Tiger Woods
How many women does it take to break up a marriage, assuming of course one isn’t named Jolene. How many does it take to keep a marriage together but for Tiger Woods’s wife Elin Nordegren to get a modification of the prenuptial agreement? We don’t know, but whatever the number is, it was apparently enough.
Prenuptial agreements are nothing new, but the recent troubles in the Woods-Nordegren marriage highlight a little talked about fact of family and divorce law, namely that these agreements are contracts. Like the marriage contract itself, or any other contractual document parties enter into, it can be changed, modified, updated, breached, dissolved, etc.
If two parties (in this case the married couple) decide to enter into a contract, they can. Assuming the contact doesn’t contain any illegal provisions that would make it void as a matter of law, they can come to an agreement on whatever they want, and place whatever terms or limits in the contract they see fit. Weight gain conditions? Sure. Specifics about what they will or won’t watch on television? Why not? Who gets the convertible on Saturday? Ok.
And if they decide to change their prenuptial agreement (sometimes called a premarital agreement) they can do that as well.
There’s a lot of stuff that people have included in these contracts that might seem odd. The Chicago Sun-Times once published a story about some of the more interesting clauses they’d found;
- The right to random drug testing and a fine for positive results. (Married to the Olympic Committee?)
- The husband does not have to go on vacation with his mother-in-law. (Ok. We get this one.)
- For each time a spouse is unfaithful: $100,000. (Let’s hope this is a deterrent and not an incentive. “Honey, I want a new boat. Would you mind going out to get a hooker?”)
Ah, love. Isn’t it grand?
(Photo courtesy Keith Allison’s Flickr page.)
