The cultural script around prenuptial agreements still treats them as evidence of doubt. If you really loved each other, the script says, you wouldn't need one. This framing collapses two things that are not the same: the question of whether the marriage will last, and the question of which legal defaults you want governing it. The first is unknowable; the second is fully knowable and worth choosing deliberately. A prenup is the second decision. It is not a prediction; it is a specification.
The state already imposes a prenup on every married couple — it just happens to be the prenup the state wrote, based on a default model of marriage that may or may not fit you. Community property versus equitable distribution, alimony defaults, debt allocation rules, business interest treatment, inheritance overrides, retirement plan division — all of these are already specified by your state's domestic relations code. Signing without modifying is not "no prenup." It is "the state's prenup." The honest question is not whether to have a prenup, but whose prenup you are operating under.
Law 4 — Plan — is the lens because the prenup conversation is the most concrete pre-marital design conversation most couples will ever have, and the one most likely to surface misalignments that would otherwise emerge mid-marriage under worse conditions. Laura Wasser, who has handled high-profile divorces for two decades, makes the argument that the couples who do the prenup conversation well are often the most durable marriages, not the least — because the conversation forces them to talk about money, expectations, prior obligations, family wealth, and dissolution preferences while both are still on the same side of the table.
The conversation has a paranoia version and a planning version. The paranoia version starts from "I don't trust you, so I want protection." It is adversarial, it surfaces resentment, and it often produces an agreement that both parties resent. The planning version starts from "We are merging two financial lives, here's what's coming in, here's what we'd want if it ever ended, let's specify the parts of the default contract that don't fit us." It is structural, it surfaces information, and it produces an agreement both parties can stand behind. The difference is not subject matter but stance.
There are cases where a prenup is close to mandatory and cases where it adds less. Mandatory-ish cases: significant pre-marital assets, family wealth or trusts that need protection from commingling, a family business, prior marriages with children whose inheritance you want protected, large earning asymmetry, one partner sacrificing career for the other, foreign assets, anticipated inheritance. Lower-stakes cases: two young people early in career with limited assets, no kids from prior relationships, similar earning trajectories — the state's default fits reasonably well, and the cost of a prenup may exceed the value it adds, though even here the conversation has value.
The mechanics matter. A prenup that doesn't hold up at dissolution is worse than no prenup, because it created the conversation cost without delivering the protection. To hold up, in most US states, the agreement needs to be entered voluntarily, with full financial disclosure on both sides, with adequate time before the wedding (a prenup signed the night before is often challenged successfully), and ideally with separate counsel for each party. Trying to save money by sharing one lawyer or signing close to the wedding is the most common way prenups fail when it matters.
The conversation itself should cover, at minimum: what each party is bringing in (assets, debts, business interests, anticipated inheritances), how income during marriage will be treated (community, separate, blended), how household contributions will be valued (especially if one partner is likely to reduce paid work for caregiving), what happens in dissolution (alimony, asset division, business interests, family heirlooms), and what happens at death (especially with prior children or family wealth). A good prenup also handles the postnup escape valve — what happens if circumstances change substantially mid-marriage and the prenup no longer fits, both parties can agree to modify.
The deeper move is to treat the prenup conversation as the entry point for an ongoing financial conversation that continues through the marriage. Money is the single largest source of marital conflict and the area where most couples have the least explicit alignment. Surfacing it before the wedding, while both partners are still optimizing for each other's good opinion, produces a baseline of honest disclosure that's hard to recreate later. Couples who skip it often discover, ten years in, that they have radically different assumptions about saving, spending, debt, inheritance, family support, and risk — assumptions that would have been visible in a prenup conversation and were not.
The romantic move is not to skip the conversation. The romantic move is to have it well — with full disclosure, with mutual counsel, with adequate time, with a stance of joint design rather than mutual protection — and to come out the other side knowing more about each other and choosing each other anyway. That is what designed commitment looks like in adults running real lives.