Do We Need Pre-Nups?

You’ve met the woman of your dreams, or, for that matter, the man. (S)he’s charming, sweet, sensitive, supportive, romantic and hard-working. As an added bonus, (s)he’s tremendously good-looking and also has a good job. (OK. Here’s where the alarm bells start ringing – how come (s)he’s available, are all the other men/women walking around blindly which enables this extremely eligible (wo)man to fly below the radar? For the benefit of this post, we’ll ignore those wretched alarm bells).

So you’re a practical so and so and decide a pre-nup is a good idea. There might be tears ('it means you don’t love me'); there may be lies ('poor (wo)man, how can I convince you not everyone is like that?'); there will be reassurance ('it’s just a crying shame that you haven’t met the right (wo)man'); there can be reverse psychology ('my family may not be wealthy...'); there certainly will be indignation ('what do you mean? How dare you? My father had 50 times what you have before he died'; or 'before someone duped him out of £50 billion'; or 'before my mum fell ill and he spent N75 trillion on her treatment abroad'). How do you navigate these obstacles?

…Or, maybe you still believe in the goodness of human nature, you being love-struck and all and thinking: what the heck is this fellow writing about? Where has he been? What sort of shady characters has he met? Pre-nup kó, pre-nup ni (in other words, don’t talk to me about pre-nup). Anyways, I have nothing of value that a future spouse can lay claim to if things go sour, at the most, a DVD player, a house and a car.

Did you just say nothing?! You may end up finding out that ‘nothing’ becomes ‘everything’. Ask Lanre who is now stacking shelves at night in the supermarket after he lost ‘nothing’. Ask Louis who has developed physical complications after mental illness when he lost ‘nothing’. Do ask “Sade” who felt she had to emigrate to Canada when she lost ‘nothing’, which included her erstwhile husband instructing a solicitor to claim a half share of her house on the day she was supposed to complete a sale, after he walked out and said he wanted nothing to do with her and her house.

Maybe we should use the case of Mr and Mrs Crossley to bring it home. In the UK, pre-nups are not as binding as in the US, however, this is a very interesting case. I quote a magazine: Mr and Mrs Crossley ‘were independently wealthy at the time of their marriage (indeed, Mrs Crossley had accumulated £18 million from three earlier divorces {that’s $36m to you folks across the pond}). Their marriage … had the benefit of a pre-nuptial agreement. When Mrs Crossley sought to extricate herself from the agreement in order to bring financial claims against her fourth husband, the Court of Appeal rejected her claim, making it clear that this was exactly the sort of case where a pre-nuptial agreement should be truly binding’.

A true example, albeit an extreme one. Your thoughts?