What are your feelings toward "pre-nuptials"?

Get them.

How do you feel about airbags? Obviously I don’t want or plan to get into an accident, but I sure I hope I have one if it happens.

I didn’t have one for my first marriage and everything worked out ok during the settlement. I plan to have one the next time around. I want to make sure my daughter has what I want her to get in case the marriage fails. Plus, my current SO is a little more stingy than my first husband was, so I want to have protection… just in case.

On a first date I bring this up all the time.
I’m for it

It should be part of the legal process of getting married.

I don’t think ninjaxmarc has ever had a second date.

I don’t really care about possessions that much. And shit, we can cut the 40$ worth of empty beer cans and my iMac in half if you want. Take half of what I have, that is just less stuff I have to move.

I fully believe in them. A marriage, as my sister wisely told me on the eve of her divorce, legally has nothing to do with love, and legally everything to do with finances. Not very romantic, but true.

Emotionally, I am not so crazy about them. Practically, though, in this day and age with 50%+ divorce rates, and people having more assets before they get married, they make sense. I like vectorul’s idea, which would remove any stigma from them of lack of trust.

I believe in them. Ive worked hard for what Ive gotten over the years and I dont need to split it with anyone.

@thecoot exactly!

I think it’s wise to consider it. At least, you should both look at what the laws are where you marry, so you know what you will get if you don’t. If the default law doesn’t match what you want, then an agreement makes sense. Making a clear agreement based on what you two want, that represents what you are doing, makes perfect sense.

@johnpowell at least I still have my own possessions.

What kind of partner is worth loving, if you don’t trust him/her to be fair in a possible (hopefully not so possible) situation of divorce.

Showing your partner that you’re willing to “risk” everything you’ve got for him/her, is the right thing. In my thinking, love can’t be expressed in other ways. It’s immaterial.

people often seem to feelings of love and business matters. I am all for love. Business is important too! Just because I ask you or you ask me to sign legal documents protecting my business or yours, doesn’t mean we don’t love each other. Its nothing personal. Its not in anticipation of a breakup. It is merely a piece of paper protecting both of us. Love is love. Business is business. No hard feelings!

I am very much against pre-nuptials. I firmly believe that the only reason to marry is because of love. Marriage shouldn’t be about tax breaks, citizenship, or other benefits provided by institutions…

Why is the divorce rate at 50%? Because marriage isn’t valued the way it used to be.

“Lemme marry this American so that I can be a citizen!”
“Let’s marry so that we don’t have to pay Uncle Sam as much!”
“I want to marry you because if we do it unprotected and a baby pops out, I want it to be legal.”
“Let’s marry so that we can have as much sex as we want and people won’t think that I’m a ____” (use your imagination)

Point is: marriage should be about love; civil unions should have pre-nuptials. If you’re so paranoid about your significant other taking your things, then see a psychologist about possible paranoia. After solving your “their out to get me” mentality, then you should consider marriage.

Please forgive the rant. As much as I am vehemently against pre-nuptials, I understand that not all people share my views on marriage. I just hate how something that was once so valued has turned into a legal issue.

@jcs007 I am all about marrying for the right reasons, and you list several great examples of how people don’t marry for the right reasons. But with high divorce rates and society getting “bored” with things like marriage part-way through it, people should protect their assets. I am firmly against divorce, but I think that when it is necessary, a pre-nup is a start to having a good safety net for the future.

@thecoot: I see what you’re saying with a safety net and all (safety first!), but it just saddens me that people would need one for their relationship. Is greed such a problem that we must anticipate it in our marriages?

@jcs007 I suspect you have never been on the receiving side of vengeful ex. Sometimes what is left when love goes is greed, hate, and anger.

@ everyone – thank you for answering the question! i asked it because last week me and a couple of friends were discussing this and i was surprised to see that some of them were against pre-nups. I am all for them and i would have to agree with everyone above who said that it is NOT a trust issue since money matters are separate from relationship issues. I don’t believe in having to pay for a break in a marriage from all the money that i earned from working hard day and night. i thought mzgator summed it up really well. Personally, I don’t believe in divorce, if i marry someone, i plan to stick through it thick and thin (unless any form of abuse is involved of course), but I also believe in having a safety net.

I see pre-nup agreements as a way to be responsible about the legal meaning of the marriage. I don’t think it’s “more trusting” to not look at what the default law is, and consider making the agreement actually be what the couple intends. I think it actually creates a more dangerous context – if there is a worry about divorce later, either the people still won’t know the law and be thinking it’s stuff from fiction and hearsay (I’ve actually heard people think their spouses might consider killing them or doing other crazy dramatic maneuvers to get a divorce when there is no actual legal reason to do so), or they will research it and find out there’s something that becomes an external threat that neither of them knew about before.

I think it’s impossible to come up with any ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ arguments to this topic. I guess people are just different: some people thinks it’s worth bothering with being ‘prepared’, some wouldn’t care.

I, for one, would never, ever marry a partner who demanded pre-nuptials.

I’d say it’s not even that people are just different, but that they have different perspectives. Where we can gain the most value from discussion is not in finding the rightest answer, but in seeing other people’s perspectives and being able to move between them easily to see what different aspects they each reveal.

on another point, would you want to marry into debt?

When a guy asks a girl that…it insinuates a lack of trust…or a prospect of a potential divorce in the future…if you two aren’t married and that is on his mind. Run. Its seems doomed to fail from the start.