I have not read all the posts in this thread, yet, but feel compelled to comment as a retired attorney, a woman with an ex-spouse who agreed to a pre-nup which he subsequently complained he "did not understand" despite graduating from Georgetown Law School himself, and participant in an expensive court battle ending in a settlement that was better for my ex than what he would have received in the pre-nup, but worse than what I offered him before we each spent tens of thousands in divorce attorney fees. BTW, we met at Yale as undergrads and married fifteen years after we met.
Please note that I have no idea what the laws are in Canada, and each State in the U.S. has different divorce laws. I live in N.J.
As to the emotional issues: IMO if your gf canNOT understand your need to plan for possible problems in the future, and to obtain what security you can against unexpected turns in life, then you will NOT do well together and certainly should NOT have children. IMO one of my biggest mistakes was not to realize that my "best friend" and sometimes "bf" did NOT share my values regarding contracts and truth-telling. Or perhaps it was my false belief that he "understood" how much these things meant to me, and how rare and precious a thing it was for me to trust him to do his best to help me satisfy those needs.
As to the financial issues: Although my ex passed the bar, he never practiced law. I, on the other hand, practiced antitrust and other corporate law. During the fourish years we lived together before getting married, he lived rent-free first in an apartment I rented and then on a horse farm I purchased, working a mis-mash of jobs. I wanted the pre-nup primarily to ensure the horse-farm remained entirely mine. Horses were my Aspie obsession from the time I was 3 years old.
When I got pregnant with our first kid and were going to engage a nanny, we made a "mid-marital" agreement instead. That oral agreement (okay, pregnant lawyers can be ridiculously trusting and incredibly stupid, too) stated that until I turned 50, I would be responsible for holding a "job with benefits," and my ex would be responsible for day-time childcare. Thereafter, those responsibilities would reverse. My ex told me that this mid-marital agreement would save our marriage because I, of whom he always said, "Claudia is not like the other kids," could not smoothly get along with another adult living in my house, even if they were the horsewoman I had chosen as a nanny.
During the period my ex was responsible for childcare, I agreed to put 50% of what we would have needed to pay the live-in nanny into his separate bank account.
In this way, my ex could write his airplane mystery book (and later, sculpt his actually quite good sculptures) and continue to try to figure out what he really wanted to do in life, and, when I turned 50, I could pursue my own plan to write the feminist version of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, solving the problem of akrasia along the way (we were both philosophy majors undergrad).
Long story short, when I quit my job at age 50, my ex decided he would rather continue to sculpt than take his turn at a "job with benefits." Without telling me, he accepted his psychiatrist's offer of $1000 (my ex had ADD and his psychiatrist had bought several of his sculptures) to NOT look for a "job with benefits." That was the end of my trust in him, and so of the marriage.
However, the divorce took several years. I could even not file until my younger child was off to college, because of that kid's sensitivities. So I was stuck in a horrible situation for seven years. And went from a financial situation without debt, with the farm completely paid off, and with $50,000 bonus in our bank when I quit my corporate job, to substantial debt at the time of the final divorce decree.
s**t happens. We make mistakes. People misunderstand each other. People change. Even people we love. If your gf canNOT understand and accommodate your need to minimize the pain of that by planning ahead, IMO you will NOT be happy together. It isn't the pre-nup per se; it is that she either does NOT understand your needs, or does NOT love you enough to accomodate them.
Finally, a few tips regarding the technicalities of a pre-nup: Note that each jurisdiction is different; each has "magic words" that need to be in the pre-nup for it to be enforceable, so you MUST consult a local lawyer. Second, note that EVEN IF the magic words are in your agreement, a court may decide the pre-nup was unfair in some way, and so decide to refuse enforcement. To guard against the latter, IMO the best thing to do is: (i) get a different lawyer for each party entering the pre-nup; (ii) disclose all assets; (iii) VIDEO each party talking to their individual lawyer regarding the MEANING of each clause of the pre-nup before they sign it, so no party can claim they didn't understand; (iv) VIDEO each party's declaration with their lawyer present that they believe the pre-nup is fair, and WHY it is fair.
Love,
A recently diagnosed Aspie
18 May 2016, 9:29 pm
