The Case for Prenups, and Why Young People Aren’t Getting Married — ft. James Sexton

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Scott Galloway (1:41)

Welcome back to ProfGOM Relationships in a special two-part series about love, marriage, and what it takes to make a partnership last. We're joined once again by divorce attorney and author James Sexton today. We'll ask your questions about sharing money in a marriage, deescalating conflict, and why fewer young people are getting married.

James, good to see you again.

James Sexton (2:00)

Good to see you, Scott. Always a pleasure.

Scott Galloway (2:01)

All right, let's bust into this. Question number one comes from Food Lifestyle, Inc. on Instagram. Can two people have a loving, affectionate, successful marriage if they keep their money separate?

James.

James Sexton (2:12)

Yeah, I think absolutely. I mean, I think there's all permutations out there, but I'm a big fan in most aspects of relationship of like the you, the me, and the we, and this kind of Venn diagram. I think the idea that if we don't have everything completely co-mingled all the time, that somehow it means there's a division in a relationship that's going to create distance between us. I don't think it's honest, and I don't think it's necessary. I think if it's happy for the two of you and it doesn't scare the horses, it's nobody's business. I think if the two of you see, I think there's value in having some separation. I mean, if we have only joint accounts and only joint credit cards, okay, we've got full transparency. But that also means when I buy you a birthday present, you're going to see what it cost and where I bought it. And if I bought it the day before your birthday or a month in advance your birthday, there's no privacy whatsoever. Maybe this is generational and I'll get accused because I'm Gen X of old fashioned ways of thinking. But if a woman in my life says, hey, can you get this out of my bag? I give them their bag because I was raised, you don't go in a woman's bag. You bring her and give it to her and then you take it. So I think it's the same thing. I think there should be some privacy in relationship, whether it's medical autonomy, whether it's financial autonomy, there should be some level of it. But that being said, total disconnection from the finances and having everything be it's yours and mine and there is no ours, I don't think that that's necessarily healthy. But again, I don't think it's one size fits all. I think it has a lot to do with people's relationship with money individually, which has a lot to do with the way that they were raised and it has lots of other values built into it.

Scott Galloway (3:47)

I mean, I find sometimes that you need to be attracted to a partner, you need to have similar values. I think the thing that people don't spend enough talking about before they enter into a long-term relationship is each of their relationship jointly and individually to money. Who is expected to make the money here? What is your approach to spending? What are your expectations around lifestyle? Who's responsible for providing that lifestyle?

I think these things are, and there's data that shows that financial adjectives are the number one cause of divorce. At least that's what I've seen in my personal experience, and there's some data here. I think there's no one size fits all. It's entirely up to you. So if you're entering into a relationship where one person has a lot of assets and you do not, it's entirely fair to say there's pre-assets that go back to me if there's post-marriage, and then there's stuff we do together. And then also, I think, and granted, I've never had a prenup, so I'm, you know, do as I say, not as I do, but it seems to me that a prenup just makes everything much easier, such that once you're in a very ugly situation, it's like, I have a contract with every major business relationship I have, and 98% of the time, we never refer to the contract, because we don't need to, because it's going well.