Chapter 22
The Economics of Marriage

Marriage and divorce are the two largest financial transactions most people ever execute, and the only ones they enter without a closing statement, a due-diligence period, or a single professional in the room. A merger of two balance sheets gets less scrutiny than the purchase of a used car.

This is not an argument against marriage. It is an argument against sleepwalking into it. Here is the part nobody mentions at the wedding: if you do not write down the financial terms of your partnership, the state has already written them for you. That document is the law of your state, it runs to thousands of pages, you have never read it, and it governs what you own, what your spouse owns, and who keeps what if the partnership dissolves. You are free to draft your own terms. Most people simply accept the government’s.

Love and money occupy different planes; marriage forces them onto the same ledger. This chapter treats that ledger clinically — the merger, then the divestiture — because the emotional weight of these events is precisely what makes people skip the paperwork that protects them. The survivorship case, the death of a spouse, is its own kind of transaction, handled in section “Estate planning” alongside the rest of estate settlement.