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If your prenuptial agreement needs tweaking or if you're married, never had one and now want one, a postnuptial agreement may be in order.

"A postnuptial agreement is any contract spouses enter into after they're married and are not necessarily contemplating divorce," says Sharyn Sooho, a divorce lawyer and cofounder of DivorceNet.com. "Postnups may be for people who intend to stay married, but aren't getting along and need some defining of responsibilities within the marriage."

Nationally, 3.7 out of every 1,000 people got divorced between June 2004 and May 2005. In Pennsylvania, there were 36,606 divorces and annulments in 2004.

While postnups aren't common, lawyers nationally and locally say they're seeing more interest in them.

Most often, income/asset issues prompt a spouse to seek a postnuptial agreement, although behavioral issues -- infidelity, gambling, drinking, excess spending, failure to help with the chores or the children -- can be addressed, too.

"It can be a full-blown separation agreement and people want to delineate division of assets or it can be something more limited than that, such as how to deal with certain assets that they might have acquired or maybe they want to exclude a certain business or asset from being considered [in the case of divorce]," says Pittsburgh divorce attorney Margaret P. Joy, with the family law firm McCarthy, McDonald, Shulberg & Joy.

Parents may say to their married children, "You never had a prenup before and if you don't get one, you're not getting a piece of the [family] business," explains Pittsburgh divorce attorney Tom Mulroy of Thomas M. Mulroy & Associates.

"They're afraid that if the [child's] marriage breaks up that their [family] business is going to be drawn into that divorce."

Perhaps a spouse comes into some valuable property or a large sum of money and wants to exclude that from being considered in a possible divorce settlement.

Regarding behavioral issues, one spouse may have had an affair and the other spouse is willing to forgive and stay in the marriage under certain conditions.

"In those kind of discussions, the wronged spouse will ask that an agreement be drawn up that says if you step out of line again, you suffer some financial penalty," says Pittsburgh divorce attorney Chris F. Gillotti of Gillotti, Capristo & Beck.

In a slightly different, but similar vein, a spouse may seek a postnuptial agreement as a way of financial protection.

"I'd like to make this marriage work and we ought to make this joint commitment not to bail out, but I'm not going to sit around here having time pass, increasing my exposure or wasting my greatest assets -- my years to live -- if this isn't going to happen or if my giving you time to rehabilitate isn't going to work," says divorce attorney Gary G. Gentile, of the family law firm Goldberg, Gruener, Gentile, Horoho and Avalli. "We're going to work on this, but during this period, I'm not going to increase my exposure financially and if this blows up, I'm going to put into terms what will happen."

A postnuptial agreement can specify that if things don't work out, a spouse is entitled to a fixed amount of money or a share of assets as of a fixed date, thereby excluding any future increase in assets/income, he said.

A Florida man learned his wife had run up huge credit card debt on accounts he knew nothing about and hadn't been paying her bills. He sought a postnuptial agreement to force her to get counseling and promise not to get new credit cards, according to the Miami Herald.

Mr. Gentile believes postnuptial agreements can work.

"They get people relaxed and able to focus on the problem and it reduces the area of concern," he says.

Ms. Joy agrees, adding, "When people feel insecure about financial issues, they can't even concentrate on the personal issues."

Postnuptial agreements should stand up in court as long as the people involved have made full and fair disclosure of their assets and the value of those assets, Mr. Mulroy says.

Mr. Gentile and one of his partner's, Harry Gruener, represented Dorothy Hardy in her 1997 divorce, which included a legal challenge to a 1993 postnuptial agreement between the former Mrs. Hardy and 84 Lumber founder Joe Hardy. She claimed her then husband hadn't disclosed the true value of his business or personal assets.

Mr. Gillotti represented Mr. Hardy. The parties reached an agreement, but never divulged the details of the settlement.

Postnuptial agreements can have a warm, fuzzy side, too.

Mr. Mulroy has seen longtime spouses -- who've reached the point in their relationships when they know they will be together forever -- replace earlier, more restrictive prenuptial agreements with more liberal postnuptial agreements.

Others believe postnuptial agreements often are essentially templates for divorce agreements.

"You have to stop and think about how healthy is that relationship where people are carving out certain areas and saying 'This is mine and mine alone,' " says Ms. Sooho, who personally has handled only one postnuptial agreement in 30 years of family law. "Even if it's legally enforceable, this may tell you about the state of your marriage."

Usually, by the time people go to talk to lawyers, it's already pretty late in the marriage and they've probably already made up their minds, she says.

In Mr. Gillotti's experience, couples most often have these kinds of agreements in contemplation of a separation or divorce.

"If you're getting along fine and the marriage is solid, why do we have to sit down and define who has certain property rights?" he said.

And depending on what the trouble is in a marriage, especially if the couple doesn't want to divorce, sometimes "therapists are better at helping spouses reach agreements than lawyers," Ms. Sooho said.