Dating Insurance: The Pre Prenup

Love sometimes ends badly and someone has to get the dog

As if modern dating wasn’t daunting enough, the single set has been given one more thing to be cynical about: pre prenuptial agreements.

Called the “dating prenup,” couples everywhere are doing it, or at least seriously considering it. Why? Because new love sometimes ends badly and someone has to get the dog.

Now that couples are more likely to live together before they get married, there is often a lot of property to divide if the relationship fails. Cars, pets, apartments, art work, CDs, the Xbox – the list is endless for what two people can acquire together while cohabitating or simply dating.

“He got the apartment and the cat,” one Philadelphia woman told NBC Philadelphia about her last failed relationship. She didn’t have a dating prenup.

“Stuff happens,” Michelle Jackson of the Council for Relationships said. “Hopefully, if people are having a conversation about living together, they’re at a level of communicating with each other that is more open and authentic.”

Though many who talked to NBC Philadelphia were wary of the idea, the dating prenup is an “explosive trend” in New York, Arlene Dubin, a matrimonial attorney at Moses & Singer LLP and author of “Prenups for Lovers,” told the New York Post.

“You live together and you think you’re going to be protected,” Dubin said. “Then the guy dumps you and you’re left high and dry — it’s a pretty bad situation.”

Jackson said that a partner’s request for a pre-prenup should not be taken as a statement of doom. Don’t assume the worst, just talk about the pros and cons, Jackson said.

As for one Philadelphia couple, Sean and Katie--together for five months and two days--they’re going to pass on the dating prenup.

“I don’t think it’s worth it,” Sean said. “Then again, I don’t have much stuff.”

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