[Mayfield]

I have a friend who is entering into his third marriage. His first marriage lasted more than a dozen years, produced no kids, and ended in divorce. The next marriage lasted far less time, produced no kids, and ended in a messy, protracted divorce.

This year, his girlfriend, an old university classmate is expecting his child. She's going to have the kid, and they're going to raise it together, so I'm told.

Because there's a kid on the way, I asked if they were getting married. I asked this because it seemed obvious to me he should, for the good of his kid and the protection of his own rights and assets - not the least of which being the protection of the access to his kid - marry this woman (under a pre-nuptual agreement) lickety-split.

Here's why:

1) The benefit of the kid is what I'm considering first. A marriage under a prenup reduces variability and decreases the chance that the kid's life will begin under a protracted divorce nightmare.

2) The odds of a divorce are frankly pretty good. The ink is barely dry on his ugly, expensive second divorce, made all the more ugly and expensive thanks to having no prenup.

3) Both he and I are friends going back to grade school - and we're both children of divorced parents. It was terrible for both of us in a lot of ways, and we both remember this. I guess I'm the only one applying what we learned, though.

4) After meeting this woman, I found she sets off a lot of alarms. A bit obnoxious, cold, self-absorbed, really, really likes her booze, has a series of interpersonal train wrecks in her own past, and the capper - her sister just had a kid, a case of filial uterine me-too-ism if ever I saw one.

No matter the reason, the the bun is in the oven already. So I bring up marriage.

Did he say "Yeah, I'm on it"? Did he say "Of course, what am I, an idiot? We're doing a prenup" No, he did not. He looked at me like I was crazy, like marrying the mother of his child or getting a prenup was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard in his many years.

A couple of weeks after our talk, he did ask her to marry him and she did accept, but there's no talk of a prenuptual agreement.

So: Should I press him about this?

Or am I out of line? Am I over-reacting to what is just another set of benign variables that some weird upper-middle class people find themselves having kids under?

Mayfield