Every other city in this series has covered some version of the same instrument: a document, a credit check, a debt disclosure, something built to make an exit cleaner or a financial picture clearer before two people commit further. Arizona offers its residents the exact opposite option, and it's one almost nobody outside the state has heard of. Since 1998, Arizona has allowed couples to enter a "covenant marriage" — a legally distinct form of marriage that requires premarital counseling upfront and deliberately narrows the path out later, restricting divorce to a specific, short list of fault grounds or a mandatory multi-year separation. It's the anti-prenup: a legal commitment device built to make leaving harder, not easier.
Phoenix's version of this series' financial-caution theme runs through two very different instruments Arizona makes available — one that assumes a marriage might end and prepares for it, and one that a small number of couples choose specifically to foreclose that assumption from the start.
The rare option: making the exit deliberately hard
Arizona is one of only three states, alongside Louisiana and Arkansas, that offers covenant marriage as a legal alternative to a standard marriage license. Entering one requires premarital counseling from clergy or a licensed counselor, plus a signed declaration of intent acknowledging the seriousness of the commitment. Once entered, a covenant marriage can only be dissolved on specific grounds under A.R.S. § 25-903: adultery, a felony conviction with a lengthy sentence, abandonment of the home for at least a year, physical or sexual abuse, drug or alcohol abuse, or — the closest thing to a no-fault option — a minimum two-year separation, reduced to one year following a legal separation decree. Standard Arizona marriages, by contrast, dissolve on a simple finding that the marriage is "irretrievably broken," with just a 60-day waiting period after service of the divorce petition.
Covenant marriage has never taken off in Arizona the way its backers hoped — it remains well under 1% of marriages statewide, chosen mostly by couples with strong religious or conservative convictions about marriage's permanence, and research suggests those couples were already less likely to divorce for the same reasons they chose the option in the first place. But it's a real, currently available legal instrument, and its existence says something worth noting about Phoenix specifically: this is a market where a meaningful cultural current treats marital commitment as something to be legally reinforced rather than merely documented — the reverse instinct from the exit-planning conversation happening in every other city in this series.
The default that applies to almost everyone else
For the overwhelming majority of Arizona couples who don't choose a covenant marriage, the state's baseline property rule points in the opposite direction, and it's worth understanding on its own terms. Arizona is a community-property state under A.R.S. § 25-318, and while the statute uses the word "equitably" rather than "equally" — a change a state senator named Sandra Day O'Connor helped push through in 1973, years before she joined the U.S. Supreme Court — Arizona courts have interpreted that word narrowly. Under the state Supreme Court's ruling in Hatch v. Hatch, division must be "substantially equal" absent a sound legal reason otherwise, which functions in practice as a near-automatic 50/50 split of everything acquired during the marriage, regardless of whose name is on the asset.
That combination — a default that splits community property close to evenly, alongside a rare opt-in that makes leaving the marriage itself extraordinarily difficult — gives Arizona two decoupled financial-caution conversations most other states only offer one of. Nationally, the more common version of that conversation continues to trend the way it does everywhere else in this series: 53% of engaged or married Americans under 45 had signed a prenup as of May 2026, up from roughly 8% in the 1990s, and Arizona law explicitly permits couples to define their own property rules in writing before marriage specifically to opt out of the near-50/50 default.
A city absorbing a lot of people who don't know any of this yet
Phoenix has become one of the top destination metros in the country for inbound relocation, driven substantially by sustained out-migration from California, and that population growth is a real part of why local housing costs have climbed well past what the metro's own wage base historically supported. A meaningful share of Phoenix's newer residents are arriving from states with different default marital-property rules than Arizona's near-automatic 50/50 — the same kind of legal assumption gap covered elsewhere in this series, here specific to a genuinely fast-growing, transplant-heavy dating pool that may not realize how firmly Arizona's default actually leans toward an even split.
The retiree and elder-fraud backdrop
Phoenix's other distinguishing demographic feature — a large population of retirees and snowbirds, concentrated in and around the metro — shapes the local romance-scam picture in a way worth naming directly. Arizona ranked fifth among all states for total romance-scam losses in 2022 and 2023 combined, at more than $47 million, according to an analysis of FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center data, and the state's own Attorney General's Office has specifically flagged the elderly as disproportionately targeted, citing cases where scammers defrauded older Arizona residents out of hundreds of thousands of dollars each. AARP Arizona's own guidance echoes the same advice given nationally: be wary of anyone who professes "instant love" and moves unusually fast. For a dating pool that includes a large share of remarrying adults navigating existing estate plans, trusts, and adult children's inheritance expectations, financial caution in Phoenix often has a second audience — not just a new partner, but a family already counting on how existing assets are structured.
The same national instinct, running through a Phoenix-shaped filter
The broader financial-caution data holds here the way it does everywhere else in this series. Credit Karma's national survey found 66% of dating-app users consider it important that a partner have good credit, and 87% say they're specifically interested in someone financially responsible. Earnest's 2026 Debt and Dating Research Report found 55% of daters consider at least one type of debt an automatic dealbreaker. Bankrate's research found 40% of Americans in committed relationships have hidden a financial secret from a partner — figures that hold in Phoenix the way they do everywhere else, layered on top of a local legal landscape with genuinely more range, from a rare option that locks a marriage in place to a default that splits nearly everything evenly the moment it ends.
Why a room does something a profile in this city genuinely can't
None of the information that actually matters here — whether someone understands Arizona's near-50/50 default well enough to have planned around it, whether a remarrying partner's account of their existing family and estate obligations holds up under a real follow-up question, whether someone is the kind of person who'd choose a covenant marriage's seriousness or simply hasn't thought that far ahead — is something a static dating profile can carry. A number on a screen doesn't distinguish between a first marriage and a second one built around a decade of prior financial decisions.
That's the gap Relish's Phoenix evenings are built to close — recurring nights at Thunderbird Lounge in the Melrose District, in a city absorbing new residents faster than almost anywhere else in the country. A real conversation, held across a table, tells you more in a few minutes about whether someone is financially grounded and genuinely clear-eyed about what they're building here than any profile in this city ever will.
Sources referenced
A.R.S. §§ 25-318, 25-901, 25-903, 25-329; Recording Law, AZ Court Help, DM Cantor, and Divorce.law, Arizona divorce and covenant-marriage analyses, 2026
MyAZLawyers / AZ Criminal and Family Law, covenant-marriage prevalence and mechanics
JSTOR Daily, "Why Covenant Marriage Failed to Take Off"
CityWage / Apartment List / City Affordability, Phoenix cost-of-living and salary-needed analyses, 2026
Phoenix New Times / Cronkite News / AZ Big Media, Arizona romance-scam loss reporting (FBI IC3 data), 2025
FBI Phoenix Field Office, U.S. Attorney's Office District of Arizona, Senior Fraud Awareness Day release, 2026
Arizona Attorney General's Office, Valentine's Day romance-scam consumer alert, 2026
Harris Poll for Bloomberg, national prenup adoption data, 2026
Credit Karma / Harris Poll, dating app credit-score survey, 2024
Earnest, 2026 Debt and Dating Research Report
Bankrate, Financial Infidelity Survey, 2025–2026
All figures above are drawn from the publicly cited studies and reports listed. Where a source was cited secondhand through another publication, that's noted — worth verifying against the original study before publication if you want primary-source links rather than secondary citations.
Relish hosts structured social evenings for driven professionals across Phoenix — including recurring evenings at Thunderbird Lounge in the Melrose District — as part of 50+ cities in the US, UK, Canada and Australia since 2014. Find a Phoenix evening →