I Asked Her For A Prenup Before Marriage & She Left Me!

Some things to consider if you are considering marriage involving the government.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a viewer who has been following my work off and on for about a decade. He got married to his next girlfriend after finding my work without much thought. She got fat and let herself go. He eventually divorced her and got crushed in divorce court. His latest girlfriend left him after he asked her to sign a prenuptial agreement and to get married without involving the government. It was her way or the highway. She chose the highway.

He asks my opinion. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

Well, sounds like you dodged a bullet there.

In this particular email, this guy says he’s been following my work basically on and off for about a decade. After the last time, he originally found my work after he had a breakup. Then he came across it and started reading the book, got serious about it, started dating a girl, things were going well. Then he was like, “Well, she wanted to get married. So I was like, ‘Hey, what’s the worst that can happen?'” So he got married and then over time she started to nag. She was a pain in the ass. Then she started to get fat and let herself go. Then he didn’t feel like having sex with her anymore. Eventually he left her and got absolutely crushed financially in divorce court. After it was all said and done, he was like, “Wow, that really sucked. I don’t really enjoy involving the government in my relationship.”

Anybody that’s ever dealt with the DMV or the IRS, or has gone through a divorce and had to deal with the government trying to get out of the divorce, once you’re in it, it’s like man, the downside risk financially and the mental and emotional torture that you go through and the time that it takes and the money and especially you get into a relationship with somebody for a handful of years and then you lose half your net worth, when you think about it as a man, all the late nights you stay at work because you’re trying to get ahead. Or if you’re an entrepreneur all the time, you’re working on the weekends, you’re working late at night, you spend years and decades building your business and your life, and then some girl who is not part of that at all, she’s in your life for a very short period of time. You marry her, or you involve the government in your relationship thinking, “Hey, we’re going to live together forever and live happily ever after.” Then it doesn’t work out and then you leave her everything you spent decades acquiring and building. You have to give that up to somebody you only spent a handful of years with and she didn’t have to work for that. She didn’t earn that. Yet most women are going to feel entitled to that.

Any guy that’s gone through that is like, “Boy, that was a really shitty business deal.” If you think statistically, half of them right off the bat are just not going to work out. They’re going to end in divorce. When you look at that, it’s like investing in stocks. If you were 50% to 60% of the time going to lose all your money on those stocks, it probably changed what you actually invest in or maybe you’ll do some more due diligence, because when you look at the downside risk of getting married and involving the government and then trying to get out of that marriage, financially that is just like one of the worst deals that you can make, but guys make their decisions based upon their emotions.

If you’re going to involve the government, you got to understand, what are your values? What’s your value system? What’s your goals? If you’re going to do that, you got to make sure the girl shares the same goals and values, because the strongest negotiating position is being able to walk away and mean it. You don’t get what you deserve in life. You only get what you negotiate. A lot of guys, they don’t think very clearly. I had a buddy of mine that got divorced a few years ago and just absolutely got his clock cleaned. His wife and him worked out how they were going to split things up and he started quit claiming properties over to her, just honoring his part of the commitment and she had no intention of honoring it. Then when they went through the actual divorce, she wanted even more. He’s like, “Well, we agreed to this,” and he was asking the judge and the judge is like, “Well you dummy, you signed the quit claim deeds,” and she later told him after all was said and done, that she wanted to make it so he didn’t have enough money or wealth and resources to have a family with anybody else. That was her way of getting revenge on the fact that he left her when she stopped having sex with him. Then literally weeks after his divorce was finalized, he’s already sticking an engagement ring on the new girl. Shortly thereafter, he got married once again. No prenup. Just all in. So far it’s working out, but the last one it took 10 years to blow up. So we’ll see where he is in another seven or eight years, but you know, guys get all up in their feelings and they don’t think straight. Even after they’ve gone through these difficult things, they’re like, “No Corey, you don’t understand. This is the one. This is going to be different.”

If you’re smart and you’ve been through this and you have a good woman who has similar goals, similar values, you’ll probably do something to not involve the government in your relationship, because if it doesn’t work out, I mean obviously you can have an agreement. Again, I’m dealing with people all over the world, so you have to go by whatever the laws are in your state, your city, your country, because they’re different everywhere, but involving the government in your marriage contract and then looking at what it takes to get out of it, if it doesn’t work out and how much it’s going to cost you is very sobering.

So this particular guy, things are going great with the girl that he’s been with for the last couple of years, she wanted to get married, she wanted to go to the courthouse and do all the sappy Disney stuff and he’s like, “How about a prenup? How about we get married, but we just don’t involve the government?” And she wasn’t having it and she left him. He’s like, “Damn…” He writes in telling us his situation, so it’s a good email to learn from. Again, it’s another experience of another dude that just got crushed in the courts. He’s trying to be objective and fair, but his girl was like, “No, my way or the highway.” The government, for the most part, at least in the West in the United States and I know in Europe, it’s everything’s pretty much slanted in favor of the woman. The Middle East and other places, it’s actually slanted, or most of the places, it’s slanted more in favor of the man, and if the guy is earning all the money, especially when he’s been doing all this decades before he even met this girl and he’s expected just to give up half of that because they’re getting married and they’re having sex and maybe kids?

Let’s go through his email.

Viewer Email:

Corey,

I hope you are well. I was in a six-year relationship that ended in 2014 when I discovered my girlfriend was cheating. Shortly afterward, I found your videos and read 3% Man a couple of times. After reading your book, I realized I’d made several communication mistakes with her and women in general, which contributed to the breakup. Within a year, I found an amazing woman and dated her for a couple of years. She pushed heavily for marriage, as her life purpose was to get married and have kids. Although I hadn’t seriously considered marriage, she made me happy, so I decided to go for it. We had similar values and goals, so I figured—what was the worst that could happen?

Well, guess what? He found out.

What happened was a four-year sexless marriage.

Well, you only read the book twice, so that’s definitely a mistake there. If you’re applying what’s in the book, you’re not going to be in a four-year sexless marriage. That tells me you read it and you stopped applying the things that made you successful, and here’s why.

Over time, she became more demanding and nagging, often not respecting my decisions and pushing us forward instead of letting me lead.

I would say probably he was abdicating his leadership role and she didn’t feel safe with him. That’s why she tended to get into her masculine and become a little too much of a boss girl, but he didn’t know what he was doing because he didn’t take the time to read the book. At this point, that was 10 years ago that he read the book.

She gained weight and mostly stopped taking care of herself. She became the masculine force in the relationship and argued with me whenever I tried to take control. This led to me losing attraction, and I no longer wanted to be intimate.

Well, that was by your choice. At the end of the day, that was your best thinking at the time.

I ended up filing for divorce and went back to reading 3% Man a few more times.

Again, he’s just reading it enough to get some attainable success, but he’s not really taking learning the material seriously because I guess he hasn’t experienced enough pain yet.

A year passed, and I met the most easygoing, attractive girl I’ve ever been with. The sex is the best I’ve ever had, and our communication is incredible. She’s the type of girl I want to be with for the rest of my life.

I’ve avoided bringing up marriage, which was easy at first, but now after a year, she’s pushing the conversation. She wants a guy who knows he wants to marry her. I told her I wanted to be with her forever, but that wasn’t enough. I suggested marriage without government involvement, but she turned it down, saying she wanted to go to the courthouse like her family did.

Interesting… This is part of the negotiation. You’re trying to determine whether or not you guys are actually compatible. So you can get an attorney to prepare an agreement that protects her and protects you, but doesn’t involve the heavy hand of the state in your marriage. If she wants to involve or is insisting on the heavy hand of the state being involved in your marriage, then it’s probably not a good idea for you to get into it anyways because she’s trying to twist your arm because of the pussy, to give up all of your leverage and access to your money, your resources and your retirement account that you spent your whole life building, and you got your clock cleaned once already by, sounds like a fat Karen, and you’re probably not excited about doing that all over again.

I brought up a prenup, and for the first time, she got extremely sad and didn’t want to do it. Besides, I know from my previous marriage and speaking with lawyers that a prenup doesn’t necessarily protect you fully.

Yeah, if you got a lot of money and assets and the other attorney knows it, he’s going to sue you to try to get the prenup thrown out because there’s huge financial upside for the attorney. He doesn’t really fucking care if your ex-to-be gets a lot of money out of it or not. All he’s thinking is dollar signs because he can clean your clock in divorce court.

Due to my previous marriage, I don’t believe I ever want to marry again.

Well, those are your goals and your values, and you got to live them, and unfortunately, that may mean that you lose a girl or two. If a girl truly is easygoing, easy to get along with, she just wants to be with you, you can come up with a prenup or some kind of contractual agreement that’s legal in your state, city and country that can protect her in case you get hit by a bus or you have kids or how you’re going to split things up, because the last thing people are thinking when they first get married is getting a divorce, but all of life is a negotiation. After what you’ve been through, it would be stupid to just jump into it and get married and hope for the best because you’ve already been through it once. If a girl is not willing to be understanding after what you went through to get to this point of level of understanding of wisdom, and she’s just all emotional and wants what she wants, well your values aren’t really aligned and neither are your goals. You may both want to get married, but she wants to do it where she gets all the leverage, basically. After you already did that once and you got crushed financially and you gave up money that spent you years and years and years and decades to accumulate and she was only in your life for a couple of years, that’s going to make anybody bitter. That’s like doing a bad business deal. You don’t want to make another bad business deal. That would be stupid.

I don’t feel there is any upside for guys, especially those who make a good living. I lost a lot in my divorce and don’t want to go through that again. She has now left me because I can’t give her a definitive answer that I will marry her someday.

Well, you could have said, “I will marry you, but I’m just not going to involve the government. We can do things legally that don’t involve the government in our marriage,” and if she’s just insistent on things being her way, well then that’s on her.

I want to be with a good woman forever, but I just don’t know if I can marry again. I’m 40 with no kids and see little benefit in marriage, but it seems to be the end goal of every woman I meet. How do you handle this marriage situation if you’re unsure but willing to be with a good woman forever?

Bob

Well you got to live your values. If this is how you want to live, you don’t want to involve the government, then you got to find a girl that’s compatible with that. This girl was not compatible. So it’s just one girl. You can’t just say, “Well, I keep finding women that only want to involve…” It’s like we’re talking two women here, and you really didn’t put any thought. “Well, what’s the worst going to happen?” It’s like when you’re thinking like that, that’s just stupid. “Well, what’s the worse that can happen?”

You should get married because you really want to be with the person, you’re excited to be with them, they’re excited to be with you and you’re good together, you’re easygoing, easy to get along with, she’s fit and in shape, she takes care of herself. Ideally if the mother is fit and in shape, typically your girl will be fit and in shape. If a girl is fairly fit and in shape now or she’s thin but the mother is obese, well more than likely she’ll probably become obese after enough years together with you. I mean, if you want to know how the daughter is going to turn out, just look at the mother. That’s typically what you see. Instead of trying to fix a woman or to get her to get in shape, it’s got to be something that’s part of her value system that she does even when you’re not in her life. She does it for herself. She’s disciplined.

This particular woman here, you don’t want to get married. So when you’re dating, if in the first couple of months of dating, that topic is going to come up at some point, you say, “Yeah, I’d get married again, but I’m not going to involve the government. I’ll have some kind of prenup,” but just blindly getting married with no prenup and involving the government and then having to go through the divorce, what I went through is like, there’s no way I’ll do that again. So if I get married again, it’s going to be outside of the government and we can have a contractual agreement. If we buy property together, we can put it in an LLC, or we can put it in some kind of a trust and we can have some kind of a prenuptial agreement on what we’re going to do with kids. If we don’t stay together, how do we fund our children so they can grow up? You have to work out all this stuff out ahead of time. If the other person is not willing to work it out with you, I mean, this girl just tapped out and says, “I’m out of here.” I would be like, “OK,” well that’s part of the negotiation. She wasn’t down for what you were offering, and so she left you. That’s fine. Let her go. Hopefully the door doesn’t hit her ass on the way out, but she can change her mind and come back.

The strongest negotiating position is being able to walk away and mean it, and you’re pretty adamant that you don’t want to get married again involving the government after what you’ve been through. I totally get it. I got married once in my 20s. I was only together for a year, but we were married for a year and it took me three fucking years to get out of it. To finally get rid of everything, dispose of the house and get a signed settlement agreement, had to deal with her obnoxious boyfriend that was getting in the way and causing trouble because he was worried I was going to come back and take her away from him. It’s like after you go through something like that, it’s not necessary. There’s no reason to involve the state in your relationship. It’s just absolutely not, because it’s just a bad deal for the dudes. Most places in the West, it’s just not a good situation. So you got to find a woman who’s flexible and understanding and is cool with you having legal protections, but not going and getting a government approved marriage because that’s a really bad deal with too much downside risk for the guy, and all the upside is on the woman’s side. It’s like the women have all the cards and have all the leverage when it comes to the kids, when it comes to the finances, they got all the leverage. So that’s just a bad business deal you shouldn’t get involved in. That’s what I would do if I were you.

I mean hey, you dated this girl, you had a good time. You couldn’t come to a meeting of the minds, you couldn’t come to a win-win situation. Maybe she reaches back out in the future. Again, you got to live your value system even if it means you lose this girl forever, because say you go ahead and you cave to her and then it doesn’t work out and now you’re right back where you started. You went against what your gut was telling you, then you get your clock cleaned and then you give up another half of what you got left after the first marriage. It’s like, that’s just too much downside risk. You’re 40 years old. You spent your life accumulating your wealth and your resources. You already got your clock cleaned financially the first time around. Any sane man would feel the way you do, which is like, “I don’t want to get crushed again. It’s not worth it. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” You can come up with a legal arrangement that protects her and the kids in case something happens to one or both of you, but to just go and involve the government in your marriage it just doesn’t make any financial sense for most of us. It’s just the way it is.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen on any page, and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.