Prior to saying “I do” in 2022, Roshni Patel and her partner had an important task they wanted to take care of: negotiating and signing a prenuptial agreement. For 28-year-old Patel, a prenup isn’t just a contingency plan; it’s something a bit closer to self-care.
“It’s not about my partner,” said Patel, who lives in Silver Lake and works in business operations. “It’s about me knowing that I am doing my best to take care of myself, regardless of the situation.” Patel is part of a generation approaching marriage — and the legal architecture around it — very differently than their parents did.
Society is in the midst of a zillennial prenup boom. According to a recent Harris Poll with Bloomberg, 53% of engaged or married Gen Zs and millennials have signed a prenup as of this spring. That’s a striking increase from 2022, when 39% of engaged or married 18-to-34-year-olds reported having one — and only 15% of engaged or married Americans overall did.
There are practical reasons for the boom. Zillennials, the microgeneration on the cusp of Gen Z and millennials, came of age during the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Many watched their parents’ marriages struggle and drew their own conclusions. In the last several decades, women’s matriculation rates and early career outcomes have caught up to — and in some cases, outpaced — those of men, thus reshaping the calculus underlying many partnerships.
For some, the Great Wealth Transfer looms: an estimated $84 trillion moving from boomers to younger generations, reshaping what feels worth protecting before marriage. For others, the math is grimmer with student debt, an unforgiving housing market, fewer social safety nets and the enduring financial penalties of having children. Both roads lead to the same document.
But there is also something less tangible driving this shift. The prenup, long imagined as a wealthy man’s hedge or a reluctant woman’s obligation, has undergone a quiet generational reinvention, one that has just as much to do with attachment styles as it does assets.
(Melanie Lambrick / For The Times)
Steeped in therapy culture and financial literacy content, young Americans are fluent in boundary-setting and open to frank conversations about money and mental load. They’re now applying that framework to the oldest legal contract in the book. For them, financial candor before marriage isn’t defensive or cynical — it’s actually intimate.
Getting a prenup was a no-brainer for Patel. “Starting a relationship on this healthy, transparent footholding sets you up for success,” she said. “We want to be with each other, but we also want to be smart about how we want to be with each other.”
California’s community property laws made it all the more salient for the couple. “In California, absent a prenup, your income from employment is community property: split 50/50 [in the event of a divorce],” said Jackie Combs, an L.A.-based matrimonial attorney and partner at Blank Rome LLP.
The same 50-50 split applies to debt, which was a key consideration for Patel, as her partner was starting law school and she didn’t want to acquire his school debt if they were to divorce. In their prenuptial agreement, the pair agreed that any assets and debts prior to marriage as well as any assets and debts during the marriage are individual property, an intentional sidestep of California’s community property default.
However, Patel and her husband added a “sunset clause” to their prenup, stating that after seven years or when they have children — whichever comes first — the provision of separate marital assets is effectively nullified. From that point on, all assets and debts would be shared.
Sunset clauses and so-called “trigger clauses” are growing more common, as they allow couples to add specific protections for life’s many what-ifs, including, for example, if the couple decides for one spouse to leave the workforce. While lost earnings and career atrophy can be hard to truly quantify, more couples are trying to account for it in their prenuptial agreements.
For example, take Kirby Kimball and Carlos Real, a recently engaged couple in the process of moving from San Francisco to New York City.
Kirby Kimball and Carlos Real, a recently engaged couple in the process of moving from San Francisco to New York City.
(Courtesy of Kirby Kimball)
Both agree that Real is likely to one day be a stay-at-home dad. “The work to raise a healthy and connected family and happy children is sometimes far harder than showing up to an office every day,” said Kimball, 24, who works in public relations. “That should be appreciated and accounted for financially.”
To Real, 24, who works in commercial property management, having a sense of security underscores intimacy. “The more that you have yourself secure, I think you can be more secure with each other and more open with each other,” he said.
Getting a prenup used to be seen as “planning for divorce,” said Combs, adding that the stigma is eroding.
According to Stephanie Coontz, one of the leading marriage historians in the U.S. and professor emeritus at Evergreen State College, “[Getting a prenup] makes perfect sense now for couples who trust each other very much — but trust each other enough to say, ‘Well, things could go wrong.’ ”
To Coontz, candor is not at odds with care. “People have to get over the idea that there’s something unloving about sitting down and saying what you want,” she said.
Coontz’s research over the last five decades traces the ways in which marriage has evolved throughout history. In her latest book “For Better and Worse” (2026), she references sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s argument that marriage has evolved from “cornerstone” to “capstone.” Once seen as the first step toward adult life, today marriage is what you do after you’ve already built one.
For Will Carragher, 24, a strategic advisor at an L.A.-based talent agency, this accumulation of life experience and savings is all the more reason to get a prenup. Carragher has been dating his boyfriend, San Francisco-based startup consultant William Smithers, 24, for two years.
“Men don’t have any biological clock, so I have no timeline where I’m like, ‘I want to get married by my mid-30s,’ ” Carragher said. “When you get married later in life, you have more time to build … retirement funds, Roth IRAs and investments. [Your] financial situation up to that point was very individual. I would probably want to have protection over what I’ve individually amassed.”
As couples tie the knot later, there’s often larger pots of “yours” and “mine” to consider before becoming one. And that’s not to mention family wealth. To Luisa Valles, a 29-year-old architectural designer living in San Diego, a prenup can be a way to honor each other’s families, by protecting what they built for their own children to inherit.
Luisa Valles, a 29-year-old architectural designer living in San Diego, says a prenup can even be a way to honor each other’s families, by protecting what they built for their own children to inherit.
(Courtesy of Luisa Valles)
“Whatever we build together, we build together, and whatever we didn’t build together is that. It’s OK to protect both those things,” Valles said this spring.
Since then, Valles and her partner with whom she was living have broken up. Splitting up with a long-term partner, she said, only underscores her belief that getting a prenup is essential. “If you think it’s uncomfortable, if you think you can’t talk to your person about that, then what can you talk to them about?” she said.
To Logan Crabb, 30, that same conviction coexists with old-fashioned romance. “I’m a very romantic person. I love love. I think marriage, in many ways, is a declaration of vows and commitment,” said Crabb, an accountant from West Palm Beach, Fla., who, when we spoke in July, lived with her boyfriend of six years. The pair has since become engaged. “As much as I would love marriage to be exclusively that, it’s not. … Marriage is legal, and it’s medical and it’s financial.”
Talking about money (yes, really talking about it) turns out to be one of the more intimate things a couple can do. What negotiating a prenup demands, after all, is precisely what therapy demands: vulnerability, full disclosure and an explicit confrontation of what each person needs — or, even more intimately, wants.
“If you’re going to go to premarital counseling with a priest or therapist, why wouldn’t you also talk to a lawyer?” Combs said.
This framing of prenup-as-financial-premarital-therapy is mirrored in how young couples speak about the process itself, often directly borrowing from the lexicon of therapy.
“We tried to honor each other in how we wrote the prenup, in a way that felt mutually respectful,” said Ruby Ross, a 28-year-old doctor living in New York with her 30-year-old husband, Brian, a facilities manager.
“It feels more like an act of kindness,” Crabb said.
“With a prenup comes boundaries,” said Valles. “Even just as a safeguard of self-protection and self-love, it’s important to have those boundaries written down.”
Not every couple takes that extra legal step before tying the knot. Katie Rocco, 30, and her husband do not have a prenuptial agreement. For them, open communication fills the gap. “It’s a lot of frequent checkpoints as you enter each stage of your life that you couldn’t anticipate beforehand,” she said. “That’s why you picked that person.”
Rocco recently left her teaching job in Connecticut to stay at home with their toddler, and she acknowledges that these kinds of decisions rewrite the financial math in a marriage. When she and her husband recently refinanced their home — taking her name off the mortgage for a better rate — they agreed to maintain the deed in both their names. “I still want to have some ownership of this,” she said.
For couples who take the legal step, a prenup is a way to put their intentions for the marriage into writing while things are still good.
“If there’s a way to mitigate at least some of the financial discussions because it’s already been set in stone when we were at the strongest point in our lives as a couple,” Kimball said, “then we both want to take that step.”
