More on Child-Centered Pre-Nups

Marriages are not like dairy products. They don’t have a shelf life and an expiration date. A bad marriage results from poor planning, which is easy to avoid. All divorces—every single one—can be prevented. I don’t just believe that; I know it. You can’t have a divorce until you have a marriage, so there are two ways to stop a divorce. One way is to fix problems that come up in a marriage. The second way is to keep bad marriages from ever coming into existence. There is no such thing as a good marriage that turns bad. Divorce is inherently selfish because it holds kids responsible for adult failure. If you care about your kids as much as you may claim to, you must avoid a divorce, even if that means avoiding a marriage.

You can either die of a quick gunshot to the face or a slow-growing cancer. Marriages can hit the skids either because of one catastrophe, or, more often, because of minor skirmishes that collectively wear down one or both spouses. Committing to a workable marriage plan requires placing a microscope—or sometimes a periscope—over your lives in an almost paranoid way. It’s a good kind of paranoia, though, because it is designed to spot potential trouble before it ruins the children’s concept of the world as a safe place. Preventing disaster means eliminating proactively and preemptively any possible source of crisis, no matter how remote the chances.

Planning for your future is not the “kiss of death” for your marriage. I am trying to help people save their children’s sanity by understanding how to eliminate divorce. No child wants to come from a broken home, but no kid wants to live in one either. If people knew what to do—if they had steps to take—they would follow through, no question about it. I say the same thing about mediation, a relatively new approach to solving family law problems short of a full-blown, messy divorce. If people knew about it, they would use it. My mission has been to spread the word about the benefits of mediation. The same is true for a child-centered pre-nup. If people knew that it could save them and, more importantly, their children, from chaos, heartbreak, and misunderstanding, they would leap at the chance to write one.

Look, I understand why states like mine have a 90-day waiting period to get a divorce. We don’t want people getting out of marriages haphazardly. But why not? We let them get into marriages that way. We as a society need to put more effort into preventing problems rather than just dealing with them. Isn’t something that will last a lifetime worth a couple hours or even a few days of planning? Far from jinxing your marriage, planning for a potential divorce process before or while you’re happily married will help keep you on track. At least a third of the time, clients who come to me seeking divorce mediation do not ultimately divorce. Gregory and Misty went all the way through the process and decided not to divorce. The process of agreeing on all the issues of their divorce—matters they largely had never even considered before—made them understand that they could indeed stay together. Because Gregory and Misty were not allowed to jump to conclusions about each other and their relationship, they didn’t, and the waiting period saved their marriage. I would venture to guess, with no research to back me up, that over 90 percent of divorces are unnecessary and could be remedied with a child-centered pre-nup either before or after the problems arise.

No matter how sure you are that your partnership is forever, utilize the legal system’s protections whenever they are available to shield you from conflict and confusion. A lack of understanding leads to the breakup of relationships, as with Shawn and Stacy. They had a domestic partnership, not a marriage, but they faced all the same issues as married people, and they had an even more complicated situation because when things got tough, they didn’t have the legal protection of marriage law to fall back on. Once more, Shawn and Stacy’s kids were left in limbo, because their parents had nothing to commit themselves to each other. I’m not at all a fan of living together before you’re married, not mainly because of a moral objection, but more because it’s just confusing and risky.

And again, I know I’m going to run up against the arguments that you don’t need to lock yourself into a legal relationship if you’re planning to stay together forever. Well, the key word in that sentence is planning. You may be planning to drive safely to work today, but if you hit a patch of ice and skid into a ditch, I bet you have insurance coverage to protect yourself. Being legally married also gives you other protections not available to unmarried people, such as the ability to cover each other on medical insurance plans and to inherit as spouses with or without a will. A premarital agreement gives protection where none otherwise exists. People most in need of that protection are those in unmarried relationships, because there is no legal structure to insulate them in case of problems.