Kamila Staryga’s husband asked her to marry him years after their chance meeting in Golden Gate Park. She said yes. Later, he popped another question: Would she get a prenup?
Staryga, the founder of a reproductive health startup, Rita Health, didn’t take offense. “I’m a super-high risk profile,” she says matter-of-factly, and legal contracts are part of her daily reality. “You don’t write a contract for good times,” she says. “You write them for when stuff goes south.”
For Staryga and her husband, cash isn’t the only asset at stake. He works at a leading artificial intelligence company. Both receive part of their compensation in stock options. But where Staryga’s equity is a bet on the future, his is already a winning lottery ticket.
Cayce Clifford for BI
Prenups go with death and taxes on the list of things no one wants to discuss, and yet, they’re having a moment. Surveys suggest they’re on the rise. On TikTok, lawyers and money influencers cast them as basic financial planning. For ultra-public couples like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, attorneys dissect who-gets-what in a divorce with ESPN-level draft-night energy.
Monica Mazzei, chair of Buchalter’s family law group, calls it “the Kardashian effect”: The public interest in their prenups helped ease taboos. Family law attorney Susan Scherman has a slightly darker explanation for millennials and Gen Z signing prenups: “Their attitude toward marriage is, ‘Look, the statistics are against us, so let’s just go in and do the best we can.’”
Survey data suggests more couples are proposing prenups. Fifteen years ago, a Harris Poll survey of 2,000 married or engaged adults in the United States found that just 3% had signed a prenup. In 2023, Harris Poll and Axios reran the survey, albeit with a smaller sample; the share jumped to about 20%. Rates were even higher among millennials (47%) and Gen Z (41%).
The climb tracks a shift in how younger Americans think about marriage. Some of them grew up during the peak divorce rates of the eighties and nineties. They wait longer to say “I do,” then marry with careers, mortgages, and other assets worth protecting: social media handles, bitcoin, frozen embryos, and Labubus. Which is why, more than ever, they’re saying, “We want prenup!”
It also helps that tech has made getting a prenup easier than filing a joint tax return. Staryga and her husband used First, a TurboTax-style prenup service. It walked them through a questionnaire and let each bring in a lawyer to review the draft before signing. First’s no-frills prenups start at $599. The company has raised $4.3 million in venture capital to expand.
Cayce Clifford for BI
For Staryga, getting a prenup was a natural choice. Being a tech founder, she’s accustomed to signing contracts online. She’s also part of a generation that expects on-demand everything.
“We bought a Tesla on a website,” she reasoned. Why not a prenup?
Historically, prenups were the province of the ultrawealthy, pushed by parents to protect family money. One attorney described a photographer-client who deferred to parents on every term in their prenup because a mega-million-dollar inheritance loomed. Lois Liberman, a partner in Blank Rome’s renowned family law practice, has a name for this cohort: “the lucky sperm club.”
That world hasn’t vanished. The children of boomers and older generations are staring down a record wealth transfer — about $100 trillion by 2048. But the fastest growth is among self-made couples, lawyers in New York and San Francisco say. They’re building their fortunes faster than their parents did, as the housing and stock markets surge and float their net worths higher.
Prenups aren’t recorded in any central registry, so there’s little hard data on who uses them or why, said Elizabeth Carter, a professor at Louisiana State University Law and a practicing attorney. Her research suggests that the rise isn’t only about soaring assets, but also about who’s earning them.
Women are more likely than ever to be the household breadwinner. More own homes, hold college degrees, and run teams. In that light, the legal document that once shielded dynastic wealth now protects dual xf, which is why, more often, she’s the one asking for it.
You can’t handshake your way into a marriage and expect that to protect you.Rachel-Jean Firchau
Social media director Kate Winick found love at 34. Before she swiped right on her husband, she’d spent a decade growing her savings working in media, then at Peloton.
“That nest egg was really important to me,” she says. She and her husband used a mediator to sort out the terms of their prenup before hiring separate lawyers. “I think we both felt like the goal was to walk out whole, not to walk out at an advantage or make a profit,” says Winick, now married three years.
In certain corners of tech and finance, prenup lawyers travel by referral. Mazzei, based in San Francisco, recalled a Google employee who, when he inquired about a prenup, said her name was on “a list.” Staryga says many of her husband’s coworkers advised him to get a prenup.
The comp mix drives it, says Michael Calogero, a partner of Cohen Clair Lans Greifer & Simpson. For startup workers, their pay is often equity-heavy. If the company hits, the windfall can be significant. And if it doesn’t, they’ll move on to the next thing. “Even if they don’t have tremendous wealth,” he says, “they’re hoping maybe one day they will and planning for that.”
Earlier this year, Rachel-Jean Firchau, 32, who recently moved to Australia, raised the idea of a prenup to her then-fiancé. She’d been the primary earner for five years, working in ad-agency sales, and they’d just decided she would quit to build her travel-and-lifestyle blog full-time, betting that a brand with more than 20,000 Instagram followers could become a dream job.
The couple pushed the paperwork to the last minute — it was “not as cute” as choosing wedding favors and her reception outfit change. They used First, filling out questionnaires over a Trader Joe’s dinner and later signing from their studio apartment with a notary on video.
The prenup says Firchau owns her brand’s intellectual property and keeps it if they divorce. “You can’t handshake your way into a marriage,” she says, “and expect that to protect you.”
Abigail Varney for BI
It’s not just social media handles that younger couples want to safeguard. Clauses now cover pets and sometimes the pet’s TikTok, if there’s real revenue tied to it. Libby Leffler, First’s founder and CEO, says she’s seen it all: sneakers, handbags, game consoles, patents, and crypto art.
Mazzei says she includes embryos on her standard asset questionnaire. She says pre-marriage embryos come up “more than you would think.” One thing a prenup can’t settle: child custody or support. Courts decide those later, under a “best interests of the child” standard.
Once the assets are sorted, couples start writing rules. The hottest example is the infidelity clause, which defines cheating and sets a financial penalty.
HelloPrenup, a four-year-old platform that produces tens of thousands of agreements a year, says that about one-third of prenups generated on its platform have an infidelity clause. The average penalty is about $165,000. First is seeing more inbound inquiries, too.
Lawyers, though, are unimpressed. Cheating is notoriously hard to prove in court, creating a “mini trial within a trial,” says Lidio Duval, a family law attorney at Aronson Mayefsky & Sloan in New York. Enforceability of infidelity clauses is a patchwork. In pure no-fault states, courts often refuse clauses that insinuate fault. California generally won’t enforce them at all.
Where they are allowed, the language has to be surgical, especially for open relationships. HelloPrenup founder Julia Rodgers has seen clauses that read more like a Feeld bio than a legal contract: sex with a third party is fine, “so long as the spouse is in the same room.”
It’s a different scene from nearly a decade ago when my then-fiancé looked aghast at my suggestion that we hire a lawyer to draft a prenup. He’d inherited a tidy sum from his grandmother, and I wanted to spare him the guilt of asking me to sign one. Plus, if we were ever to divorce, I didn’t need the money. We were both pulling in six figures and carried no debts.
When I asked, his face collapsed as if I’d just slid divorce papers across the table. “I’m not counting on us needing one,” he said, part-statement, part-question.
My chest tightened. “Me neither,” I said before dropping the subject.
My husband heard “prenup” and pictured a trip to a law office with a cold receptionist and a candy bowl on the conference table. The new version of that scene looks different — a couch, two laptops open, and a list of prompts nudging couples toward the hard questions while they still like each other.
That’s the spirit Winick and her husband brought to their prenup. Winick, who describes herself as “reasonably feisty,” knows the version of herself that shows up when she’s stressed, tired, or, “God forbid, hungry.” They chose a prenup so that their best selves could set rules for their worst days. “We’re going to guard each other against even the possibility that we will do things out of anger and hurt,” she says.
Seen that way, a prenup isn’t a hedge against love, but a buffer against our worst impulses.
Melia Russell is a senior correspondent with Business Insider, covering the intersection of law and technology.