Why does a marriage contract centre around money when the partnership?
Because marriage contracts are, and always have been, based on practical matters such as inheritance and child rearing. Marriage contracts didnt start off being about love they started off being about cementing ties between families, countries and businesses what better way to cement a treaty between warring countries or fractions than by wedding the son of one house to the daughter of the other so that there were ties in blood as well as on paper. In addition when they married wives often became totally financially dependent on their husbands either due to laws that said they belong to their man as does everything they owned, to circumstances that still occur like them being expected to stop working, become stay at home parents and depend in their husband for financial support. In most countries women are now able to have and earn their own money but its often still the case they are the ones expected to give that independence up once a baby comes along, even in the west we still criticize working mothers who continue to concentrate on their career instead of letting the career take a hit to concentrate on child rearing. Marriage contracts reflect the fact that in many cases the marriage will end up with one person as the primary breadwinner and one as the primary caregiver and that being the breadwinner usually gives that person an element of power over the person dependent on them, so the dependent person needs to know the marriage contract gives them some protection if the source of their financial support disappears.