Its a bad contract, but it gets infinitely better and a lot less consequential if you are rich before marriage and spent five minutes on financial planning. Yo

Its a bad contract, but it gets infinitely better and a lot less consequential if you are rich before marriage and spent five minutes on financial planning. Your assets will only be taken from you if they were earned during the marriage. So for anybody that wanted to work on something, like a house, any time between now and the next 30 years, then yeah marriage with the non-negligible probability of divorce will destroy the equity you dumped into it, no matter what proportion you and your spouse contributed. If you already had properties, even income producing ones, they can go in a trust before hand, and you don't even have to worry about the stigma of a "pre-nup", and nothing of consequence will be split from you in a divorce. Then you have the flexibility to actually enjoy the marriage, make any number of conditions to actually use the money or support a family or make grand children set, and if it falls apart, the financial things you worked for are still in place and hopefully A LOT more valuable. A trust can also help keep alimony and child support payments restricted to amounts that even the bread winner would find reasonable. This article talks about how marriage is declining amongst the poor, and staying steady amongst the privileged. It makes a few assumptions about why such as "women don't want men that can't provide", while my analysis has been devoid of gender. All around, it looks like education around how bad the default contract is has taken hold, even amongst the poor and uneducated, who previously had been greatly skewing the marriage and divorce rates.