If you really think you need a prenup, why you’re getting married?

Recently Metro’s Rebecca Reid wrote a piece about marriage called If you think you don’t need a prenup you’re being naive.

Her feeling on the matter – echoed by the 68% of readers who voted in a poll in the story – is that arranging fair division of financial assets in the event of a divorce, before you’ve even tied the knot, is the only sensible thing to do.

And I’m afraid I respectfully disagree.

According to Benjamin Franklin (who stole it from Christopher Bullock), only two things are certain: death and taxes. Not divorce.

A prenup isn’t like a will, which deals with an inevitable situation (even if some of its clauses may allow for it happening rather earlier than you anticipated).

A prenup deals with something strictly hypothetical.

It isn’t like an insurance policy. Insurance is designed to factor in events that are beyond your control.

In a marriage most actions are under your joint control, at least in the way you both react to them.

Either way a prenup implies a lack of trust.

Another argument is that it saves potential heartache when it comes to divvying up assets in the event of an acrimonious breakup.

You know what? That happens to kids as well. Few people in any divorce suffer as much as the children.

By this sort of logic, your potential heirs should remain behind biological closed doors, forever unfertilized.

Because what’s the point in having children if you’re potentially going to have to fight for them later?

It’d be better to just not bother having them at all, wouldn’t it?

I’m not blind to the statistics. Half of marriages end in divorce. I know that as well as anything. It’s happened to a number of my friends.

And I’m not smug enough to claim that our marriage is perfect, or that my wife and I have something that our divorced friends somehow lack.

But I didn’t walk into my marriage assuming that I’d be one of the lucky 50%.

I walked into it deciding that I was going to stay in that 50% by working at it. So did my wife.

Generation X author Douglas Coupland defines Divorce Assumption as ‘the belief that if a marriage doesn’t work out, then there is no problem because partners can simply seek a divorce’.

That seems to be the prevailing mindset among my generation – you’ll marry the person you love until it stops working.

It’s like buying a car. When the radiator blows, you simply trade it in for a shinier model.

Head from the garage to the kitchen and it’s the same story. Time was a washing machine would last you a good couple of decades before packing up.

These days it’s half as long – if that. You can’t get the parts. Mobile phones are out of date in a month.

We live in a disposable culture – and marriage, it seems, has gone the same way.

The phrase ‘make do and mend’ may seem archaic to a generation who can pick up a new shirt from the hypermarket while they’re out buying milk, but it was the way our parents lived – and it applies as much to the maintenance of matrimonial bliss as it does to patching up clothes.

It’s not always that simple, of course. Even if you have things sorted out, circumstances evolve.

Money – its sudden presence or sudden absence – is often a key factor.

You never know how people will change over years of good and bad fortune. But that’s the sort of thing you need to be aware of going in.

There is a marked difference between planning a wedding and planning a marriage.

Otherwise why are you up there saying those vows and promising to love the other person for better or worse, or for richer for poorer? Oh, hang on – that’s why you wrote your own vows, isn’t it?

We live in a world of shifting opposites.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a great many people were trapped in loveless marriages because of the shame of divorce, which is never a good place to be.

Fast forward a few decades and divorce no longer carries the social stigma it once held.

But we’ve moved to the other extreme, where marriages are treated as a joke by many of the people who choose to enter them – things to be annulled, or abandoned at the first sign of the seven year itch.

And central to this rather nasty state of affairs is the concept of having an exit strategy for when it all goes wrong.

I don’t want to tar all couples with the same brush.

I can understand that there are probably circumstances in which a prenup may be the wisest course of action (although I’m struggling to think of any).

But applied as a general principle? Sorry. It just doesn’t fly. And you can take that to the bank.