I should have asked for a prenup....and you should too!
If I ever had a time-machine, and could fix just one thing in my past, it would be to tell my younger self to never marry that man without a prenup.
Prenuptial Agreements. Wow, has the stigma behind this subject gotten pretty bad. But, ladies, I am here to tell you… and listen carefully…. YOU…NEED…A PRENUP. Period. And lets take it a bit further…. You need a prenup before you know you need it. What I’m saying is, protect yourself. “But what about love Steffie?” or “I don’t want to scare him off because I asked for this”. And that’s where we are losing ourselves. The idea that a person could force you to minimize your financial security to make their ego feel better just makes my blood boil. But that is today, on the flip side of a painfully nasty divorce that would have been so much easier had a prenup been in place.
“I don’t want to scare him off because I asked God for this”
Prenuptual….’Insurance’
You buy insurance, because you hope you don’t need it. You never know when a storm, earthquake, car accident, or fall down the stairs is going to change your life. So just in case, they have insurance to make sure that recovering from that life crash is not as difficult as it could be. So why don’t they change the name to “PreNuptual Insurance?” Just in case your flawed human selves can’t keep this union a float, nobody has to have a rough landing. I think this is a good idea, but somehow the message of self-protection has been reframed as being ‘selfish’. In my experience, I was so blinded by the desire to have love that I let his insisting we didn’t need legal protection feel like leadership. Here are a few FALSE mentalities that women believe when they are being convinced not to ask for a prenup:
“If something happens, the courts will divide it equally.”
“We should be in love enough that we don’t need this”
“Marriage is about trust, why don’t you trust me?”
“You handle so much dear, let me worry about the money and I’ll take care of you”
“You don’t love me as much as you love your money”
What narrative was presented to you? What made you believe in it and how could a ‘prenuptual insurance’ policy have changed your life at the end? When researching this topic, I saw one very constant thing amongst the women with this story. They all said a version of this phrase:
“I went along with it, because I wanted to please him”
