@PalmaSailor,
Yeah, I don't get why you'd sign a marriage contract with an "ironclad prenup" with an open relationship partner either.
The Western court system has made a practice out of invalidating prenups. Also, depending on the jurisdiction, many prenups expire after a certain marriage duration, too. I know in New York it used to be 15 years... so if you're the guy who's only started realizing 15 years into his open marriage that he's gotten totally cucked, congratulations, you no longer have a prenup to protect you.
Nobody with honest intentions expects to divorce, but high-wealth individuals increasingly take advantage of prenuptial agreements to protect them from fortune hunters. Many families like to keep c…
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Check out reason #3:
Contracts Made Under Duress: Mental and physical duress are valid reasons for throwing out a prenuptial agreement. Duress can be difficult to prove, but the strategy often works with strong evidence. Proving a lack of mental capacity to understand the terms of the agreement when you signed it is also a valid reason for overturning the agreement.
I'm sure no woman could make that case in the event of a contested divorce...
The #5 reason is also a common one for legally inexperienced men ending up with their prenups overturned. Or they make a silly mistake like loaning their lawyer to their spouse to review the prenup for her (doesn't work that way. She must have her own separate lawyer she hired independently to audit it).
IMO, if you're going to go with a prenup, you should also be taking stronger/smarter asset-protection steps than that. Just in case that prenup goes the way more and more of them are these days, and ends up overturned.
If you really needed a marriage in that situation, where it is open but you're worried about asset protection, you could have a civil ceremony, then sign power of attorney agreements, and set up a joint bank account for joint purchases/rent/mortgage/etc.
@kristian,
Those sound like good rules.
The threats to the system are
- If forward progress in the relationship stalls for too long at any certain point
- If you stop being as strong a guy, or
- The relationship comes under too much external pressure (i.e., you get outed, or are insufficiently discreet... or she just starts talking too openly about it)
If you hit any of those points, it will trigger reassessment in her, where she says, "Wait a minute. Why am I agreeing to this deal with this guy?" and then you're in for the heavy drama. So long as you do a good job avoiding those / handling the relationship with care, it can stay smooth, in theory indefinitely.
There are absolutely men who run one-sided monogamous relationships. However, they tend to be very discreet. The guys who boast about it typically out themselves and get swamped in drama and fold or lose their relationship sooner or later. Also, as you age, you get busier with other stuff and your sex drive goes down, so typically if your main girl is satisfying your needs well taking another woman will just become a time-to-time thing.
@DoWhatWorks,
Yes, the big issue there being the transparency of the setup.
In my case when younger I was too obvious about running relationships like this (especially when I was new to it and oh-so-cocky about how slick I was for being able to have hot girlfriends monogamous to me while I still openly shagged around), and ended up humiliating girlfriends and creating a lot of pushback for myself.
That is one advantage the open relationship / open marriage setup has for it in the current woke/feminist culture of the West: it's a totally 100% endorsed relationship structure, trendy, even, which takes a lot of the pressure off and even lends it social approval.
Whether social approval is enough to overcome what I'd consider to be its obvious shortcomings, I leave that to the individual man to decide.
Again, yes, there are men running implicit one-sided monogamy in the West. It's not super uncommon. The woman knows the husband's fooling around, but he never embarrasses her, he's good with the kids, discharges his familial duties, and she doesn't raise a stink about it so long as it's kept under wraps.
You will even see situations where someone tries to tell the woman her man is cheating on her and she goes off on the tattler, attacking this other person as a busybody and insulting his credibility, trying to undermine him, etc.
I suspect what happens is that the man flounders discreetly and the woman turns a blinds eye/ doesn't ask questions because she's being provided for to a high standard of living... but that's just a guess.
Precisely. It's a bit more complicated than just "standard of living"... you can have the overworked middle class guy providing a high standard of living, and his wife would never agree to or go along with a one-sided set up, and you can have the poorer guy who still provides a happy home and his wife knows how he is and accepts it. There's a fair bit that goes into it. If you can picture the woman who finds some sign of another woman on her man and he brushes it off and she just rolls her eyes at him and the happy relationship continues as usual, you've got the picture.
As for me I'm only considering marriage (whether in long term monogamy or non-monogamy) because it's consistently shown to produce favourable outcomes for children and I may have them in the future
Absolutely, two married parents is a huge advantage for children.
I think it's important to consider what sort of role model you're setting for your children as well.
The women I've seen in open relationships treat their husbands different from how the women in one-sided monogamous ones, or even just regular monogamous ones where the guy has a firm hand on his relationship, treat theirs.
Both women can be respectful, and affectionate... but there is a sort of "my husband is a very powerful, sexually powerful man" sort of respect you see among women who are either in one-sided monogamous marriages or are in explicitly monogamous ones with a sufficiently strong guy. I haven't seen this with open relationship marriages. It's more a kind of affection between equals IME.
I personally feel like that is not what you want children seeing growing up. It should be clear the father's the strong guy in charge of things. The mother has influence, and she makes some rules, and whatnot, but the buck stops with Dad. He's in charge.
If another man is dicking mom, can we really say that "Dad's in charge"?
I think the only way you could is if it's a situation like what you see at the end of
Emmanuelle, the 1974 softcore film, where the old guy's taking Emmanuelle around and making her get fucked by guys. In that case, you're still in charge, because she's taking cocks at your direction.
Any other way, you're the dad trying to corral his kids while the mom runs off and does her own thing at least some of the time too.
It seems to always show up in the behavior of the spouses.
Even regular ol' monogamy is better than open marriages for child rearing, if you ask me. Even if the guy loses some of his power and kind of tunes out, and he's retreated to the den watching sportsball much of the time, you can still get the sense the wife/mother is at the least
fed up with him -- so there's some sense that there's a role he's supposed to be fulfilling, he just isn't doing that great a job of it.
With open marriage, it's a lot harder for the woman to get as frustrated, because she's getting her cervix pounded by Coworker Joe and Repairman Frank. So if Husband Henry is a bit of a disappointment, well, it's okay -- don't stay up too late watching sports, Henry! I'm heading out now!
That's still better than single-parent. But it's also not really what you want for raising strong kids with good heads on their shoulders.
Chase
