Prenup, Meet Therapy

Prenuptial agreements are having a cultural moment. Once whispered about in the context of celebrity scandal, second marriages, and the ultra-wealthy, prenups have entered the conversation alongside wedding cake preferences for many couples. Podcasts like Today, Explained and Vox have examined their growing popularity among millennials and Gen Z. Entrepreneurs and public figures like reality star Bethenny Frankel, who after a grueling, traumatic divorce in which her ex fought to take a massively disproportionate part of her wealth, have spoken openly about the financial wisdom of protecting oneself before marriage.

Theoretically, they make sense. Economics is no longer the primary driver for marriage—love is. Ideologically (and given the reality of divorce rates) prenups ensure finances stay in order so that we can focus on love. It sounds romantic in a sense. And yet, in my clinical experience, that framing is incomplete.

For many, marriage isn’t solely a commitment to love each other forever, it is also about building a life together, which widens the scope. Lives can become intertwined in ways that go far beyond the love bubble, especially for couples who choose to have kids.

Premarital agreements sit at the intersection of romance and risk management. They can be thoughtful, fair, and even protective. But they also risk carrying unanticipated emotional consequences that are rarely discussed with the same enthusiasm as their financial benefits. Most couples are told they can sign it, tuck it in a drawer, and forget about it. In my experience, that’s not always the case.

The Case of Mark and Danielle

Mark and Danielle came to see me nearly a decade into their marriage. At the time they married, he was transitioning into private equity, and she was ascending the ladder at her marketing company. The potential financial upside of his career was significant, but so was the liability. Before they married, his attorneys strongly advised a prenuptial agreement. Danielle was initially taken aback. She hadn’t seen it coming since at the time, he was still in the very early stages of his career and didn’t have family wealth that she was aware of. She assumed they would grow their wealth together, but, after collecting herself and talking to some trusted friends about how a prenup could offer protection for her as well, she agreed.

She didn’t see herself as financially dependent and didn’t feel particularly threatened by the document. And she wasn’t naïve. Her own parents had divorced, and she knew that despite how promising their future looked, anything could happen.

The prenup stipulated that his private equity holdings would remain his separate property. This would protect her from major liability and give him the freedom he wanted to manage them as he wished. They agreed on percentages relative to the difference in their income that would be saved separately versus put into joint spending. She negotiated some protections for herself, which he agreed to—greater alimony if they had children and a life insurance policy that named her as the beneficiary. It was, on paper, clean and rational, and at the time, gave her a sense of security and confidence.

They had a beautiful wedding and moved on with their lives. For years, the prenup barely surfaced in conversation. Until it did.

The Illusion of Clean Lines

Prenups are built on the premise that we can draw clean lines around money, but life is unpredictable. Danielle decided to leave her job after the birth of their second child. Mark had done very well in his career, and they agreed it made most sense for her to stay home while the kids were young. Meanwhile, Mark’s professional obligations intensified. The demands of private equity meant long hours and frequent travel. Danielle absorbed the invisible labor—childcare logistics, emotional support, and household management—that enabled him to focus on his career.

He became a partner in a new fund. They bought a new house in a better neighborhood. She got a part-time nanny so that she could have some time to herself. She was grateful for everything his success afforded her, and she still loved him. From the outside looking in, you’d never know that resentment was slowly brewing below the surface.

Over time, Danielle felt herself pull back. She wanted to cheer on Mark’s success, but she also became aware that, at the end of the day, it was his—not theirs. It occurred to her that despite making it easy for him to excel at his career—she looked after the kids, kept the house in order, got dressed up and engaged his colleagues and their spouses at dinners out—he was reaping significantly more benefits than they were. As her resentment grew, her enthusiasm began to fade. She no longer wanted to participate in business dinners or familiarize herself with the details of his projects. Her withdrawal left him feeling neglected and unloved.

Things came to a head when, after pushing him to meet with a financial advisor to discuss their shared investments, she learned—as she suspected—that what they shared paled significantly in comparison to what was legally his. His actions weren’t nefarious. The return on his funds was so much greater than what they shared, it simply didn’t make sense to focus on those assets. In his mind, since he had no intention of leaving her, it didn’t make a difference. But even though she trusted this on an intellectual level, it triggered a deep sense of anxiety within her. She knew, being a child of divorce, that anything was possible. The whole thing left her feeling like she was standing on the edge of a (beautifully manicured) cliff.

When they came to see me, they had devolved into a couple living like ships passing in the night.

In one session, Danielle quietly said, “The agreement felt fair at the time that I signed it. But sometimes it feels like I’m cheering for a team I’m not a part of. If he divorced me tomorrow, our lifestyles would look very different. After everything we’ve built together in the last 10 years and all that I’ve done to support him, that doesn’t feel right to me anymore. I should have been smarter. I hold myself responsible for not taking a closer look until now, but it didn’t feel romantic to talk about this stuff while we were trying to conceive. Plus, I trust Mark. He always says that we are fine.”

Mark hung his head. “I didn’t intend to make her feel this way. The thought of leaving her has never entered my mind. This was pure neglect, not intentional selfishness. As distant as we’ve become, I still have hope we can work things out. I love Danielle, and I understand why she feels this way.”

The Emotional Effects No One Anticipates

As a therapist—and a feminist—I am not at all against premarital agreements. They can offer important protections. In states where spousal support is limited or nonexistent, couples can include alimony provisions. They can clarify inheritance, protect family businesses, and shield a partner from business liabilities. I’ve seen them used after major breaches, such as infidelity, to restore a sense of security for the injured partner. For blended families, they may prevent devastating legal battles. These are real and meaningful benefits. But what often goes unexamined are the psychological implications. A prenup is not just a financial document. It is a symbolic one. It communicates something about trust, risk tolerance, and how much of one’s future is truly shared.

For some couples, it subtly establishes a hierarchy: one partner as primary wealth generator, the other as peripheral participant. It’s also important to acknowledge that Mark’s desire for financial insulation wasn’t inherently selfish. In a high-risk industry like private equity, a prenup can serve two purposes at once: protecting a spouse from external liability while also preserving the assets he worked hard to build.

Even when both partners intellectually agree to the terms, the emotional meaning can evolve with time. Danielle began to experience what I call structural exclusion. She wasn’t excluded from the marriage or from the lifestyle Mark’s success afforded them. They vacationed well, dined out often, and had childcare support. But she felt excluded from the wealth-building engine of the family itself, which she resented because she knew she contributed to its growth from backstage. Neither of them had anticipated how dramatically Mark’s separate property would outpace their shared assets. After years of supporting his career and stepping back from her own, the disparity felt less like prudent planning and more like inequity. When a prenup is signed in one’s twenties or early thirties, it reflects who the couple is at that moment and cannot fully account for who they will become or how the marriage will reshape them.

Couples who successfully integrate a prenup into their marriage treat it as a living agreement rather than a document that collects dust in a drawer. They revisit it periodically and revise it as life evolves. They acknowledge that contributions evolve in ways that are impossible to forecast early on.

As prenups become more common, therapists will increasingly encounter their downstream effects, often years after signing. Several clinical realities are worth keeping in mind.

A prenup is an attachment event. Even when negotiated rationally, the request can activate attachment systems. For one partner, it may symbolize security. For the other, it may register as conditional commitment, triggering anxiety. Exploring attachment histories and negotiation dynamics can uncover lingering injury. Humans seek security through mutual reliance. We bond not only through affection, but through shared safety nets. When the structure of a marriage is inequitable, emotional safety can erode over time.

Structural asymmetry affects emotional safety and power. Financial structure influences psychological leverage. If one partner’s wealth remains largely insulated from marital division while the other’s future is more economically tied to the relationship, the risk calculus of leaving becomes uneven. Most couples don’t consciously weaponize this imbalance (although I’ve seen it happen), but unconsciously, it can influence vulnerability, negotiation, and conflict. Therapists should assess whether either partner feels economically vulnerable or silenced.

Identity and wealth are intertwined. For some partners, financial growth represents competence and legacy. Mark’s private equity deals represented ambition and worth. He wanted Danielle to share in his excitement, but it was hard for her to feel enthusiastic when she felt sidelined. Danielle’s emotionally withdrawal was not stubbornness. It was grief—grief that the part of their life generating the most growth did not include her structurally. Long-term partnership is not only about emotional connection. It is about co-creation—building something shared, financially and symbolically.

The document should evolve along with the couple. Career pauses, caregiving demands, illness, and unexpected financial growth alter contribution in nonlinear ways. Wealth grows, roles shift, and children reconfigure ambition. One partner’s trajectory may accelerate while the other’s stabilizes. Resentment often arises not from the original agreement, but from failure to revisit it in light of change. The advice to sign a prenup and forget about it assumes that both money and relationships remain static. They don’t.

Encourage proactive renegotiation. Therapists can encourage periodic financial reviews that include retirement projections, asset comparisons, and updated definitions of fairness frame not as suspicion, but stewardship. These conversations go better during peaceful times rather than in a crisis.

As therapists, our role is not to advocate for or against prenups. It is to help couples examine the emotional fine print and ask questions like: What does the agreement symbolize? How does it shape power? Does it still reflect who our clients have become? In which ways are our clients’ lives parallel and how are they shared? How will the agreement shift if one client pauses their career, wealth grows asymmetrically, or caregiving and emotional labor falls on one person?

In Mark and Danielle’s case, therapy became the space where the agreement could be reexamined without accusation. Danielle didn’t demand fifty-fifty, but she did push for a shift that felt more commensurate with her role in sustaining the life that enabled Mark’s wealth to grow. They explored several options with their attorneys, but the specific solution mattered less than the shift in mindset. Defensiveness softened once the conversation shifted from division to shared security. They amended their agreement in a way that reflected not only their finances, but the life they’d built together. In the end, the prenup wasn’t the threat to their marriage—their avoidance of it was. For therapists, that may be the deeper lesson. Legal structures can create clarity, but they cannot substitute for ongoing conversations about power, vulnerability, emotional security, and shared destiny. Our work is to help couples bring those conversations into the open and ensure that the structures supporting their marriage evolve alongside the relationship itself.