It’s certainly not a subject likely to win you an adoring gaze from your sweetheart across a romantic, candle-lit table.

Making financial plans in the event a marriage ends is difficult for most couples to consider. No one enters into a marriage thinking it’s doomed to failure. Most feel certain that they’ve found their soul mate, and are loathe to discuss a treasured relationship in the cold, detached language of the legal world.

Once nearly the exclusive province of the rich, the high profile, and the powerfull, the public had regarded the prenuptial agreement as a symbol of greed and selfishness.

But attorneys say that quietly, under the radar, prenups have become more and more commonplace. They attribute this to the fact that a higher percentage of marriages these days are not the first go-around for one or both partners — over 40% of marriages today, says the National Center for Health Statistics. About 20% of these marriages reportedly now engage a premarital agreement.

Historians note that first marriages tend to happen at a later age than in years past.

Both these changes mean that partners are more likely to have accumulated assets and belongings they may want to safeguardt. They may also have children from previous relationships that they intend to leave assets to — A prenuptial, sometimes called an antenuptial agreement, can protect one’s desire to provide for those children. One Austin divorce attorney that we spoke to about this mentioned that these are common concerns for her clients.

Unlike very young couples, these “more experienced" spouses have had relationships in their lives that seemed great when they were new, but went sour somewhere down the line. To them, a prenup may simply further define obligations the partners have to each other.

Prenups are also a common way to create a written record of a spouse’s previously held assets. These assets are more easily protected, should their partner have back child support, alimony, taxes, or debt held by creditors that accumulated prior to the marriage. Those who have built up businesses, too, frequently rely on prenuptials to shield rights to an enterprise their spouse had no part in creating.

You can learn more about the potential risks of not having a prenup by watching the Austin divorce seminar.

Currently about 5% of marriages have a prenup in effect. But these kinds of changing conditions in the population are expected to continue to increase the occurrence of such premarital agreements.