Arthur Brooks’ Advice to Take a Risk May Be the Worst Marital Advice Ever
Why all couples, wealthy or not, need a prenup
Arthur C. Brooks is a presumably a smart man. He’s a Harvard professor, PhD social scientist, a best-selling author and a columnist at the Atlantic who has just co-written a book with Oprah Winfrey, Build the Life You Want. And he’s been married to his wife, Ester — presumably happily — for 32 years.
His latest Atlantic column, “Why the Most Successful Marriages Are Start-Ups, Not Mergers,” offers a few good thoughts on how to have a “durable romantic partnership” (although whenever someone quotes W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist who believes marriage is always the answer — the name of the project he founded, the National Marriage Project, should give you a clue — I take it with a huge grain of salt).
But here’s where Brooks offers possibly the worst marital advice ever— take a risk, as in don’t have a prenuptial agreement, a contract in which a couple agrees to what will happen to their assets in case they divorce. He notes that the percentage of couples who have a prenup nowadays has hugely increased, driven mostly by millennials who want to avoid the “messy disentanglements” of their boomer parents.
