In our work with families, much of the planning looks to the next generation. Less attention is given to those who join the family through marriage. A prenuptial agreement may set out the legal position, but it rarely addresses what matters day to day: how decisions are made, what role a new spouse is expected to play, and how to raise and prepare children who will one day inherit both wealth and responsibility. Left unspoken, these questions can affect the marriage, the wider family and the wealth it hopes to preserve. In conversation with Annamaria Koerling, the Founding Partner of Delfin Private Office, she shares her view on how families can welcome a new spouse well, and why these conversations are best held early.
Sarah Thorpe Scott speaks from both personal and professional experience. She began her career in investment banking at Credit Suisse in New York before moving into media, with roles at CNBC and Forbes and, later, as Managing Director for EMEA at The New York Times. Having married into a family enterprise now in its fifth generation, and serving on its family council, she now advises families, investors and their advisers on succession, governance and the relationships that sit beneath them. She does this through her own practice, Thorpe Scott Coaching and Advisory, and as special adviser to Horizons, a network of next-generation leaders and investors.
Sarah Thorpe-Scott
Prenups are now standard practice, but the conversation about actually integrating a new spouse into the family isn’t. What is missing when couples do the legal work without the relational work, and what is actually at risk — for the marriage and for the family — when that conversation is avoided?
A prenup answers one question well: what happens to the assets if the marriage ends. It’s a good document and families should have one. But for most couples it’s the only structured conversation they have before the wedding, and it’s a conversation about what happens if things go wrong.
Nobody is having the conversation about what happens if the marriage lasts.
That’s the one that matters, because in these families the couple will go on to do three things. They will raise the next generation. They will influence or make the family’s most important decisions. And they will set the tone for how money and the family enterprise are talked about at home. None of that appears in the prenup, and almost none of it is discussed beforehand.
So what’s at risk is the marriage, the next generation and the capital, and the three are connected. A couple can only steward wealth well if they understand it and agree on how to use it. Research has found that disagreements about money predict divorce more strongly than disagreements about almost anything else. In my experience, that’s often because the conversations didn’t happen early enough.
What I see, and this is my observation from practice rather than a research finding, is that how well a family brings a spouse in, and how aligned the couple become, is one of the better predictors of how the next generation turns out. When I meet next-gen members struggling with money, with each other, or with what they’ve inherited, I can usually trace part of it back to two parents who were never aligned on how to talk about wealth and power, and were never helped to get there. That is rarely a failing of the parents. More often it’s a gap in what the family and its advisers offered them. Many advisers see that gap clearly, but it sits outside their mandate, and there has been no obvious place to send couples for this work.
There is almost no research on spousal integration, which is one reason families don’t prioritize it. The other is that these conversations are genuinely uncomfortable, and most people would rather avoid them. So families spend a great deal protecting the assets on paper and very little preparing the couple who will one day steward them and raise their children inside them. But a legal document can’t protect capital on its own. The real protection is a couple who are equipped to make sound decisions together and raise a next generation who can carry what they inherit. Without that, the prenup protects the assets from the marriage, but nothing protects them from what comes after.
For couples preparing to marry, I believe the prenup should be the fifth step of a six-step process. Too often it’s the only step. It often gets agreed at the last minute because the conversations that should come first never happen. We expect couples to work through all of it on their own, with no help, at one of the most emotionally loaded moments of their lives. So everyone keeps the peace, and nobody asks the hard questions. A prenup agreed that way can do lasting damage, leaving behind anxiety, frustration and resentment that surface years later. Built on proper groundwork, it does the opposite. It becomes an agreement both people understand, have genuinely talked through and can stand behind, and a foundation that strengthens the marriage rather than straining it.
Here are the six steps:
1. Aligning on values and vision.
2. Designing a shared life: how they’ll make decisions and work through conflict, what work will look like for each of them, how they’ll parent and how their children will be cared for, what they owe to both their existing families, faith and traditions, where and how they live, and how public their life will be.
3. Building enough financial and business literacy that both partners understand the real picture: the trusts, the structures, the enterprise and how much is actually liquid.
4. Stress-testing the life they’ve designed against the real financial picture.
5. The prenup itself, which the couple come to having done the emotional and practical groundwork, so the agreement is understood, considered and fair to both of them.
6. The wider family conversation about the spouse’s role and what’s expected, in both directions.
*Source for the Q1 statistic: Dew, Britt and Huston (2012), “Examining the Relationship Between Financial Issues and Divorce,” Family Relations. Kansas State University study of US couples.
This is a threshold moment for both people, not just the one marrying in. What does the partner who grew up in the family carry that often goes unspoken, what is the partner joining trying to make sense of, and how does the insider/outsider dynamic actually get set in these early moments?
I married into a family enterprise myself, so I know some of this from the inside. The first thing I’d say is that it’s hard for both people, and I’d resist framing it as one side against the other.
The partner who grew up in the family is often caught between two loyalties. On one side are their family, the enterprise and the capital. On the other are the person they’re marrying and the life they’re building together. Holding both is genuinely difficult. It’s often the first time they’ve seen a prenup, and sometimes the first time they learn the full size of the wealth or what they stand to inherit. They may not have been raised to be financially literate, and there can be some shame in that. And they’re processing all of it while planning a wedding.
The partner joining is trying to learn a code that is almost never written down. That’s true whether or not they come from wealth themselves, because every family’s culture and values are different. If they don’t come from this kind of wealth, the gaps can be practical too: how trusts work, the difference between liquid and illiquid assets, why a large number on paper may not be money anyone can spend.
They don’t want to look grabby, and they also want to be protected, especially if they’re giving something up to make room for a partner who may take on a big role in the family business. That might be a career or their own earning power, a home country, or a kind of independence that’s harder to name. Over time, family life can tilt heavily toward one side: whose traditions you keep, where the holidays are spent, where you live, how the children are raised.
It makes sense that many incoming spouses feel they’ve taken a back seat. There’s sometimes an assumption that the wealth compensates for that, but it often doesn’t. If they feel they’ve been largely cut out in the prenup, it can leave them feeling exposed in more ways than one. Not only financially, but in their sense of place, voice and security within the family. The insider/outsider dynamic doesn’t set in at one moment, and it’s different for every couple. But the prenup conversation is almost always where both people feel it most sharply, which is exactly why it’s worth preparing for. That preparation can happen with the couple together, which is much of my bespoke work. But incoming spouses also benefit from support of their own. That’s why I run a small circle for spouses marrying in. They meet others navigating the same terrain, have one-on-one coaching with me, and build their financial and family enterprise literacy, so the prenup process becomes a more straightforward, positive and productive one.
What does a realistic starting point look like for a family beginning from zero, and what does it look like for a couple who are already ten years and two children in?
Ideally this work starts at least six months before a prenup is signed. In an ideal world, and I know this isn’t always realistic, it would begin before the engagement, when a couple is already talking about shared values, what their life will look like and the roles each of them will play. Starting early means the prenup arrives as one step in a conversation that’s already underway, rather than as the opening move.
For a couple ten years and two children in, it isn’t too late. Lives change in ways nobody anticipates: roles shift, careers move, the family’s needs change. It’s always worth realigning. That might mean a postnup. At the very least, it means having clear, explicit conversations about where things stand now.
The goal is the same either way. When both people feel aligned and protected, their energy can go into the marriage, into raising children who are ready for what they’ll one day inherit, and into making sound decisions together about the family’s capital. Not into a quiet worry about being exposed or taken advantage of. That’s what makes this work matter beyond the couple. A well-aligned marriage is one of the best protections a family’s wealth has.
When a family member avoids the conversation, family office executives often get asked to do this on their behalf. What should they do with that request, and what does that reluctance usually reveal about why these conversations don’t happen in the first place?
Often a parent would rather the family lawyer or trustee tell their child that a prenup is needed than have that conversation themselves. I understand why. Talking about money and power, and about an agreement that has to feel fair to both people, is uncomfortable. The reluctance usually comes from a mix of things: fear of conflict, fear of looking mistrustful, fear of offending the incoming spouse, and the plain fact that money is a taboo subject in many families.
My view is that the conversation should start inside the family, even if it doesn’t stay there. Lawyers and advisers need to be involved, and fairly quickly. But a next-gen family member should first hear about the need for a prenup from their parents, along with the reason for it. Simply starting that conversation openly matters, because the technical work will follow soon, and it lands very differently when the couple already understand why it’s happening.That first conversation doesn’t need to be long or perfect. It can be as simple as: “This isn’t about you or about doubting the person you love. It’s how we look after what’s been built for the people who come after you.” Saying out loud that it feels awkward usually helps more than pretending it doesn’t.
If you’re a family office executive or adviser being asked to carry it, the most useful thing you can do is coach and support the family member to have it themselves, and make it clear you’ll back them up and can be on hand to explain the detail and reinforce the message once the conversation has started. Help them get clear on purpose: how the prenup connects to their long-term stewardship and values, and why it matters to them. Help them see how valuable it is to have this conversation openly, rather than leaving people to make their own meaning of it later. And help them see the opportunity in it. A transparent conversation invites both members of the couple to start thinking of themselves as future stewards, and about what it will mean to raise children inside an unusual context of wealth or a family enterprise. The more openly it’s handled, the less it feels like something being done to the incoming spouse, and the more it looks like what it is: responsible care for the family now and for the generations to come.
That reluctance says a lot about why these conversations don’t happen in the first place. If a family finds it hard to talk about money with someone they love, it’s usually because no one ever helped them learn how.
What changes for the family’s technical advisers — lawyers, accountants — once the relational work has been done, and what tends to go wrong for them when it hasn’t?
Their expertise gets put to its best use. When the relational work has been done, advisers can design structures that solve for what the family and the couple actually need, rather than defaulting to boilerplate terms.
A prenup is designed around the marriage ending. Without the relational work, it can end up working against everyone if the marriage lasts. When a spouse’s need for security isn’t properly understood, the instinct is to meet it in the most concrete way possible, for instance by putting a house in their name. That can tie up capital that would otherwise keep growing, and it may not be what the spouse wanted in the first place. When advisers understand what each spouse actually needs, and why, they have far more room to design provision that gives the spouse real security and keeps the family’s capital working. Both people are better served, and so is the family.
Without those open conversations, advisers end up working around assumptions and fears nobody has said out loud, often ones the people involved haven’t fully understood themselves. This is deeply threatening territory. With a wedding approaching, it’s hard to think clearly, and nobody wants to risk the relationship by naming those fears. So they turn up as negotiating positions instead. Drafts go back and forth, the process becomes more adversarial than anyone wanted, and it takes longer and costs more. Advisers can find themselves caught between two people who haven’t yet talked to each other about the things that matter most. And because the couple isn’t actually aligned, the prenup can become a quiet source of resentment. Concerns left unspoken don’t disappear. They tend to resurface later, when the stakes are much higher.
What happens if the process itself surfaces that the marriage shouldn’t go ahead?
The process isn’t designed to test whether a marriage should happen. It’s designed to strengthen it. The couple are stepping into unusual territory together, and the work helps them see clearly, talk honestly and build a marriage strong enough to carry what comes with this kind of family. Any decision that comes out of it is the couple’s alone. Occasionally, though, the process does show a couple that they shouldn’t go ahead, and that’s painful. I don’t want to make light of it. But if a couple isn’t ready, or can’t bridge a gap that matters, it’s far better to discover that before the wedding than after, and far better than finding out once children are in the picture.
Sarah Thorpe-Scott & Annamaria Koerling
Sarah Thorpe-Scott
For me, the clearest sign is that the couple has had real disagreements and worked through them. If they’ve talked about difficult things, found the gaps between them and had productive conflict about those gaps, the process has done its job. If everything went smoothly and nobody disagreed, I’d be wary. It probably means the real conversations haven’t happened yet. Conflict isn’t the problem. Avoiding it is.
The other sign is a genuine sense of “ours.” The assets may not be split equally or owned jointly, and often they shouldn’t be. But the couple share a vision of the life they’re building and feel it belongs to both of them. Every new couple has to form its own unit while staying connected to the families they come from. It’s one of the central tasks of early marriage. In a family enterprise, it’s harder. Jobs, homes, trusts and money can tie a couple closely to the wider family, and even without anyone intending it, that can leave the incoming spouse unsure whose interests are really being looked after.
When this is done well, the family understands that. The inheritor’s parents, and the siblings where it makes sense, know what the incoming spouse is navigating and what they need to feel secure. People feel able to speak up and be honest with each other. That’s the difference between a process that genuinely brings someone in and one that only looks like it has. The second stops at the paperwork: the prenup is signed, there’s a warm welcome, and nothing else changes.
Annamaria Koerling
For me, the distinction is between inclusion on paper and belonging in practice.
Families are generally very good at creating structures. They have trusts, shareholder agreements, family constitutions, investment committees and, increasingly, prenups. But structure only takes you so far. You can invite somebody to a family meeting without giving them a voice. You can give them information without giving them context. And you can welcome them socially while still leaving them outside the conversations that actually matter.
I think genuine integration begins when the family stops seeing the spouse simply as somebody who has married into the family and starts thinking about the role that person will inevitably play within the family system.
That does not mean giving every spouse voting rights or access to every piece of confidential information. Belonging is not the same as entitlement. Good governance depends upon being clear about those boundaries. But it does mean explaining the family’s history, values and responsibilities; being explicit about what is expected; giving the spouse an appropriate voice; and, crucially, allowing them to ask questions without those questions being interpreted as an interest in the money.
The test I would use is quite simple: does the incoming spouse understand not only what the rules are, but why they exist, and do they feel able to challenge them constructively?
If the answer is yes, you probably have genuine integration. If the answer is, ‘they’ve signed the documents and attended the family retreat’, you may simply have created the appearance of it.
Annamaria Koerling
How does spousal integration intersect with family charters and governance frameworks?
I would go further and say that spousal integration is part of family governance, rather than an adjunct to it.
When we work with families on charters, the most productive conversations are rarely about drafting rules. They are about making explicit the things that families have historically left implicit: who participates, how decisions are made, what information is shared, how family members are prepared for responsibility, how disagreements are handled and what being part of the family actually means.
An incoming spouse immediately raises all of those questions.
One practical issue we see is that families spend considerable time defining the rights and responsibilities of descendants but sometimes barely mention spouses. That omission is itself a governance decision, although usually an accidental one.
A good family charter therefore needs to address spouses explicitly. What information should they receive? Which family meetings should they attend? What education should be available to them? What happens if they work in the family enterprise? Are spouses expected to understand the trusts or investment structures? What happens on divorce or death? And how do you distinguish appropriate confidentiality from unnecessary exclusion?
It is particularly important because spouses often become the people who translate the family’s relationship with wealth for the next generation. They are raising the children who may ultimately inherit both the assets and the responsibilities attached to them. So I would not wait until somebody becomes engaged and then suddenly produce a prenup. Ideally, families should have thought about the principles governing spouses before there is a particular spouse in the room. It makes the conversation far less personal and much fairer.
That is what a good charter should do. It moves the family from making difficult decisions in response to individuals to having agreed principles that can be applied consistently.
Can a technically sound prenup still damage the family or the in-marrying spouse?
Yes. I have seen situations where the legal advice was perfectly competent and the document itself was entirely defensible, but the process caused damage because nobody thought about how the agreement would be experienced by the people involved.
A pattern I have seen is that the family approaches the prenup as a technical exercise. The lawyers are instructed, the family’s assets are protected and, from a legal perspective, the process works.
But imagine being the person marrying into that family. You may discover quite late in the process that decisions affecting your security have effectively already been made. There may be a significant imbalance of financial knowledge. You may be surrounded by advisers who have worked with the other family for years. And because nobody wants to appear interested in the money, some of the most important questions remain unasked.
The document may ultimately be reasonable, but the incoming spouse can nevertheless come away feeling that the first formal interaction they have had with the family is about protecting the family from them. That is an extraordinarily difficult foundation on which to build trust. And that is why I would challenge the proposition that a prenup alone is sufficient. A prenup answers what happens if the marriage fails. It does not answer how the family intends to help the marriage succeed.
The better approach is to put the legal process inside a wider governance conversation. Explain why the family protects capital. Explain the structures. Discuss expectations on both sides. Give the incoming spouse independent advice and sufficient time. And have the uncomfortable conversations before positions become entrenched.
The objective should not simply be a signed agreement. It should be that, when the agreement is signed, both people understand why it exists and neither feels diminished by the process.
