When I asked my married friends who among them had a prenuptial agreement, the most common reply was something like: “Wait—are people not getting prenups?” One put it bluntly: “You wouldn’t buy a house without a contract. Why would you get married without one?”

Age-wise, I’m somewhere in between the millennials and Gen Z, two generations that are signing prenups at rates their parents would have found bizarre. In the 1990s, around eight percent of married couples had one. Prenups were whispered about in scandalized tones, the province of the paranoid rich, the famous, or the twice-divorced. You knew about them because Donald Trump famously had one with Ivana, or because soap operas featured conniving heiresses demanding them, or because your uncle muttered about it after his first wife cleaned him out. To actually admit you had a prenup was to admit that you didn’t really believe in love.

But now, prenups aren’t just common; they’re becoming the norm. Nearly half of engaged or married millennials—47 percent—have one, according to a 2023 survey. And Gen Z isn’t far behind, at 41 percent. Why the dramatic rise? What motivates so many young people to sign on the dotted line before walking down the aisle?

It might have something to do with the fact that millennials were the children of the first great divorce boom; they grew up with joint custody schedules and awkward holidays, watching marriages disintegrate in real time. Women especially saw how their mothers and grandmothers could be treated terribly, financially trapped, or punished for the unpaid labor of stay-at-home mom life, and vowed not to repeat the script.

But according to James Sexton, a New York divorce lawyer of almost 25 years, there’s also been a shift in pop culture. “Celebrities used to swear they didn’t have prenups while I had their signed agreements in my safe,” he said. “The difference now is that people admit it.”

The candor of celebrities has helped destigmatize the prenup in wider society. As Julia Rodgers, CEO and founder of Hello Prenup—a company that helps couples write their own prenups—told me: “Celebrity culture drives how we look at relationships and divorce. Look at Gwyneth Paltrow and her ‘conscious uncoupling’ 10 years ago.” (Paltrow explained the phrase, which she used to describe her divorce from Chris Martin in 2014, as a way of parting “amicably, keeping mutual respect as part of the process.”)

“Suddenly,” Rodgers said, “mediated divorces skyrocketed. Everyone was like, ‘good idea, I’ll consciously uncouple, too.’ ”

The taboo around prenups has actually dissolved to the extent that we judge celebrities for not getting one. When Kim Kardashian married Kris Humphries in 2011, the tabloids reported that they had a prenup as if it wasn’t the done thing, and mocked them for negotiating it. But in May of this year, The New York Times ran a piece about the end of 82-year-old David Geffen’s marriage—to the 32-year-old dancer David Armstrong—it included the observation:

The circumstances of the dissolution raised some eyebrows because of one detail: The petition also indicates that Mr. Armstrong did not sign a prenuptial agreement with Mr. Geffen, the entertainment mogul whose net worth has been estimated at more than $8 billion.

In recent years, TikTok has demystified the prenup even further. Women film themselves explaining the details of their prenuptial agreements in videos that rack up thousands of views. “Prenups are hot!” they declare. One video, titled “What’s In My Prenup and My Purse,” shows a woman called Vivian telling us how many assets she has compared to her husband while showing us her moisturizer and tampons from the bottom of her purse. Prenups, she concludes, are “the most loving thing you can do.”

The comments seem to agree. “Love this!! Normalize prenups!!” one says. “I’m loving that people are learning more about prenups instead of it being a taboo thing,” another adds.

There’s a point at which normalization shades into celebration, and watching these clips, you start to feel that point has been passed. There’s twerking, matching outfits, waving the documents around and claiming that not wanting a prenup “is a red flag to me.” It’s absurd and a little charming, and also unmistakably of its time: The prenup, once a quiet, sober document, has become just another milestone to broadcast, a new genre of relationship flex.

But underneath all the hashtags, there’s real anxiety. It’s about money. We’re the first generation to be objectively worse off than our parents. And we tend to be older than our parents were when we walk down the aisle, which means we’ve had more time to accumulate things, savings accounts, debt, IKEA furniture; we have more to lose. It means marriage looks less like stability and more like risk. “I’m not about to claw my way out of six figures of loans just to gamble it all on vibes,” one friend told me.

It’s also about the money yet to come. As Rodgers of Hello Prenup pointed out, Boomers will soon transfer more than $80 trillion in wealth to their millennial and Gen Z children. “The best way to protect that wealth is with a prenup,” she said, “so parents are pressuring kids to sign one.”

And then there’s politics. Trust in the government is famously low among young people today, and a prenup is essentially just a way to opt out of letting the state script the terms of your divorce. Without one, your finances are governed by your state’s laws: how property gets divided, who keeps the house, whether alimony is owed, even how retirement accounts are split.

“Every marriage has a prenup,” Sexton, the divorce lawyer, told me. “It’s either the one the legislature wrote, which you never signed, or the one you and your partner made together.”

Prenups aren’t just about money; they can be a way of figuring out in advance what you want your marriage to look like. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, before they married in 2012, reportedly drafted terms of her move to Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg allegedly promised to take her on a date once a week and spend at least 100 minutes of alone time with her outside the office or his home. In other words, the agreement was about time, not money. Some people even have “sex prenups”—which lay out how much sex a couple agrees to have per week. (They are, unsurprisingly, generally unenforceable in court.)

And of course, millennials being millennials, we have pioneered the “pet-nup.” My husband, three months into dating, had me sign an informal sheet of paper agreeing that if we were ever to get a dog and then separate, that he would have sole custody. A few weeks before we got married—and before we had a dog—the same terms, laid out on that piece of scrap paper, were sent to me via his lawyer.

Our prenup felt practical, not threatening: We had bought a house and gotten married after four months of dating, so not having one would’ve felt like the reckless choice. It’s not an especially glamorous document, though it does contain one clause that makes me smile. If we ever divorce, I get to pick one of my husband’s old cars. He collects them compulsively—beautiful, temperamental machines that spend half their lives stranded on the shoulder waiting for AAA, and which I neither have the patience nor willingness or ability to drive.

But like so many people my age, the prenup didn’t feel like a moral statement so much as a logistical one—just another box on the pre-wedding checklist between “invite guests” and “order flowers.”

Maybe there is something moral about discussing hard questions about separation in advance, though—or at least, responsible. There are some things you really don’t want to be figuring out with your estranged spouse. For example: More and more couples are freezing embryos. And not all of them have prenups that specify what should happen to these embryos, were the marriage to end. Should they be destroyed, donated, or awarded to one partner? Sometimes that decision can end up in court, which is how people wind up litigating their own potential children.

Critics worry that prenups undermine the spirit of marriage, citing reports about the most uncomfortable clauses. And there are absurd cases, like one Sexton told me about where a man who insisted that, in the event of their divorce, his wife would lose $10,000 in alimony for every 10 pounds she had gained during the marriage. A court upheld it. “They actually commented that this man was disgusting and boorish, but that it was enforceable,” Sexton said.

Stories like this make prenups sound a little unhinged, as do tales about infidelity clauses, which spell out what counts as cheating and what it’ll cost you, with fines that can run into six figures. Most of these are unenforceable, Sexton told me, especially in no-fault divorce states. But there’s an argument to be made that it’s good for couples to discuss what constitutes infidelity in an age of sliding-into-DMs and “emotional affairs.”

It might seem as though starting a marriage with an exit strategy all but ensures the exit. But Sexton insists it’s the opposite. “You can’t feel loved if you don’t feel safe,” he told me. “A prenup is a way of saying, ‘Even if we fail each other, you’ll be okay without me.’ ”

And if you grew up in the wreckage of divorce, you understand the logic. What kills affection isn’t paperwork. It’s betrayal, surprise, the sudden discovery that the person you trusted most can ruin you. Marriages fail with or without contracts, and with a prenup, you have a bit of control on what the fallout may be.

So, call us Generation Prenup: pragmatic, skeptical of institutions, unwilling to leave the future to chance. Maybe a little neurotic. If marriage once meant surrender, today it’s about control. But the funny thing is, it might actually be working. Millennials divorce at a