Who knew I’d get so fired up about media articles this week? New York Magazine writes about the current rise in prenuptial agreements. In particular, it points out that more and more upper-middle class couples in their 20s and 30s are executing prenups for first marriages. These young bastions of corporate opportunity spout jargon like “business relationship” and “asset entitlement” when discussing their upcoming nuptials.

Reading this made me want to turn and spit a glob of phlegm onto my living room floor. I agree that there is no single “correct” view of marriage – romantic, convenience, financial. It serves different purposes for different people, and none are universally right or wrong. But what infuriates me is the crap spouted by my peers about the need to “protect their future assets” from potential spouses. Why? Because it proves that we have learned nothing from the complete gaffes that passed for the marriages of over 50% of our parents. We are direct products of the Baby Boomers, the over-divorced over-analyzed over-medicated disillusioned generation that taught us that making money and owning lots of crap is the most important part of life, and the greatest tragedy is losing it to some opportunistic lowlife that you never should have married anyway. Twenty- and thirty-somethings, take a look at your parents and your friends’ parents. Has battling to Keep Up With the Joneses brought them any sort of enlightenment in the twilight of their careers? Are they a happy, well-adjusted group at peace with the choices they’ve made in life? Yeah, I thought not.

But instead of examining Boomers and learning from their mistakes, we’re simply taking their soul-crumbling notions to the next level. More than half of them went through miserable, messy divorces and wound up bleeding emotional shells – well it must have been because they didn’t protect their future assets before they got married! That’s the key! I won’t make the same mistake! I worked hard to get through college and land this private equity job! I’m not risking it all for some Daddy’s Girl from Bedford! Summon the lawyers!

And so, entirely free of insight or self-awareness, we now plan our futures around the seeming-inevitable divorce. Talk about a foregone conclusion. We’re so obsessed with holding on to our six-figure incomes, Upper West Side co-ops, BMWs and Florida condos that we don’t bother to consider the possibility that we are in fact choosing a life mate and entering into a relationship based entirely on unselfishness. Divide the spoils now! You’ll have peace of mind knowing that the wench can’t walk away with the Bridgehampton house and the Lexus. And so you premise your entire relationship on hoarding your material crap and protecting yourself from your spouse. For this, we cast aside thoughtfulness, sacrifice, consideration and even civility toward the person to whom we are pledging eternal love. In other words, we’re lying at the altar.

Throughout this frenzy of prenuptial self-armament, it never even occurs to us that perhaps these bank accounts, 401Ks, and property holdings are worth giving up for our spouses, or just for the sake of the human experience. What price on love, even if it doesn’t work out in the end? What price on starting a family? If your relationship is falling apart, does it really honestly matter who gets the leather sofa? On your deathbed, will you regret not spending more time with your furniture? Maybe instead of drowning ourselves in self-obsession, we should spend more pre-marriage time working through topics like how to be the best spouse possible, what to expect emotionally in the marriage, how to handle rough times. Maybe we should try making ourselves entirely vulnerable and un-self-serving for once in our lives – worst thing that happens, it doesn’t work out, and so we pick ourselves up and go on. We watched our parents do it – no reason why we can’t follow suit.