I have to say I completely disagree with the likes of footballers/movie stars/etc's wives automatically walking away with half...

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that pre-nuptials don't have any standing in UK Law following a House of Lords ruling on the subject?

I'll have to disagree I'm afraid.

The entire point of marriage is that you leave your families and become "one flesh", i.e. that you function as one unified entity and as such have equal ownership of all property. If you then get divorced, because all the property was jointly owned it should be equally split. I find the idea of having property external to the marriage to be an absurd concept - why are you married?

Personally I'd like to see pre-nups become meaningless and 50:50 splits becoming the specified default. Provision could be made to adjust this in certain circumstances e.g. unfaithfulness etc. but that should be the considered exception.

Just my opinion though.

I can where you're coming from, but I just don't think it covers modern individuals these days - how many married couples have their own (complicated) individual business interests for instance? Or had seperate accounts and interests before one of them got greedy in the divorce proceedings, for talk's sake?

Those interests should have be sold and the proceeds split equally.

Basically if your marriage fails, you lose half of everything.

Kind of an impetus to not enter into marriage so lightly and thence not give up so easily don't you think?

Those interests should have be sold and the proceeds split equally.

Basically if your marriage fails, you lose half of everything.

Kind of an impetus to not enter into marriage so lightly and thence not give up so easily don't you think?

Definitely, but equally you could be stuck together in misery instead of making the break if it came to that - who wants the added burden of financial pressure (especially these days) in what's become a loveless/unhappy marriage?

Things and people can change over time, and the 'old days' no longer apply for many, probably another reason why the marriage rate is said to be dropping.

Surely anything that puts the gold-diggers out of business is a good thing? If you have any considerably wealth the last thing you want is to get duped by your gold-digging wife as she shacks up with one of your friends and runs off with half your estate. Chances are, even if she spends most of your wealth on heroin to feed her habit, the divorce courts will still give her custody of the kids.

Basically if your marriage fails, you lose half of everything.

Yes but you could do what the Irish do and that is just move out and shack up with your new partner and start afresh. Odds are that you are both married to someone else so why worry.

Because in the UK the Child Support Agency would then confiscate a significant portion of your wages at source, regardless of what you or your ex actually want. There's a lot of regulations in the UK that seem designed to make an already bad situation worse, frankly.

I'm sorry but this is my opinion. As a male in the UK who is old enough to have a life of significant value as it stands, I would have to be stark raving mad to get married without some sort of pre-nuptual. Marriages do break down; this is a reality. But should that happen to me, I'd likely be much much worse off than if I'd never been married in the first place. We may have different opinions of how marriage should work but you'd have to work very hard to convince me that's 'fair'. You could almost consider a pre-nup to be an insurance policy against the incompetence of the state.

Jon