfare. Nonetheless, in the twenties, as divorce rates increased, potentially pricey payouts became a topic of national debate. As the sociologist Brian Donovan observes in the 2020 book “American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith,” a veritable “alimony panic” set in. To avoid paying any, men transferred deeds, created shell companies, and, in New York, set up “alimony colonies” in out-of-state locales such as Hoboken, where they wouldn’t be served with papers. Even though courts were equally loath to award alimony—“Judges publicly criticized alimony seekers as ‘parasites,’ ” Donovan writes—the perception that men were being fleeced persisted. I was reminded of the 1959 film “North by Northwest,” in which the executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) gets lured into a dangerous mission and protests by quipping, “I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives, and several bartenders dependent upon me.”
Ex-husbands longed for a legal remedy. There had been limited cases since the eighteenth century in which prenuptial contracts were recognized in the U.S., but these typically pertained to the handling of a spouse’s assets after death. The idea of a contract made in anticipation of divorce was considered morally repugnant. In an oft-cited case from 1940, a Michigan judge refused to uphold a prenup, emphasizing that marriage was “not merely a private contract between the parties.” You could not personalize it any more than you could traffic laws.
But by the early seventies there was no stemming the tide of marital dissolution: the divorce rate had doubled from just a decade earlier. In 1970, a landmark case, Posner v. Posner, was decided in Florida. Victor Posner, a prominent Miami businessman, was divorcing his younger wife, a former salesgirl. He asked the judge to honor the couple’s prenup, which granted Mrs. Posner just six hundred dollars a month in alimony. The judge, in his decision, acknowledged the cultural shift: “The concept of the ‘sanctity’ of a marriage as being practically indissoluble, . . . held by our ancestors only a few generations ago, has been greatly eroded in the last several decades.”
As prenups became more regularly enforced, popular culture took note. In a 1976 episode of the sitcom “The Jeffersons”—about a successful African American couple named George and Louise (played by Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford), who own a chain of dry-cleaning shops—a neighbor raises the topic of prenuptial agreements after hearing that the Jeffersons’ son is engaged. In 1981, the erotic thriller “Body Heat” updated the plot of “Double Indemnity” for the prenup era. In theory, the femme fatale (Kathleen Turner) could now just get a divorce, under no-fault laws, and live comfortably. “You’ll come out all right,” her lover (William Hurt) tells her, thinking of alimony. “No, I signed a prenuptial agreement,” she corrects him. “What?” he responds, before the movie gives “contract killer” a whole new meaning.
It was in the eighties, though, that prenups truly began to “trend up,” as Patricia Hennessey, a divorce attorney who teaches at Columbia Law School, told me. When I visited her office in midtown, I spied a copy of the DSM-IV in her bookcase and asked her about it. “Of course I have the DSM-IV—for custody cases,” she replied. Hennessey started her career as a matrimonial lawyer in 1987, working under the divorce attorney Harriet Newman Cohen, whose clients have included Tom Brady and Andrew Cuomo. It was an exciting time to be a divorce lawyer, depending on what excites you: “All kinds of things were beginning to change then, like property distribution,” Hennessey said.
In the early eighties, following protests by women’s organizations, New York State had passed a new law that declared that all marital assets would no longer go by default to the titleholder—typically the husband—but would have to be divided according to “equitable distribution.” Judges were given a number of factors to consider in determining what was equitable, including the contributions of a “homemaker” to the other spouse’s “career or career potential.” “It encapsulated the idea of marriage as an economic partnership,” Hennessey said. “The person who stayed home and took care of the kids so that the other person could go out and, as one judge put it, ‘slay the dragons of Wall Street’ was considered equal to the person bringing in the money. That was a real sea change. Women started getting a lot more of the marital assets.” Requests for prenups in New York skyrocketed.
But if equitable distribution has long been on the books, I asked Hennessey, why are prenups being touted now as a method to protect stay-at-home mothers? Wasn’t the law already on their side? She explained that the law is one thing; the interpretation of it is another. “I don’t think judges can stop themselves from seeing facts through the prism of their own experience,” she said. Questions can arise about how often stay-at-home parents—eighty per cent of whom are women—actually cooked or cleaned. In contrast, she observed, “nobody ever says about the husband, ‘He didn’t make enough money.’ ”
During the next few weeks, I sat in on Hennessey’s matrimonial-law class. I learned that in most European countries couples getting a marriage license check a box to choose a separate- or joint-property scheme. Nothing like that exists here. “You want to drive a car in New York State, they give you a big, big manual and then they test you,” Hennessey said. “You want to get married in New York, you pay thirty-five dollars to the clerk and they say, ‘Good luck.’ ”
One student asked whether saying “I won’t marry you if you don’t sign a prenup” counts as duress, which invalidates the contract. Many have attempted to challenge prenups on those grounds, Hennessey said—The wedding invitations had already gone out! But, she explained, “it’s only legal duress if the person says, ‘Sign this now or I will shoot you.’ It makes no sense to those of us who live in the world, because emotional duress is just as painful—if not worse.”
On a chilly afternoon, I made my way to Enso Cafe, in Park Slope, to meet Sol Lee, the creator of Neptune, the A.I.-assisted prenup app. I found Lee, who is thirty-four, sitting on a leather couch, wearing a beige fleece sweatshirt, straight-leg jeans, and neon-green sneakers—what she calls her “founder uniform.” Her brown hair fell just below her shoulders. She told me that her husband cuts it. “He says, ‘I’m hooking my talons in so you can’t leave me,’ ” she said. “Because I do prenups, we can kind of joke.”
Lee previously worked at Mastercard, Uber, and a V.C. fund, and also launched, then shuttered, a skin-care health-tech startup. She got the idea for Neptune, she said, while weighing whether to do a prenup herself. It occurred to her that this was a prime opportunity to explore A.I.’s capacity as “a tool for emotional navigation.” Lee said that three thousand users have conversed with the company’s chatbot since its soft launch, in 2024.
At the café, Lee wanted to show me a new analog feature—Fight Night, a card game to help couples brainstorm what they might want in a prenup. “It’s still in beta,” she warned. The cards fell into categories including debt, inheritance, pets. (Although prenups can’t legally dictate custody arrangements for human children, they can for the four-legged kind.) Lee read a sample card: “Money earned during the marriage is, one, fully shared; two, fully separate; or, three, a mix of fully shared and separate.” I held up three fingers to her one. “We’re not aligned!” I exclaimed. I confessed that I didn’t want to have to pay for someone’s overpriced gym membership. Some couples consider that a shared bill, Lee said. “Because I would benefit from looking at my spouse?” I joked. “Dead-ass,” she replied. I noticed Lee’s ring, a huge sparkler, and complimented her. “Thanks, it’s in the prenup,” she said. “It was important to my husband that it stay in his family.”
Prenup signers are making decisions on behalf of their future selves—who will get the house we might one day buy with money we don’t and might never have—with greater ease than I can decide what I want for dinner. But today’s work culture seems to invite a certain amount of projection. More than thirty-five per cent of both millennials and Gen Z-ers identify as entrepreneurs. Neptune features a “startup equity calculator” on its website. Many young people earn part of their income as content creators on TikTok or Instagram. One law firm in San Francisco has even begun marketing prenups to #tradwives; an ex-husband could, after all, argue that he was integral to the brand.
I often got the sense that prenups were aspirational. Recently, New York did an exposé on non-celebrities who require their dates to sign N.D.A.s, to telegraph their own importance. Were prenups a version of that? If you can’t have Kanye West’s money, you can nonetheless shout, “We want prenup!,” a line from “Gold Digger.” Lee told me that one couple on Neptune included a clause stating that if the marital pool reached five million they’d both waive spousal support. “I really like that, because it’s a positive incentive you’re creating in what’s a negative document,” she said. One of Wenup’s clients told me that she was encouraged to consider a prenup, in part, after listening to the audiobook of “I Will Teach You to Be Rich,” by Ramit Sethi.
I wasn’t unsympathetic. Who wouldn’t, amid all the current recession indicators, crave some modicum of control over one’s future financials? But there was a thin line, I noticed, between managing and manifesting. I spoke to a New York-based theatre actress in her thirties who works part time at Lululemon. Earlier this year, she married a finance guy. At her suggestion, they signed up for HelloPrenup. She wanted any property purchased in the marriage to be in the name of the person who paid for it. This surprised me as, by her own admission, that person was likely to be her husband. “He’s the breadwinner in his, like, hedge-fund job,” she conceded. “But I’m an actress, so there’s a chance, if I get a movie or show or whatever, I can make a lot of money.” She also insisted on an infidelity clause that initially came with a fifty-thousand-dollar penalty per act of cheating. Her then fiancé responded, “You don’t even have fifty thousand dollars.” That didn’t matter, she told me: “I need it to hurt.”
Sharon Thompson, a professor of family law at Cardiff University, in Wales, began researching prenups in 2010, when the Supreme Court first gave them “decisive weight” across England and Wales. That year, the court upheld a prenup between a German paper-company heiress and her ex-husband, an Oxford researcher making thirty thousand pounds a year. Hoping to anticipate what impact the case would have on British culture, Thompson travelled to New York City to interview divorce lawyers, conducting a kind of anthropology of the prenup.
Thompson observed that prenup signers could suffer from “optimism bias.” Though most have heard that the divorce rate is fifty per cent, she said, “for themselves, they’ll say, ‘No, we’re never breaking up.’ ” Optimism bias could lead people to agree to unfavorable terms, as in the case of a woman who signed an especially stingy prenup. When her lawyer, whom Thompson interviewed, asked the groom-to-be what his client was getting out of it, he answered, “Marrying a doctor!”
Similarly, in a 1998 article titled “Bargaining in the Shadow of Love: The Enforcement of Premarital Agreements and How We Think About Marriage,” the American legal scholar Brian Bix wrote about the limits of rationality in negotiating prenups: “Society should be skeptical about the ability of the earlier self to judge the interests and preferences of the later self.” Bix’s prescription for drafting a clear-eyed prenup was, perhaps unsurprisingly, to have each party employ a good lawyer, someone who has seen every way a marriage can fail, who has heard more sad stories than can fit inside the Country Music Hall of Fame.
I flew to Tennessee to meet Rose Palermo, the so-called divorce queen of Nashville, whose clients have included Wynonna Judd and Billy Ray Cyrus. Palermo had recently handled Cyrus’s split from an Australian singer-songwriter named Firerose. Firerose received no spousal support but was entitled to royalties for the songs that she and Cyrus co-wrote, including “After the Storm,” a ballad about overcoming hard times with the help of the right partner. It was released in March of 2024; come May, Cyrus would file for divorce. Behind Palermo’s desk, I noticed a signed handwritten letter from Tammy Wynette. “But I thought she stood by her man,” I said. “She did,” Palermo replied. “About four times.”
Palermo began practicing law in the seventies. Back then, she specialized in protecting up-and-coming country-music stars from predatory contracts or fraudsters. “People would take their money, promise fame, then leave town,” she recalled. Divorce law wasn’t a big leap; here, too, were people who’d been banking on a fairy tale.
I told Palermo about some of my reporting. Prenups, I kept hearing, were a way to take some of the emotion and vitriol out of divorce. (“I don’t know how I will feel about future Alex,” Zevallos told me. “But I want to look out for him now, because right now I love him.”) Was it true that they helped ease the pain? “No, no, no!” Palermo objected, laughing so hard that I thought she was going to knock a pit-bull paperweight right off her desk. “Someone should tell my clients that,” she said. “They keep writing divorce albums.” She stopped to text Kacey Musgraves, a client whose divorce album, “Star-Crossed,” came out in 2021, to tell her that she was being interviewed by a journalist from New York. Musgraves texted back, “You’re iconic.”
Then Palermo got serious. “You’re hoping when you have this prenup you’re going to eliminate all the arguments.” But, she added, “if you have one person that’s ended up being a bigger star than the other, there’s a lot of hostility. It’s ‘You’re going to have all this, and I’m not going to have anything, and I made you what you are.’ ” There was no contract that could save you from a broken heart or your own broken dreams. I asked Palermo if she’d heard a song by the country singer Nicolle Galyon called “prenup.” It’s about a couple with nothing who jokingly consider getting one—“You’d get half of my Christian college loans / Half of my first Nokia phone.” I played it for Palermo. After the bridge—“Ain’t gonna sign no dotted line / What’s mine is yours and yours is mine”—Palermo said, “I love it,” but she didn’t sound convinced.
“Would you get a prenup?” nearly everyone asked when I said I was working on this story. Previously I would have said no, because I’m not a Kardashian. The apps that charge five hundred and ninety-nine dollars a pop aim to bring prenups to the masses, but is that whom they really serve? Prenups essentially exist to override laws that split assets equally, or at least equitably; they generally favor the spouse who has more. (When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement, one X user joked, “that prenup is about to be longer than any book travis kelce has ever read.”) James Sexton, a divorce attorney who founded Trusted Prenup, another app, is a frequent guest of manosphere podcasters such as Andrew Huberman and Andrew Schultz. Sexton accuses his app competitors of being all “girlboss marketing,” and he told me that, despite efforts to democratize prenups, the stereotype remains true: “It’s still more often than not the Goldman Sachs guy marrying a yoga teacher who wants to protect his money.” Did prenups actually have anything to offer the average couple?
I took my questions to Alexia Korberg, the executive director of Her Justice, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation for women and gender minorities living in poverty in New York City, with about six thousand clients annually. Since 2018, it has run the Financial Freedom Project, which supports women facing economic crisis, including as a result of divorce. Korberg told me that those living in poverty are typically splitting not assets but debts. In many cases, it’s “coerced debt”—the result of credit-card applications filled out by a spouse without a partner’s knowledge, for instance.
I expected that Korberg and their colleague Anna Maria Diamanti, Her Justice’s supervising attorney, would regard prenups as a frivolous luxury item. “They’re a privatized solution to a social problem,” I offered, thinking of the motherhood penalty. They didn’t disagree, but they told me that younger generations might be seeking out prenups because there’s greater awareness now of the cost of litigation, both financial and emotional. Even if a prenup only re-states the law, it can neutralize a vengeful ex. “If my prenup says, you know, My 401(k) coming into the marriage is my own, my house that I inherited from my family is my own, then you’re not going to risk having to litigate it later, or litigating it might be much cheaper,” Diamanti said. And litigation, she observed, can become a form of abuse. She sees some partners “file motion after motion just to wear down their victim, just to force them to try to walk away with less.”
Korberg noted that a prenup is educational. “It compels you to learn what is the law in the state of New York, so you don’t have these expectations that you’re entitled to this or to that.” It’s true that, when I spoke to the Neptune chatbot, I learned that debt taken on by a spouse, in that person’s name, could become my responsibility if I “benefited from the debt.” I asked the chatbot what that meant. It replied that, if my partner took out a car loan but I also drove the vehicle, I was benefitting. I didn’t know this, despite having been both married and divorced in the state of New York.
What was the verdict—were prenups good or bad? I had heard both sides, the prosecution and the defense, and had pored over all the evidence only to conclude, well, it depends. Was I spending too much time with lawyers? Definitely, but can anyone really speak generally about a contract that was created to individualize? We sign prenups in pen, but our lives are written in pencil; plans can easily get erased, vows smudged to the point of illegibility. “That’s why older people cry at weddings,” one divorce attorney told me. “Because we know that young couples don’t know what they’re getting into.” I did see the value of at least considering a prenup. The conversation alone is a kind of personality test. Are you about to marry a person who wants to be reimbursed for the wallpaper you put in the nursery, who doesn’t want to help you pay off your student loans, who wants the ring back? Or does this person look at you and think, I want to give this woman everything. ♦
An earlier version of this article used an incorrect pronoun for Alexia Korberg.
