When Kristin Brennan, 24, and her boyfriend, Nick Lamplough, 26, moved in together nine months ago, they negotiated the usual household issues. Who makes the bed. Who handles the laundry. And who gets legal custody of their Xbox, their friends and their neighborhood bodegas if they ever break up.
They jotted down this agreement in a leather-bound book, endearingly dubbed The Captain’s Log. The book — in which they also record their daily adventures as a couple — is now stashed on the nightstand of their Upper East Side apartment, “out of sight, so we can avoid ridicule,” says Lamplough.
It’s their version of a “dating prenup,” a set of contractual guidelines for relationships and relation-splits.
“It forces you to realize that you’re sharing everything,” says Lamplough, who generously offered Brennan rights to their desk, TV stand and “a plant that we don’t really keep alive.” He, for the record, gets custody of the Xbox.
Brennan says making these decisions in advance is a healthy communication tool. “If he thought he was actually going to talk to my mom after we broke up, he now knows differently,” she says. The two are both very close to each other’s parents, but in the event of a split, no dice.
These agreements — call them pre-prenups — are something that more and more unmarried New Yorkers, stung by bad breakups and bitter battles over apartment guardianship, are pulling together. They hope to protect themselves, their property and their pets from happily never afters.
The number of unmarried couples living together shot up 88 percent from 1990 to 2007, according to the US Census Bureau.
So it’s no surprise that pre-prenups, also known as cohabitation agreements or “cohabs,” are an “explosive trend,” according to Arlene Dubin, a matrimonial attorney at Moses & Singer LLP and author of “Prenups for Lovers.” Dubin says pre-prenups are particularly common in New York, where common-law marriages aren’t recognized and unmarried couples are considered legal strangers — unless they have a cohab.
“You live together and you think you’re going to be protected,” she explains.
“Then the guy dumps you and you’re left high and dry — it’s a pretty bad situation.”
Dubin says that while legal assistance is preferable, informal signed documents or even mutually acknowledged e-mails can serve as binding contracts.
She’s drafted cohabs covering everything from real estate rights to education expenses to partner support to “bad boy/bad girl clauses” that outlaw cheating and drug use. One of the few things that can’t be included in a cohab is a requirement for sex, she says, “Because then it looks like a prostitution contract.”
Manhattan family law attorney Philip A. Greenberg says he’s also receiving more and more calls about cohab agreements.
“The divorce rate is so high that most people have close friends and relatives who have been divorced, so they’re just petrified of getting married,” he says. “A cohabitation agreement will deal with the issues that come up if they ever break up.”
He recently drafted such a contract for his unmarried neighbors who were buying a co-op together. The couple explained, “We get along so great, we don’t want to do anything to spoil it.”
Greenberg also brokered a contract between a law student and her boyfriend, who was supporting her through school. They agreed that once the woman graduated, she’d foot the bill for his master’s in social work.
“They weren’t thinking in terms of what if they broke up,” Greenberg says, “They just wanted to put it down on paper.”
Relationship blogger John DeVore and his girlfriend of six months, comedian Sara Benincasa, don’t yet live together. (He’s Astoria, she’s Financial District.) But they’ve already hashed out a dating prenup. A few rules scratched out on a soggy napkin have blossomed into a seven-point decree, frequently amended “over booze at various dive bars,” according to Benincasa, 29.
“It’s a living document, like the Constitution,” adds DeVore, 35.
The written contract covers creative rights to their shattered relationship, division of possessions and breakup sex entitlements (one episode of drunken pity sex, “preferably within 72 hours,” is permissible).
“We both have fairly public jobs for which we often speak and write about sex and love,” says Benincasa. “Our weird, multi-tentacled agreement grew out of a conversation on how to balance privacy with that public sharing.”
But aren’t dating contracts sort of unsexy? “Come on, how are pseudo-legal agreements not romantic?” jokes DeVore.
Other unwed couples fear losing their furry friends more than their prewar penthouses.
Allie Herzog, owner of integratePR, gave up her East Village apartment six months ago to move in with her investment banker boyfriend, Eric (who declined to give his last name), in Houston. The roomies soon purchased a puppy and a couch.
“As I began to fall more and more in love with Waffles, I wanted to make sure that he would be mine if we ever broke up,” says Herzog, 25.
So they agreed that, in the event of a split, she would get custody of their pug while her boyfriend would get the couch.
“We finally just e-mailed it to each other, and now we have our pre-prenup,” Herzog says, adding that she has no intention of losing her man or dog.
Hell’s Kitchen daters Miriam Bouchma, 33, and Ajay Mohan, 29, have taken pet custody precautions to another level — decreeing visitation logistics for her Staffordshire bull terrier mix, Bailey.
Bouchma and Mohan reconciled a few months ago after a previous breakup, making them more aware of the painful logistics of a separation. This time, they decided to pound out a detailed dog custody agreement.
“In the event we break up, Ajay still gets visitation,” she explains. “For example, he could visit the dog while I was at the gym — or if I go out of town, he would have first choice to watch her.”
Mohan says the pooch prenup has brought the couple — who both work as legal consultants for FTI Consulting but live separately — closer than ever.
“I find it really, really freeing that we can talk about stuff like this,” he says. “It makes me feel a lot more confident and safe with the relationship.”
Indeed, Manhattan relationship psychologist Dr. Joseph Cilona says dating prenups can result in clarity about a partner’s values, beliefs and trust issues. “They can help identify and reveal potentially big disparities early on, before each person is invested very deeply emotionally,” he says.
And then there are couples who treat their relationships more like month-to-month calling plans.
Photographer Christian Johnston, 48, created what he calls “The Contract” with his then-girlfriend. The two agreed to formally check in every 30 days and accept or decline another month together.
“We’d either re-up or move on. We’d just lay it all on the table,” he explains. “We would say, ‘The end of the month’s coming, we gotta start thinking about the contract. I’m in for another month. You?’ ”
Johnston believes dating contracts are ideal for couples “who like to live in the real world.”
Shortly after their 12-month anniversary, the two broke up — during contract negotiations.
“I think these agreements are a great idea,” Johnston says. “They prevent hard feelings — we’re still friends to this day.”
Creat your own pre-prenup
* Discuss the idea with your partner and decide if a pre-prenup is necessary and important to you both.
* If you have valuable possessions, consult a lawyer. “If you have nothing, you can split nothing both ways,” says family law attorney Philip A. Greenberg. “But if you have property, or one is putting the other through school, it’s not something you should do yourselves.”
* If your valuables are more big sentiment than big bucks, consider drafting your own agreement and put it in writing, complete with signatures and witnesses. “If the only issue is Fido, then you don’t need a lawyer,” Greenberg says. “Two intelligent people can come up with an agreement.”
* Choose what to include in your cohab agreement. Items to consider: shared property, partner support, pre-relationship or future debts, joint household purchases, educational expenses, pets, life insurance, health proxies and joint banking accounts — among others. You can even list rules for your relationship and possible breakup, although enforcing these can be tricky.
* Revisit your dating prenup whenever a significant life event or change in circumstance occurs in your relationship. If you go from renting to owning together, or one wants to quit work for school, “you want to provide for that,” says Greenberg. “You have to use some common sense.”