WHEN “I DO” COMES WITH SMALL PRINT
Last Friday the Telegraph ran a feature celebrating what it called the “Gen Z prenup boom coming to Britain”. Prenup apps, AI consultations, satisfied customers: prenups were presented as just another sensible lifestyle choice, like budgeting apps or meal-prep kits (The example couple is a same-sex couple, which tells you everything about what the Telegraph now thinks marriage is). Clearly, this is a generation so cut off from the meaning of marriage that they can’t enter it without first drafting the terms of its dissolution.
The numbers tell a stark story. A Marriage Foundation survey of 2,000 under-35s found roughly one in five who were married had signed a prenup. Co-op Legal Services reports a 60 per cent increase in prenup sales since 2022. A 2025 Kingsley Knapley/YouGov poll found that if a partner refused to sign, 23 per cent said they would continue the relationship but not marry. Shockingly, nearly a quarter would rather forgo marriage altogether than enter it without an exit clause!
For many, this is financial common sense. But when the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham spoke in the House of Lords prenup debate in February last year, he put his finger on what the business pages miss: “Marriage is not merely an economic transaction. It is, above all a covenant”. He warned it would be “detrimental for all parties if prenuptial agreements were to become a normal part of preparing for marriage”. He is right. The moment you negotiate what happens when your marriage ends, you have redefined what your marriage is.
This is not a story about money. It is a story about a culture that has dismantled the foundations on which marriage stands. No-fault divorce made marriage terminable at will. The Marriage Foundation forecasts only 58 per cent of Gen Z women will ever marry. More than half of live births are now registered outside marriage or civil partnership. The prenup boom is simply the contractual infrastructure being built for relationships that previous generations navigated through commitment, community, and faith.
Gen Z are not solely to blame. The culture has failed them. They know family stability matters, but they are forgetting that marriage, properly understood, is what provides it: not a customisable private arrangement between two individuals managing risk, but a public covenant between a man and a woman, for life.
That is the truth C4M exists to champion. While the media celebrates exit strategies, we defend the real thing: marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman, the foundation on which families and communities are built. If that message matters to you, please forward this email to someone who needs to hear it.