Michael Waters, of the New Yorker, has made available for download his article, “Prenups Aren’t Just for Rich People Anymore”, published in the New Yorker. The abstract is as follows:
A few months after Sandy Webb moved from Indiana to Arizona, in 1994, she and a close friend decided to go out for drinks at a bar known for its country dancing, about an hour from Phoenix, in Apache Junction. Early in the evening, two men approached their table and asked to buy them a round. Sandy said no, then relented. Her friend hit it off with one of the men, and Sandy was left talking to the other, a professional carpenter named TJ dressed in Wrangler jeans, boots, and a black cowboy hat. Sandy had recently finalized her second divorce, and she wasn’t interested in dating. When TJ asked for her phone number, she declined to give it to him, but he insisted on giving her his. As she left the bar, she told her friend, “That’s it. I’m done going out with you, because I always get stuck with the stupid one.”
She called TJ a week before Christmas. She didn’t know many people in Arizona, and those she did had left town for the holidays. TJ took her out in the desert for target shooting. Three months later, they were renting a house together in Apache Junction. Four years after that, they had co-founded a business, a crane service with a mostly residential clientele. TJ bought a house for the two of them, where they kept chickens, horses, and goats. Like Sandy, he was divorced. He had three kids; Sandy didn’t want to have any of their own. “I really saw no reason to get married,” she told me.
Another decade passed, together. In early 2009, TJ began getting frequent headaches. Both of his parents were in the hospital, and Sandy figured that the headaches were stress-related. But they became so debilitating that TJ went to a doctor. He got an MRI and learned that he had cancer, which had already spread to his brain. He was forty-eight. Sandy was forty-three. Staring down the end of his life, he asked her to marry him. “At that point, you have no option but to say yes,” Sandy told me. She had one stipulation: she wanted a prenup.
To see the full article, click: “Prenups Aren’t Just for Rich People Anymore”
Posted by Marin Larkin, Associate Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal.
Wealth Strategies Journal 