Originally designed to protect corporate secrets, NDAs seem to be commonplace today. In a recent article, New York Magazine writer Reeves Wiedeman even called them “the defining legal document of our time.”

“To put it briefly, I think this document has crept into more and more areas of our lives over the last few decades,” Wiedeman said in an interview with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal.

Wiedeman and Ryssdal discussed how the rise of social media has led to the rise of nondisclosure agreements. In one case, Wiedeman reports, a couple committed to the terms of a nondisclosure agreement and eventually married each other. You could call it a nondisclosure agreement love story.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: So let’s answer the question in the headline: How did NDAs become the defining legal document of our time?

Reeves Wiedeman: Slowly and then all at once, like many things. In short, this document has crept into more and more areas of our lives over the last few decades. You can look at a few different moments that led to a boom in nondisclosure agreements: Social media and the ease with which people can go out and talk about things led to more and more people wanting to stop others from talking about it. And then, in an unfortunately ironic twist, as a legacy of #MeToo, we learned how powerful these nondisclosure agreements can be to silence people. And as I talked to more and more lawyers, many of them said one of the effects of #MeToo and some of the backlash to it is that people are using them more and more because they’ve seen what can happen when their wrongdoings become public.

Ryssdal: There’s the corporate history of these things, right, at the executive level, and then, you know, sharing technology and this and that. But now, as you alluded to, where it’s so easy to spread information about other people on social media and the internet and where so many people are protecting their influencer status or their brands, right? I mean, that’s part of what’s driving this.

Wiedemann: Yeah. I mean, celebrities are in some ways businesses themselves, their brand and who they are, and the public perception of them in some ways dictates how they make a living. And yeah, you know, the nondisclosure agreement was pretty much exclusively something that existed in corporate life for decades. One of the places where it kind of started to spill over into personal life was celebrities. And that happened in celebrity divorces, when you split up with somebody and you don’t want them to talk badly about you because you’re worried about what that does to the public perception. And so celebrities have been using these agreements, you know, for at least a decade, handing them out to basically everyone they come into regular or even brief contact with. And only more recently has it moved from celebrities to wealthy people and then eventually to regular people.

Ryssdal: Well, I mean, there’s an example in this article of a couple who are dating and they ask each other to sign a non-disclosure agreement or something. I mean, that’s crazy.

Wiedemann: Yeah, I mean this couple in particular, they’re young actors. They’re not super famous, but they’re still early in their careers. They have a little bit of success and meet someone who they think could be the love of their life, but they’re also scared that (the other) could be someone they don’t know that well who could one day break up with them and then say a lot of nasty things about them and kind of ruin their career. So it’s a little crazy to explain that, but it’s at least becoming something that a certain type of people are thinking about now.

Ryssdal: We should mention here that this couple eventually got married.

Wiedemann: They did. It’s like a love story under non-disclosure agreement.

Ryssdal: An “NDA love story” and other phrases you never thought you’d hear. To change the mood a little: The whole thing smells a little bit of, you know – if you put aside the really, really toxic ones for a second, right? Harvey Weinstein springs to mind, of course – its spread into other aspects of life smells a little bit of cynicism, doesn’t it?

Wiedemann: I think there’s this level where we don’t trust each other. And I think there’s a certain sadness in that when you look at it from that angle, like, do we even trust each other anymore? Can you trust your friends? You’d like to think, yeah, otherwise they probably shouldn’t be your friends or a person you have a relationship with. But you don’t want these things to have to exist, and yet they’re becoming more and more common.