‘It’s gone from shameful to chic’: How Gen Z is reframing divorce — and embracing prenups

At just 24, Michel Janse’s divorce came like a bolt from the blue. Janse, a content creator from Texas, discovered her husband had been cheating on her — a betrayal that explained the growing distance she’d felt in the final year of their three-year union. While processing the divorce, Janse began sharing confessional YouTube videos about the experience, describing herself as being in a “narcissistic and emotionally abusive marriage” and offering small refrains of hope, like “the future is brighter” and “I found love after divorce.”

In the corners of the internet where young divorcees congregate, Janse began to notice a language of empowerment surrounding the ending of a marriage. It gave her a sense of safety. “I saw a TikTok of a young couple high-fiving each other after getting a divorce,” Janse tells me, now 28 and living in San Diego with her new husband, Jordy. “I think our generation sees divorce as a celebration that we didn’t waste time in something that wasn’t serving us,” she says. “We figured out it wasn’t right. We don’t want to make ourselves miserable for another decade because of pride.”

The decision to end a marriage no longer carries the same stigma as it did for Baby Boomers (those aged between 60 and 79) and Gen X (between 45 and 60). While Janse grew up in a Christian community where divorce was a taboo subject, she thinks divorce has been rebranded by her generation — especially on social media. “It’s gone from shameful to chic in a weird way,” she says, pointing towards a series of viral TikTok posts from prominent content creator Aspyn Ovard, who tells her followers that getting divorced is “chic” and captions her videos like “in my divorce era.”

There’s no ignoring that divorce is a heart-wrenching, emotional ordeal. But rather than being viewed as a personal failure or source of shame, Gen Z is choosing to see divorce as a win. This sentiment has been brewing in celebrity culture for some time — model Emily Ratajkowski refreshed her engagement ring into two divorce rings after her 2022 split from Sebastian Bear-McClard, while other figures, like Kim Kardashian (after her marriage to Kanye West) and Jack White (and his ex-wife Karen Elson), have thrown divorce parties to celebrate the conclusion of a marriage. In 2025, divorce isn’t an admission of defeat; it’s an opportunity for a new beginning.

Alina, a 28-year-old living in New York City, made light of her divorce on social media by sharing a TikTok video on the subject, accompanied by circus clown-themed music. The fashion stylist had married her ex at 21 and spent four years married (eight years together in total) before they began to drift apart. “I was very young,” she says. Now engaged again, she says her approach to relationships has changed entirely. “It was that first, toxic big love where you bond over your traumas. I didn’t have a strong sense of self until I was 25. Now I am sure of what my values are, and with my financé, it is way more intentional — we are aligned on our core values and how we want to raise children.”

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As a whole, Gen Z is getting married much less and much later than their parents’ generation, with the average marriage age being 28.6 for women and 30.2 for men in the U.S., and the marriage rate currently at around four percent in that group (it’s also worth noting that since most Gen Z-ers are only just starting to get married, there is not much data yet). But for those who have decided to wed in their late teens and early twenties, young couples aren’t afraid to walk away when a marriage isn’t serving them.

Gen Z will be the first to speak up about an unhappy marriage, according to Jenny Bradley, a divorce attorney, mediator and founder of Triangle Smart Divorce in North Carolina. “Gen Z has been taught that if you’re not happy, change it — almost to the point that I think sometimes they throw in the towel too soon on jobs, marriages, relationships, and such, and they don’t try to make it work,” she says.

From first hand experience, Bradley has witnessed two very different attitudes to divorce between Gen X and Gen Z. “We’ll meet with somebody who’s in their gray divorce years four or five or six times, and it might take a year or two or three before they finally decide, ‘Yeah, I think I just need to do it,’” shes says. By comparison, Gen Z-ers will arrive “guns blazing…. And they’re like, ‘we’re done.’”

In an online world where young people are clued up on therapy-informed terminology like “gaslighting”, “self-care” and “prioritizing your mental health,” Gen Z seems quicker to spot the red flags in their relationships and act on them. However, Alina wonders whether the sometimes trivial language around mental health on social media is “helpful or harmful” when it comes to diagnosing the problems in a relationship. “As a generation, we have more understanding of how a relationship should be. But it also could get to another extreme; if you’re getting married, you should work on it. Marriage should mean something to you, and the promises that you made.” Before her own divorce, Alina and her ex went to couples therapy. “It was a slow war of realizing that we had outgrown each other in a way that I felt completely disconnected from that person.”

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Gen Z is well aware that 50 percent of unions in the U.S. end in divorce. And they are seemingly keen to protect themselves in that eventuality, financially speaking, with prenuptial agreements. Jacqueline Newman, a matrimonial attorney and managing partner at Berkman Bottger Newman & Schein LLP in New York City, has witnessed the boom in prenups — a contract that outlines how a couple’s assets and finances will be divided if the marriage ends — fuelled by a variety of factors, such as the rise of blended families, people marrying later in life and women having great financial independence than ever before. Newman says that prenups are so prominent that they now take up 40 percent of her practice.

“Not to sound unromantic, but at the end of the day, marriages are legal contracts,” Newman tells me. “Any time a person enters into any other type of legal contract, they would hire an attorney and become educated on it. It’s a very reasonable thing to do.”

Gen Z, in particular, is more accepting of prenups than older generations because they understand the “practicalities” of divorce and want to avoid the “nasty” splits that they witnessed growing up, according to Newman. “They’re seeing it all the time — there’s celebrity divorces and much more information that’s accessible about divorce. They’ve seen the horror stories of divorce, and they want to protect against it,” she says. “We’re living in a very uncertain world. So to have a sense of what will happen if you were to divorce, it gives people a lot of comfort.”

Janse agrees Gen Z’s attitude toward divorce is rooted in a desire not to relive the dynamics they watched play out in their parents’ marriages — unions that often persisted out of duty, fear, or the belief that staying together was somehow better for the kids. “I have friends who wonder why their parents are still together. They say, ‘They’re so miserable, they would be so much happier if they just swallowed their pride and got a divorce’… If I get in that spot, I don’t want that to be my life.”

Out of Janse’s five closest friends from Texas, three of them have been divorced before turning 30. As they navigate through their twenties, she jokes that they’ve become a marital support group.

“Though divorce is really scary, I haven’t met anybody who has regretted doing it,” she says. “If you get to a point in your marriage where it is unsafe, unhealthy to a point of disrepair, or your partner doesn’t want to put in the work, then there’s goodness on the other side.”