In 2026 America, even fairy-tale romances are lawyered up. The massively publicized wedding of pop star Taylor Swift and football player Travis Kelce this past weekend was accompanied by what is thought to be the “most sophisticated” prenuptial legal agreement in history. This was to protect their respective fortunes—which is obviously less about Kelce’s $70–$90 million than Swift’s $2 billion—in the unfortunate case that the union goes south in the coming years.
The newlyweds are a famous example of an exploding trend. Whereas in 2010 only about 3 percent of Americans said they had a prenup, by 2023, 47 percent of millennials and 41 percent of Gen Zers who were engaged or married had these agreements in place. In a similar trend, married couples are increasingly likely to keep separate bank accounts—up from about a sixth to almost a quarter since 1996, according to the Census Bureau.
This boggles the average Boomer or Gen Xer mind. Negotiating your divorce before your wedding and making sure your spouse can’t touch your savings seems to many like a terrible strategy to build trust and intimacy. But hey, maybe the young folks are onto something. Come to think of it, when my wife, Ester, and I combined our households in the late 1980s, we had a resource asymmetry very similar to Swift and Kelce’s: I had two cardboard boxes of belongings and 50 bucks in my checking account; she had at least five boxes of stuff and a cool $250. She’s just lucky I wasn’t marrying her for her money.
Those who advocate for prenups and separate finances have four basic arguments for doing so. First, it helps couples not to fight about money if they happen to have very different approaches to home economics. Second, it forces both partners as individuals to acquire and maintain saving habits and financial skills. Third, each person can prioritize specific, tailored financial goals. Fourth, and most obviously, not merging finances creates a layer of clarity and security if the couple splits and one spouse demands some of what the other brought to the marriage.
However, as many would point out, the odds of love fading—or failing to develop properly—might rise precisely because of these financial insurance policies put in place. And that is exactly what the research tells us. A 2026 study in the journal Family Relations found that for couples with average-quality communication—let’s just call these people “newlyweds learning to live together”—prenups degraded relationship satisfaction. At best, prenups were an insignificant factor among couples who were already very good communicators (something my wife and I certainly were not during the first few years of our marriage).
Meanwhile, in a 2023 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers showed that couples who commingled their money in joint bank accounts enjoyed greater harmony than those who didn’t, and reported better goal alignment. Indeed, the correlation between financial trust and good interpersonal skills was underlined still further in a similar study last year, which revealed that couples with high financial interdependence had more frequent and higher-quality communication than those who didn’t. Scholars writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concluded that couples pooling all their money is excellent for overall relationship satisfaction.
Every couple is different, and has its own history and peculiar circumstances. But in general, the research strongly suggests that marrying without a financial hedge against divorce and committing to mutual trust and compromise about money are self-fulfilling prophecies about the power of love and faith. Divorce feels less like an option, especially early on when couples are figuring out how to live together in captivity. Learning how to share money and collaborate on financial decisions builds trust across the whole relationship.
Working through different attitudes about money is precisely what helped make Ester and I the team we are today. I remember a long-ago argument about how to celebrate our first anniversary. We had gotten beyond the cardboard-box stage, but still had only enough money to do one of two things: go to the beach for two days or buy a cheap couch. Being a thrifty, practical American, I argued for the couch, to replace the lawn chairs in our apartment. A good Spaniard, she loudly advocated for the beach. In the end, we compromised (and went to the beach). If we had never merged our bank accounts, I might have stubbornly stayed home to save for a couch—which, at my pay rate then, would have meant a monthslong quarantine. But because we were financially, and therefore emotionally, entwined: problem solved, harmony established.
Marriage is a mystical enterprise co-created by the two romantic entrepreneurs (together with, some of us believe, God), who are all in, in every way—including with their money. Very often, this does not entail a neat 50–50 financial arrangement. And that is actually the point. Obviously, relationships in which one partner is all give and the other is all take are not healthy. But trying to litigate fairness from the outset of a marriage militates against the core ingredients of love, which are generosity and a willingness to give more than your share. Plenty of evidence suggests that spouses who practice this kind of generosity are most likely to say they’re “very happy” in their marriage. This is part and parcel of the old truism you probably learned from your grandmother: Marriage is 100–100, not 50–50. By this, she meant that each spouse plays a unique role in the relationship, and a good spouse should exercise wholehearted effort to fill that role. By comparison, haggling over equitable finances, chores, or anything else is, well, boring.
The 100–100 relationship does involve risk. But that also is part of the point, as I discussed in a column last month. To give your heart away is a risky thing to do: Your mate might leave you; they might betray you; someday, you might have a big battle over custody of kids or, yes, money. Even in the happiest of cases, abject heartbreak awaits—and here I count my own marriage—because one of us will inevitably die before the other. But the chance we take together, to declare our love, and build a life despite these risks, is itself emotional glue. Risk undertaken with another builds trust. And when people enter this “for better or for worse” endeavor, it jointly stimulates reward-related neural signals. Is commingling your finances with this person scary? Good.
My argument in this column is not that prenups and separate bank accounts will necessarily kill a marriage. The research does not say this, and many happy marriages do indeed feature prenups and independent finances. And indeed, I wish Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce the very best, and I hope that, in their fairy-tale romance, they live happily ever after.
That is, pursuant to the terms of the fully executed Marital Harmony Agreement (hereinafter referred to as “the prenup”), that the parties do hereafter reside in a state of matrimonial bliss, free of material irreconcilable disputes, subject only to periodic review by counsel and mutual waiver of any future claims for equitable distribution.