James Sexton, one of New York’s most renowned divorce attorneys, has practised law for 25 years and gone through a divorce himself. Yet he remarked on his podcast that people ought to consult a divorce lawyer before getting married.
His suggestion is not intended to encourage you to prepare for a divorce. Instead, it helps you gain genuine awareness of how marriage will alter your life prior to signing the marriage documents. Refusing a physical check‑up will not improve your health; it will only leave you unprepared once health troubles emerge.
As a Chinese family‑law practitioner, I could not agree more. From my professional experience, only a small number of clients take the initiative to sign prenuptial agreements. Most people respond with the thought, “Talking about divorce before marriage makes the wedding unthinkable.” In the eyes of Chinese people, prenuptial agreements tend to materialise romantic affection.
One fact, nevertheless, cannot be evaded. If prenuptial arrangements merely hurt romantic bonds, why have civilisations across the globe devised comparable mechanisms over thousands of years? Ancient Egypt, the Byzantine Empire, medieval Europe and ancient China all had such instruments, albeit they went by different names.
What Does a Prenuptial Agreement Truly Protect?
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago preserves an eight‑foot‑long papyrus document dating back 2,480 years. It is neither a love poem nor a family letter, but a prenuptial agreement.
Drafted in Ancient Egyptian Demotic script, the contract contains clauses as explicit as those drawn up by modern‑day lawyers. Should the marriage end in failure, the husband was obligated to pay his wife 1.2 silver coins and 36 sacks of grain every year until her death. In the presence of a scribe and witnesses, both parties read out every provision aloud and signed the instrument only after confirming its accuracy.
What merits greater attention is that this contract originated from a civilisation where women enjoyed full legal capacity. Ancient Egyptian women were entitled to execute contracts, bring lawsuits against others, testify in court, own property, file for divorce on their own initiative and claim spousal maintenance. In other words, this prenuptial agreement was not charity granted by the stronger party to the vulnerable one. Instead, it constituted a solemn confirmation of mutual rights entered into by two equal legal subjects prior to marriage.
One of humanity’s earliest marital‑related documents from 2480 years ago does not eulogise romance, but itemises assets. This is not cold‑heartedness. On the contrary, precisely because marriage carries immense stakes, affection alone cannot serve as its safety net.
Ancient China did not possess the modern‑day notion of a "prenuptial agreement". That does not mean ancient people made no pre‑marital property arrangements; they merely adopted an alternative approach.
The dowry, known in ancient texts as lian‑chan (property brought by the bride), served as China‑style premarital property settlement.
The poem The Bully from The Book of Songs · Ode of Wei records "Bring your cart over and transport my betrothal gifts". This line depicts a bride‑to‑be transporting her belongings upon marriage. By the Tang Dynasty, statute law explicitly stipulated that "property acquired from the wife’s natal family" should be excluded from family‑property partition. A bride’s dowry constituted the young couple’s private assets. Though the husband could exercise disposal rights, his parents and siblings had no authority over such property.
The dowry system reached its heyday in the Song Dynasty. Dowries were registered on government ledgers and legal contracts as the wife’s separate property, strictly segregated from the rest of the husband‑clan assets. Regardless of the form of marital dissolution, the wife was entitled to take her lian‑chan away. A prevailing principle back then held that "a daughter shall receive half the share allocated to a son". When dividing family assets, a daughter’s dowry equalled one‑half of a son’s inheritance, which legally granted women definite rights of property succession.
Here is a genuine case record.
The Song‑Dynasty case Chen Gui v. His Son Chen Zhonglong and Daughter‑in‑law Cai for Unlawfully Pledging Farmland. In short, the father‑in‑law attempted to seize farmland that formed his daughter‑in‑law’s dowry, yet the court ruled against him. Cai’s marital‑allotted farmland had been mortgaged by her husband to her younger brother. Believing the dowry belonged to the extended family, Chen Gui instituted court proceedings against his son and daughter‑in‑law. The court finally held that Cai’s dowry enjoyed independent ownership and fell outside the scope of the extended‑family communal estate.
This lawsuit dating back more than 800‑odd years shares essentially identical logic with present‑day lawyers handling premarital‑property disputes. The core question boils down to one single statement: what belongs to me, what belongs to you, and what belongs to us.
The dowry system fulfilled an additional purpose: it fundamentally safeguarded the legal standing of the principal wife. Wealthy households would receive betrothal gifts, and the bride’s family would send back assets worth double the gifts as dowry. A husband was obligated to return the dowry when repudiating his wife, forming an economic restraint on arbitrary wife repudiation. Even a woman’s spousal status as principal wife or concubine hinged upon dowry‑related customs: "A woman formally wedded with betrothal rites becomes a wife; one who elopes becomes a concubine".
Though no written contractual instrument existed and the term "prenuptial agreement" was never used, a complete property‑protection mechanism operated through interlocking regulations covering dowry registration, separate ownership, post‑divorce ownership and financial checks on wife repudiation. In substance, it performed every function fulfilled by modern‑day prenuptial agreements.
This mature system was dismantled during the Yuan Dynasty.
In 1303, Yuan‑Dynasty legislation decreed: "For remarried widows, the husband‑clan property and the bride’s original dowry shall remain under the control of the former husband’s family". Under this statute, remarried widows could not take away their late‑husband’s property, nor even the dowry they had brought into the marriage.
This legal provision was fully adopted by the subsequent Ming and Qing dynasties, and women never recovered such property rights over the following six centuries.
Why did this reversal take place under Yuan rule? In her work Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yuan China, scholar Bettine Birge identifies the convergence of three driving forces. First, Mongolian steppe customs prioritised groom‑side betrothal payments rather than bride‑brought dowries, and women took no property upon remarriage. Second, Neo‑Confucianism of the Cheng‑Zhu School opposed women holding separate private property and advocated wives surrendering their dowries to the husband’s household. Third, the Yuan military‑household system required stable soldier‑recruitment households and prohibited farmland from being transferred into another household upon a daughter’s marriage. While these three forces stemmed from different motives, they yielded the same consequence: women’s marital property rights were stripped‑away.
In the Song‑Dynasty Chen Gui case, courts upheld the independent nature of a daughter‑in‑law’s dowry. After the Yuan Dynasty, identical cases might well produce opposite verdicts.
Far‑reaching consequences ensued. Once dowries ceased to belong to wives and women could no longer retrieve their property on marital breakdown, the institutional foundation for marital property arrangements collapsed. Generation after generation, people gradually forgot that formal mechanisms once existed to safeguard every party’s interests within marriage. Only a vague cultural mindset survived: discussing money harms romantic bonds.
It is not money‑related conversations that hurt affection. Instead, the collapse of the institutional framework for negotiating property‑related matters left people trapped in awkwardness, deprived of a dignified framework for such vital conversations.
Nowadays, jurisdictions across the world hold vastly different stances on prenuptial agreements, yet share a striking underlying consensus.
Hong‑Kong courts do not automatically enforce prenuptial agreements. Nevertheless, following a Court of Final Appeal precedent handed down in 2014, judges treat such agreements as a key reference provided that they are signed voluntarily by both parties, accompanied by full financial disclosure and independent legal advice. Regulations in Vietnam are far stricter. Statutorily termed “spousal property regime agreements”, these instruments carry restricted scope and clauses on debt‑related arrangements shall be deemed void. The United Kingdom, Indonesia and the Netherlands each impose distinct qualifying thresholds and restrictions.
Upon close inspection, every jurisdiction seeks answers to the same set of questions: Have both parties obtained adequate information? Was any party under duress? Has a cooling‑off period for deliberation been granted?
In other words, what legislations worldwide truly concern is not whether parties are permitted to sign prenuptial agreements, but whether they entered into them with sound awareness.
Chinese law has furnished an explicit answer. Article 1065 of the Civil Code stipulates that parties to a marriage may agree upon the ownership of their premarital and marital‑acquired property, and such agreements “shall be legally binding on both spouses”. A prenuptial agreement is legally valid in China so long as it embodies the genuine intent of the parties and contains lawful provisions.
Though the law has made this legal instrument available, only a small number of people make use of it. Based on my practice experience, clients who take the initiative to execute prenuptial agreements remain limited in number. Shifts in public attitudes are nonetheless underway. High‑net‑worth individuals have begun to make relevant inquiries, and younger generations are changing their mindsets. The post‑1995 and post‑2000 generations have grown up in an era of transparent information. They more readily accept a plain‑spoken truth: understanding the rules does not equate to a lack of trust, just as purchasing insurance does not mean hoping for accidents to happen.
Now let us return to James Sexton. He states that the essence of a prenuptial agreement boils down to sitting down and addressing three questions: what belongs to me, what belongs to you, and what belongs to us.
These three questions were answered by ancient Egyptians on papyrus scrolls, by people in the Song‑Dynasty via dowry registration records, and are still being tackled in diverse ways under legal systems worldwide. Though its form has undergone countless transformations, its core purpose remains unchanged.
Sexton has handled numerous divorce cases involving high‑net‑worth clients. He frequently cites the case of Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott. The couple wed in 1993 and built their enterprise from scratch without executing a prenuptial agreement. Upon their divorce 25 years later, MacKenzie received around 38 billion US‑dollars’ worth of Amazon shares, marking the largest‑ever property division at that time. A prenuptial agreement would have drastically cut down the complexity and costs of asset‑splitting.
Still, Sexton recounts these cases without a trace of schadenfreude. He cites statistics showing that 86 percent of divorced individuals remarry within five years. Even after enduring painful setbacks, human beings continue to long to love and be loved, and that in itself is something beautiful.
It is striking that a lawyer who spends his days untangling broken marriages can utter such warm‑hearted words.
This perfectly illustrates that prenuptial agreements are no foe to romantic affection. Their true purpose is not to get ready for divorce, but to prepare for marriage: to hold a rational‑minded conversation when love runs deepest. Sorting out separate and joint assets does not stem from distrust. On the contrary, it arises from deep‑seated cherishment, so that the couple will never be forced to confront thorny property matters amid bitter emotional turmoil in the years ahead.
Song‑Dynasty civilians understood this principle and therefore registered dowries within official government ledgers. Ancient Egyptians grasped the same truth and required scribes to read every contract clause aloud. Sexton expresses this wisdom in modern‑day terms: consulting a divorce lawyer is comparable to taking an annual physical examination.
Sexton also offered another observation. The number of times you get to kiss your beloved is finite. You may never know the exact figure, yet it is inherently limited.
Precisely because these precious moments are limited, a sincere discussion ought to take place at the outset. The conversation is not about how you might one‑day separate, but about how you can stay united as partners.