> Frankly, the best prenup is not getting married in the first place, and not living in a state which may honor "common law" marriage. We can tell that your a

> Frankly, the best prenup is not getting married in the first place, and not living in a state which may honor "common law" marriage. We can tell that your advice is made out of ignorance by your obvious error in the second part: There is no state in the US where one can accidentally enter into a common law marriage. In the few where any kind of common law marriage is still possible at a minimum the parties must intend to be married and hold themselves out to the public as married. The idea that you could accidentally be married is the sort of absurd paranoia that comes along with many other messed up misconceptions about marriage. > is at best negligible, Yes, marriage can end. And so what? Marriage is a partnership, each of the parties going into it forsake other opportunities for the same of their collective benefit. It is useful to make the terms of that partnership explicit to protect everyone's interest for exactly the same reasons that you formalize ownership of a business. In particular, marriage matters specifically because it might end--- just like the legal structure of your business matters because eventually you might part ways. If the participants in a marriage (or business) don't know that their interests will be protected in the event of a dissolution then their ability to have a true partnership is inhibited. For example, if your spouse had the opportunity to become CEO of Microsoft or whatever, it might make tremendous sense to abandon your own career as (say) a mid-tier programmer to support her by maintaining your home, family fiances, and acting as an occasional assistant. But that would be extremely foolish to do if your partner could just drop you with nothing and no job 5 years later after their success paid-off and their success caught someone younger's attention. That doesn't mean that the default terms of marriage are right for everyone, just like every business doesn't have the same ownership structure. But if the terms of the relationship don't guarantee people a fair share from the fruits of efforts produced with the aid of their own labors or forgone opportunities, then the terms are no good. These are important factors that are apply independently and additionally to the social ones. I can say first had as someone who has spent >15 years in a committed and exclusive married-like-but-not-married relationship that third parties have significantly less respect for your relationship if you're not married and at times this becomes a nuisance and a source of practical logistic complications.