A COUPLE of weeks ago the Daily Telegraph ran a lengthy feature celebrating what it called ‘the Gen Z pre-nup boom coming to Britain’.
It profiled American tech start-ups making pre-nuptial agreements cheaper and faster, quoted satisfied customers, and treated the whole thing as a positive lifestyle trend, like meal-prep kits or budgeting apps. Pre-nups, we were told, are no longer the preserve of the wealthy. They are simply what sensible young people do.
The piece was revealing, though not in the way its author intended. Strip away the upbeat framing and what you find is a generation so estranged from the meaning of marriage that they cannot enter it without first drafting the terms of its dissolution.
The numbers are real enough. A 2025 Marriage Foundation survey of 2,000 under-35s found that about one in five who were married had signed a pre-nup. Among the unmarried, 58 per cent said they would consider one. In the US, a 2023 Harris Poll for Axios found 41 per cent of engaged or married Gen Z respondents had entered a pre-nup, up from just 15 per cent of all married Americans in a 2022 survey. Co-op Legal Services reported a 60 per cent increase in pre-nup sales since 2022. A Kingsley Napley/YouGov poll in January 2025 found that if a partner refused a pre-nup, 23 per cent said they would continue the relationship but not marry, and a further 6 per cent said they would end it entirely.
The drivers are easy enough to list: no-fault divorce (74.2 per cent of English and Welsh divorces were granted under the new legislation in 2023), the Bank of Mum and Dad (Savills reports parents gifted £9.6billion to first-time buyers in 2024 alone, and many now require prenups as conditions of the gift), student debt, record-late marriage ages and a generation who watched their parents and grandparents divorce. TikTok lawyers with hundreds of thousands of followers have normalised the conversation. According to the Telegraph, HelloPrenup, founded in 2021, has processed agreements covering over $25billion (£19billion) in assets.
But normalisation is exactly the problem. When the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham spoke in the House of Lords on February 27 last year, he put his finger on what the business pages miss: ‘Marriage is not merely an economic transaction. It is, above all a covenant: something good and beautiful. We must ensure that our legal framework continues to foster the values of partnership and protection for the vulnerable.’ He said it would be ‘detrimental for all parties if pre-nuptial agreements were to become a normal part of preparing for marriage’.
Quite so. A covenant is unconditional. A contract is not. The moment you negotiate what happens when your marriage ends, you have redefined what your marriage is. Russell Moore, the American evangelical writer, makes the point crisply: ‘A pre-nuptial agreement assumes a contractual rather than a covenantal view of marriage. It assumes there are two “partners” in the marriage, each protecting his or her interests. A Christian marriage, however, is a one-flesh union.’
None of this is to deny that in specific cases, particularly where there are children from prior relationships or vulnerable family assets, legal protections may be appropriate. But the cultural phenomenon we are witnessing is not targeted protection. It is routine exit-planning as a condition of entry.
The empirical evidence supports the theological instinct. The Marriage Foundation’s 2021 briefing, analysing more than 2,000 ever-married UK adults, found that pre-nups were associated with lower commitment. Those who had ‘slid’ into marriage rather than making a deliberate decision were more likely to have signed one. The apparent protective effect of pre-nups vanished entirely once you controlled for marriage preparation and wedding size. Their conclusion: ‘Pre-nups per se don’t change the risk of divorce.’ They are a symptom of how marriage is being understood, not a cause of how it performs.
The international picture makes the point more starkly. Baroness Deech told the Lords that ‘in countries where pre-nups are more common the divorce rate is lower’. The data says otherwise. Across Europe, high divorce rates coexist with normalised pre-nup culture. Finland has one of the EU’s highest crude divorce rates alongside rising pre-nup numbers and falling marriage rates. Nutz, Nelles and Lersch documented this ‘individualisation of marriage’ in their 2022 study of matrimonial property opt-outs in Germany, published in the European Journal of Population. Their finding: where pre-nups are normalised, marriage is redefined as a customisable private arrangement rather than a settled public institution.
That is the direction of travel here. The Law Commission’s December 2024 scoping report on financial remedies proposed four models for reform. The most radical would import a continental-style default matrimonial property regime in which couples select their own property arrangement. That is the contractualisation of marriage in legislative form. In the same Lords debate, Sir Nicholas Mostyn predicted that AI will soon produce pre-nuptial agreements ‘bound to be upheld as valid’. The emerging world is one where you can generate the terms of your marriage’s dissolution on your phone before you have even chosen the hymns.
Meanwhile, Sharon Thompson of Cardiff University, the leading UK scholar on pre-nups, confirms in a 2025 study that they are ‘no longer the preserve of the rich’. Professionals in their 30s are ‘viewing marriage in a slightly different way to maybe previous generations’. That is putting it mildly. The Marriage Foundation projects that only 58 per cent of Gen Z women and 56 per cent of Gen Z men will ever marry. Just 4 per cent of women born in 1998 had married before 25, compared with 60 per cent of those born in 1960. In 2021, 51.3 per cent of live births in England and Wales were registered outside marriage or civil partnership, the first year this had been the case since records began in 1845. Cohabiting couples have increased 144 per cent since 1996. The Acton Institute calls it the ‘Gen Z Marriage Paradox’: they know single parenting is bad for society but cannot commit to the institution that prevents it.
The Telegraph celebrated the pre-nup boom as evidence that young people are financially savvy. The truth is closer to the opposite. It is evidence that the covenant understanding of marriage that made it work for centuries as the foundation of family life and social stability is being replaced by a consumer model in which every relationship is provisional and every commitment comes with small print. Once marriage is treated as a private, customisable arrangement, it is unsurprising that its public meaning, including permanence, sexual complementarity, and openness to children, dissolves with it.
If you want to know what Gen Z really needs, it is not cheaper pre-nups. It is marriage enrichment, marriage preparation and a culture that tells them the truth: that marriage, properly understood, is not a contract between two autonomous individuals managing risk. It is a covenant between a man and a woman, before God and community, for life. That is what makes it different from every other relationship. That is what makes it worth entering without an exit strategy.
