A prenup that any judge can throw out and throw out if they want to. Or if one party (usually the woman) can raise doubts and say that the prenup was signed under duress, it gets thrown out as well. If you place your assets in a trust before you sign a prenup, you have a chance of not getting fleeced in the divorce process because the said assets are legally no longer yours. They are shielded by a trust. Now good luck getting an American woman to sign a prenup after you tell her that your assets are placed in a trust and that she will never have access to them in case of a divorce.
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This is what happens when your ego gets in the way. Extremely short-sighted.
My wife makes over double of what I make and I make a respectable income being an accountant. I had to do things more around the house while she was studying licensing exams. We work as a unit to have the rich life we both want.
Now since she is has her career on a path of success, I have a massive safety net to take risks like trying to start several unsuccessful businesses and fail quickly to get that much needed experience and teaching of failure that I would not be able to do on my own.
We take turns leaning on each other when the other is struggling or needs more support.
It’s amazing what an open mind and challenging societal conditioning will do for you.
(BTW her income dramatically increased while I was on EoG and she doesn’t listen to subs)
Tying back to original topic. Another purpose of marriage is to leverage both of your energy and assets to get much farther than you would on your own and in the society we live in today it so much easier to do that if you are at least legally married.
Once you tie those things together, magic happens and through the challenges life throws at you, your relationship and love deepens along the way. It’s all interconnected. Big thing is communication and having aligned values, beliefs, and goals.
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Ah, marriage. A concept once invented by the Church and State. The Church wanted leverage over people (mainly through guilt & purchasing forgiveness) and the kings just wanted the women. Through the institution of marriage they could enforce prima nocta, the right of a king to have sex with any woman on her wedding night (although nobody knows for certain if it was ever truly practiced) and especially after sending the men off to die in the Crusades they had a massive amount of women who were not able to support themselves without help. Since a man could only marry a single woman all those women were forced to seek the aid of rulers and priests. And believe me, even the priests were taking advantage. Through not permitting divorce and making it a sin to “covet thy neighbor” they were raking in the cash and the women. Making people feel guilty was good for business.
Later of course religion and kings lost power as despotism and theism gave rise to democracy and atheism. Religion to this day is still doing reasonable, but governments needed to change tactics. So they created new laws and constructs. Things like the common-law marriage where once you live together for 5 years you are automatically married, or tax benefits from the implicit pooling of resources to entice you to register as married and give them power over you. But of course maintaining the law of only being allowed to marry once, and creating many laws to ensure divorce can destroy people through divorce settlements, alimony, child support and so on.
And now we are in an even more dangerous time where one party, usually the prettier one, can simply point at the other and blame them for something and as stated above any prenup can be thrown out with cause.
I have always maintained to the women in my life that marriage should NEVER involve Church or State. It is a promise 2 people make to one another, to walk the next part of their lives together. I have no problem throwing a big wedding or a special day, but it would take a lot for me to actually get married “on paper”. And there will be a prenup with promise to support (meaning if she quits her job and sells her house to be with me and we divorce, I will help her get back on her feet because I want to, not because I have to) even if I’m the poor party. And if there’s children, any money for the child goes to the child, and only if I actually get to spend time with the child.
So the purpose of marriage? There really isn’t one. You can promise to be exclusive and to love and support each other through everything, and if both parties agree you can make that promise to/with more than one person as far as I am concerned if you can handle the responsibilities. You can pool your resources and support each other financially, without sacrificing your freedom to get a few tax benefits.
But in my opinion involving religion or government and giving them a say in your relationships is absurd. Unless I get to be king of course. Then I’m all for bringing back the good old days. 
A little off-topic rant to top it off...
This may be unrelated, but just like it was with the Crusades, the first World War or Great War sent all the men off to war to die, and forced the women to do all the work the men used to do. Then when the remaining men came back, they looked around and noticed that if the women were already doing all the work they didn’t have to do anything but be taken care of by her. Rather than taking back up their responsibilities in the marriage/partnership they got lazy.
This is likely why the women started fighting for their independence and equal rights with such fervor, especially with the second war coming so soon after just compounding the problem.
I personally suspect that if the men had resumed their responsibilities and care had been given to the widows most women would have been okay with it. As long as she was respected and loved for her part. But when the men got lazy and women were forced to do everything, they figured they were now entitled to everything as well. I don’t blame them, I just think the past years have seen it go over the top, far past the point of any actual equality. And it is leaving an ever increasing number of men feeling helpless, angry and many other not-so-good things. All because as men we neglected our responsibilities so long ago.
I hope one day society will allow us all to be true to our nature again, so we can stop trying so hard to be everything simultaneously and we can actually find somebody who will make us whole and we them. Maybe we can give this another chance?
A fully hermaphroditic society would be awful in my opinion. Let us please stop shouting that we should celebrate our differences and then turn around and force everybody to be the same.
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I think our nature is to create things and to then induce partial or total amnesia that we ever created them in the first place; taking them, instead, to just have floated down from the Ancient sky in the primordial past.
Our nature is also to be very unaware of our nature.
We are like mirrors whose nature is to conclude that they are whatever is currently being reflected on their surfaces.
We are always in-between; always in-process. Neither completely this, nor completely that.
We are incomplete sentences who are blessed (or cursed) to invent our own endings. And as soon as we manage to come up with a halfway serviceable completion, we immediately convince ourselves that this must therefore be the one and only answer.
We fear and reject the existential freedom that is our birthright by nature; experiencing it as a burden rather than as a privilege.
…uhhh…
…quoth the raven…
(we’re still processing reconciliation over here. take it as you will.)
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