Intimacy Economy and Labubu Clauses

Welcome back to After School Monday Edition, a not-so-brief trends debrief for paid subscribers. 🫶

In today’s letter:

• The supposed prenup bump among Gen Z

• China’s youth are burnt out and “buying feelings”

• The rise of VC-backed meet-cutes

• The latest indignities of AI slop

• Facebook's pivot to TikTok

• Single women won't date men with roommates (bad news for a generation of men still living with their parents)

• Beauty’s “superdupe era” is savage

And so, so much more, plus everything I’m buying, reading, and listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:

PRENUP BUMP

In June, Vogue declared “yes, you probably need a prenup.” (Written, for whatever it’s worth, by Eileen Kelly, 30, who is currently dating Anthony Kiedis, 63.) A few weeks later, Bloomberg reported that “more Americans are getting prenups, even if they aren’t rich.” Once I started noticing prenup headlines, I couldn’t stop seeing them. There have been stories about the trigger clauses couples are adding to protect stay-at-home spouses, creators needing to write TikTok accounts into their prenups, and the “Burden Bump” driving Upper East Side women to matrimonial lawyers after reading Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers. The latest, published by Business Insider, is about AI infidelity clauses. According to HelloPrenup founder Julia Rodgers, clients have begun asking for provisions that count “knowingly and intentionally engaging with an artificial intelligence chatbot, virtual companion, avatar, or similar AI-powered system for the primary purpose of establishing or maintaining a romantic or sexual relationship” as cheating.

But what I started to notice is that what nearly all of these stories have in common is a mention of HelloPrenup, Rodgers’ online platform that lets couples draft their own prenuptial agreements without hiring a lawyer.