No one knows what will happen in the future with any of their relationships, a consequence of not being able to know other minds or the future, though many non-rationalists speak and act as if they assume, at least selectively, that they truly can know what someone else is thinking or that a certain outcome (which is logically possible either way) will not happen. A once casual acquaintance could become a close friend or an intimate friend could become a passionate enemy. Marriage is no exception. As much as someone might want their marriage to last as long as they live, and as much as all available evidence might suggest that it will, there is no way to know if it will be so because there is nothing logically necessary about this happening. Within the very next few moments, a genuinely perfect marriage could break down; that it was perfect before does not mean it will be, and many marriages never even reach true perfection to begin with.
Only fools assume (or they are stupid to the extent that they make assumptions), and the only way to believe that a future divorce is impossible is to assume. All sorts of life directions and events are logically possible, and so there is no way to know ahead of time which possibility will come about. Signing a prenuptial agreement—a document affirming a predetermined division of money and property, including future income, in the case of divorce or mutually consented courses of action during the marriage—is a way to protect oneself and even one's partner in the case of an unfortunate future. Yes, formalizing such agreements before legal marriage can be a way to genuinely protect one's partner.
A rational (aka, rationalistic) spouse should all but never object to creating a prenuptial agreement. There is no legitimate problem with prenuptials themselves, only at most with how they might be executed—or because one person does not want a prenuptial due to not really wanting to get married! In no way does a prenuptial in itself express an expectation or desire for a marriage to end. Even then, it can also address matters following the death of a spouse, not just the death of the legal marriage in divorce. Still, a marital connection can never be guaranteed beforehand to be lifelong, and a prenuptial allows for a greater degree of security before and during the marriage and security and peace if it comes to a premature end. It is in this way a safeguard in the hopefully unlikely case that a marriage will falter to the point of ending for reasons other than the death of one party or the other.
A prenuptial arranged well ahead of the hopefully improbable circumstance of divorce can indeed make the process of legal annulment smoother. Particularly if spouses have come to resent each other and are figuratively, or even literally, at each other's throats in the final days of the legal marriage status, it is incredibly helpful to already have key financial details planned upon in a way that does not exploit either party, something that does not at all necessitate a perfectly even split of assets. There is always the option of a postnuptial, the equivalent of a prenuptial except in that it is formed after a marriage has legally started, yet having handled such matters before the legal recognition of a union does ensure that spouses would already have addressed how they would handle specific aspects of a hypothetical divorce. Though this would be the fault of an irrational spouse and not an inherent reason to avoid the issue, calling for a postnuptial might also seem more aggressive to certain husbands or wives.
The unknowability of the future alone, which is of great relevance to the possibility of a partner showing their true self or dramatically changing after marriage, means it is ideal to complete this sort of protective agreement as soon as it can be done, which for people not yet married would take the form of a prenuptial. It is not that a prenuptial is absolutely necessary to protect oneself or, more importantly, to be a rationalistic person (this is about what one believes and the reasons why); it is just a way to better ensure protection before more and more turbulence might arrive. Also, if one's partner refuses outright to consider or pursue a prenuptial, he or she is irrational, and an irrational partner, before or after legal marriage, is not worth staying with except out of sheer mercy and subjective affection. How a discussion about prenuptials goes could reveal far more than information about each party's present financial standing!
No comments:
Post a Comment