This podcast has bad words.
Every little thing.
You think that you need Every little thing.
You think that you need Every little thing.
That's just feeding your greed.
Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it.
Yes.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to The Minimalist Podcast, where we discuss what it means to live a meaningful life with less.
My name is Joshua Fields Milburn, and joining me here at our studio in beautiful West Hollywood California, is my good friend TK Coleman.
It's a beautiful day.
TK, you know, we often talk about letting go on the show.
And on this episode we're talking about one of the most challenging challenges.
Pretty fun.
The preamble so far has been super fun and today we're joined by america's divorce lawyer to talk about the nuances of divorce.
And we're also going to talk about the the courage it takes to walk away from a marriage, housing and financial advice for recently single mothers, lessons from spousal cheating, how to know when a relationship is over, and much, much more.
Please welcome to the show, James J. Sexton Esquire.
That was such a, what an introduction.
That was amazing.
And as you're going over the topics we're going to do, I'm like, I would like to hear about that.
I have a lot to learn on that.
That's very good.
No, thank you.
It's great to be here.
I know we've been trying to make this happen for a while and I appreciate everyone being patient with me.
I have an ex-wife who will tell you I am wildly unreliable when it comes to scheduling, because When billionaires you know have problems in their marriage, they rarely do it on a schedule.
Yeah.
And so they'll say like, what are you doing next week?
You're going to California?
No, you're not.
You're going to family court in Manhattan.
So I constantly have to reschedule things.
So thank you for sticking with me.
I've been looking forward to this and I'm really glad it happened.
TK, he has the best excuse.
Anytime he has canceled on us, it's always been, I have a trial next week.
And I'm like, what am I going to be like?
No, man, no, you don't.
Can it wait?
Yeah, I will tell all of the witnesses to hold on.
I have to.
But it really is.
The nature of what I do is that you know you.
Even after 25 plus years of doing this, I'm very humbled by the fact that these people trust me with these very, very important things.
And like, if anyone has ever Hired a lawyer even for, you know, a real estate closing.
If you've had the pleasure of not ever being in an office like mine, you know if your marriage is solid and stable or you're not married like you can just imagine.
You know because if you bought a condo or you sold a piece of property or you went and had a consultation about a criminal matter because you got a ticket or something, you feel so vulnerable.
You feel so needy.
And it's a frightening feeling to feel that vulnerable and needy.
And I take very seriously that these people have chosen me to be the person.
And so I tend to even though I've been blessed in recent years to do a lot of this media stuff that is like a second like.
Who knew, like after 50 I was going to have this whole second career.
I still have this full time job that is like a more than full time job.
Like I did not need a part time job at all.
I needed to actually try to find a work life balance.
So it requires me sometimes, as much as I would love to do something, to just go.
Yeah no, I have to dance with the one that brung me.
You know, I have to, I have to stay with the path that I committed myself to.
So.
Well, I love your nuanced approach.
I first learned about you because my wife, who's on the couch today Rebecca, she was sending me some Jim Sexton quotes about like marriage and strong relationships.
And I'm like, Yeah.
Yeah.
Like like she gets it and you get it in a way that you understand the nuances of relationship.
But it seems to me it's because you have the experience of of seeing a lot of relationships that just explode.
Yeah.
I mean you know when, when you think about divorce like divorce.
Divorce is the catastrophic failure of a marriage.
So, like there's failure, I think, in marriage, which is we married, we were, you know, really into each other.
And now we're not really into each other anymore.
We don't really enjoy each other anymore.
I think there's a lot of people that have that feeling, but they stay married like they're for the kids, or because they don't want to give away half their stuff, or whatever it might be.
It becomes companionate.
Yeah, it becomes OK.
We like it's like a business.
We're running a daycare center together, or you know, we have the business of our household and we're partners in that business.
And we listen, you know, like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. probably don't like vacation together.
They probably don't even take the same bus, right?
But the two of them are the two who make the music and they know that.
So I think sometimes a marriage can be that and say look, we're not as like crazed about each other as we once were.
We don't feel it for each other the way we once did, but we've got this thing.
We've built together and let's stay together.
Like, let's stay connected.
Let's work with each other.
Let's be, you know, cool with each other. divorce is a different kind of failure.
It's like a catastrophic failure.
Like this needs to end.
Now I'm not saying, by the way, that like it's a catastrophic failure, like the wheels coming off your car while you're driving.
Like sometimes happily ever after means happily ever after separately.
Like we're going to end this because it's no longer serving us.
It's no longer helping us become the best and most authentic version of ourselves.
And so what we're going to do is we're going to just part.
We're going to split.
And we're going to let this chapter end.
Because I actually like to think about romantic relationships, at least in my own life, as chapters in a very long book.
And some of those chapters are just filled with so much joy.
And some of them you look at it and go wow, I can't believe I made the mistakes that I made in there.
But they're chapters in a long book that's still being written.
Hmm.
But 56% of marriages catastrophically fail.
Let's be charitable and say another 10% stay together for the kids.
I think it's probably way more than that.
Maybe 10, 20%.
Now we have something that fails.
76% of the time.
How many people are in this room right now?
There are, what, seven of us?
And five of us have been divorced at some point?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's the overwhelming majority.
I mean, 70-something percent.
I mean, even 56% is the overwhelming majority.
I've made the argument before as a lawyer in my media presence that you know you could argue that marriage is not negligent.
Negligence is the failure to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk of serious harm.
That's the definition of negligence.
I would argue that marriage is definitely negligent.
Like it's definitely you're failing to perceive serious harm.
I would argue it's reckless.
The definition of reckless is a conscious disregard for a substantial unjustifiable risk.
So you can't say, I didn't know marriages generally don't work out.
Like I didn't know that the overwhelming majority of marriages catastrophically fail.
Everyone knows this.
It's so obvious.
But the statistic that I actually think is even more interesting is that 86 of people are remarried within five years of their divorce.
So think about that.
You've engaged in this technology.
It's catastrophically failed.
And now you go, yeah, I'm going to do that again.
I'm going to sign up for that again.
So what that tells me is not that people are stupid.
What that tells me is that there's something in this that calls to us.
Like there's something, and I don't know what that is.
It could be something that we should be striving to transcend.
It could be that, right?
Like it could be, that marriage is a tradition, and tradition in one sense is the wisdom of the people who were here before us and what we could learn from them.
And tradition in another sense is peer pressure from dead people.
I love that definition.
Like my great, great grandmother got married and her grandmother got married.
So, you know, we should do it too.
And it's like, oh, well, she had a buggy whip.
Do you have a buggy whip?
Like she didn't have the sum total of all human wisdom in every song that's ever been recorded instantly accessible on a device in her hand.
So why would the same thing that suited her suit you, especially when you have evidence to support the theory that it's catastrophically likely to fail and cause you harm?
So again, like I think there's, there is something in us that wants that to deeply connect with another person.
And marriage may just be something that we think has value in shoring that up and building on that.
You know, the best definition I ever heard of God is that God is the name we give to a blanket, that we put over a mystery to give it shape.
And I think maybe what marriage is is a wall that we build around our connection to this person who we love very deeply, in the hope that it will keep it safe and make it sustain.
And I think time has shown us that that's not true.
It doesn't do that, but there's something in us that wants to keep trying.
And I actually think that's really, really beautiful.
Well, we have a lot of questions from our audience about this topic specifically.
We knew you'd be showing up.
So let's dive into some callers here.
If you have a question for our show, we would love to hear from you.
406-219-7839 is the phone number.
Or you can just send a voice memo right from your phone to podcast at theminimalists.com.
Let us know if you're a Patreon subscriber so we can prioritize your message.
By the way.
Big thanks to our patrons.
Your support keeps our podcast 100% advertisement free because sing along at home, y'all.
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Yes, they do.
Our first question today is from Kim.
Hi, I'm Kim.
I'm 35 years old and I live in Belgium.
I am a Patreon subscriber.
I am currently going through a divorce.
My ex and I have been together for 15 years and we have three boys together.
After years of abuse, I finally found the courage to divorce him.
I work part time to take care of the kids.
We bought our house together eight years ago, but my ex has more financial funds because he works full time.
So my share is way less than his.
He will pay me my share. but it won't be enough to buy something for myself.
Currently, we still live under the same roof.
Now I am looking for a place to rent for me and my boys, but the renting prices for a three bedroom apartment are really high.
I can also try to rent a smaller place with two bedrooms, but then my boys will have to share one room Plus.
Landlords are not excited to put four people in such a small place.
I get lots of anxiety because I have to make this decision.
I recently switched jobs, so now I earn a little bit more money plus, the working hours are much better.
So my question is, do you have any advice for me?
Do I go for one extra bedroom, but at a cost of mentally and financially more weight on my shoulders?
Or do I have to rent a smaller place, which will give me more financial peace, but it will be very small and crowded?
I also like to thank you because you brought so much value to my life through this podcast.
I have learned so many things about self-worth decluttering, and my health improved drastically thanks to my earthing Matt.
Thank you, guys.
Bye.
Okay, shout out.
There's a couple places to start here.
She has questions about the financial advice, housing advice, but I wanted to illustrate a point that she didn't ask a direct question, but there was something in here about hey, I was in this relationship for 15 years and it was abusive.
She didn't say what kind of abuse there, but we can make assumptions.
And I'm wondering...
With all of the clients that you speak to.
What does it take for someone to find the courage to finally say it's time?
Yeah, I mean, you know it's a unique problem, the problem and the situation and the ecosystem of coercive control, intimate partner abuse, domestic violence.
I mean we used to refer to that as domestic violence in its totality, which was sort of any relationship where there were these elements of coercive control.
But now we more often refer to it as IPA intimate partner abuse because it's not always physical violence or abuse.
It's often financial abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse.
It can really be a whole ecosystem of all of those things.
It's sort of a cycle.
And it's very often a cycle of what we call coercive control.
It's really a cycle of control.
Sort of breaking down a person's self-esteem, causing in them with verbal or physical abuse, you know, a sort of bending this person to your will and creating in them a certain helplessness so that you can then perpetuate that.
You know that that system of of power, where you have power, and it's very often tied to like narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder, and it's very often tied to a narcissistic wound.
So this is an ecosystem that, as a divorce lawyer, i encounter constantly.
I represent a lot of victims of intimate partner abuse and domestic violence.
I also won't lie, i don't always wear the white hat.
You know.
I often represent abusers, i often represent perpetrators of domestic violence.
Um, As a lawyer, you represent your client and you represent the system.
And I don't always believe in the client, but I always believe in the system.
I think that our system, thankfully, the truth has a way of coming out.
Very often, despite my best efforts, it has a way of coming out.
So the cycle she's describing the cycle of domestic violence, and because she didn't get into the specifics of it, I'm going to say or assume that this really is an intimate partner abuse situation, whether it's verbal physical financial, all of those really are the same thing in many ways.
So in that situation there's a tremendous amount of danger and risk involved in the initial steps of extricating oneself from that system.
The likelihood of there being some kind of retaliation or violence is most acute in the very early stages of usually a woman extricating herself from the domestic violence and coercive control cycle.
So the first piece of advice I would give there is to work with counsel who are experienced in and trained in working with.
You know victims of and perpetrators of, intimate partner abuse and domestic violence, because we're going to understand the gravity of risk.
And there are thankfully in almost every country, including Belgium.
There are safeguards put in place on how a person can have protections, orders of protection.
Very often, by the time the abuser even knows that we're filing for divorce.
We have orders of protection in place, like we've done it, like a professional hit.
By the time this person knows the fight is coming, the fight is over.
Like we've already just tactically.
And I mean I've done that to the point where we get them another phone because their phone is being used to track their location so that when they meet with us they can leave that phone in a location.
So their spouse thinks that they're not leaving, and then they can come and call us with the other phone.
Like we we've, you know, good experienced attorneys will think very strategically.
We're tacticians at heart.
But thankfully the majority of people that need to leave a marriage are not leaving a domestic violence situation.
But it still requires some of the same things, which is a tremendous amount of courage, obviously.
There's a lot of bravery involved in saying out loud, even to yourself, that this marriage is over.
And it's very, very scary to do that, you know.
And I.
Often clients will say to me, you know, in their initial consultations they'll sometimes be very vulnerable and they'll say, you know, I'm so scared.
Like, I feel so powerless.
I feel so like, am I doing the right thing?
I feel so scared.
And I say to them you know, you're just the fact we're having this conversation, you're being very brave.
And they'll say, well, I don't feel brave.
Like, how could I be brave?
I'm this scared.
How could I be brave?
And I often will say like, well, if you're not scared, it's not brave.
Like, it's only brave if you're scared and you do it.
Like if you do it anyway, even though you're scared, like overcoming fear is what makes it brave.
So I think the first step for most people is having an honest conversation with yourself about where this marriage is serving you, where it's failing you.
What, if anything, can be done to repair it, if at all.
Right.
I think I think.
I think we're foolish to say that you couldn't take the same ingredients and make a different dish.
Like if you gave me five ingredients and you gave Thomas Keller or Jose Andre those same five ingredients, we're going to make different dishes.
Like you could take the same ingredients and make something very different.
I think that sometimes people lose the plot in their marriage.
And they they just they lose the plot.
They started out moving in the same direction.
They started out with the same goal in mind.
And somewhere one or both of them lost the plot.
And I think the first thing you should do if you're driving a car and you're lost, I think, I think I'm lost now.
Well, don't like floor the gas, you know, like and just stop.
And think, okay, where did I maybe get lost here?
But wait, this happens all the time where it's like this marriage is in shambles.
Let's buy a dog.
Let's have a kid.
Let's buy a house.
And you know what?
I think that's a very – I mean, this is why I'm such a fan of the podcast and I'm very much a fan of your perspective because –, you know, we've been told for many, many years that consumption will fill the void.
And so I think we feel restless in our marriages sometimes because we're restless in our lives.
Like our marriages happen in our lives.
And so we're restless in our lives.
And now we go, well, you used to make me feel really good and now I don't feel really good.
So it must be you, you're messing this up, you know?
And I think it's actually getting much, much worse, because We're just barraged now with advertisement, and advertisements do in fact suck.
But my preposition to tie this to marriage failure and marriage dissatisfaction, which I actually think is more important to look at than divorce, which is the catastrophic failure I like to think about marriage satisfaction.
Because if you said to me, we met, we did it, we won.
We stayed together for 40 years.
We were miserable for 37 of them.
Oof.
But we did it.
Like, okay, you didn't win then.
I don't think you won because you managed to stay together.
But now what I think is happening is there is this massive amount of dissatisfaction and restlessness that so many people are feeling.
And I genuinely believe it is a function of the fact we are living in an advertising saturated world.
Because if you think about it, at its core, advertising is the opposite of therapy.
It is the opposite of therapy.
If the purpose of therapy is to say, to create a sense of wholeness in you and calm and peace inside of you, advertising is the opposite of it, because the core of every advertisement is you are not okay.
You are incomplete.
You are not okay.
You could be okay.
But you need to do some stuff like you need.
You're going to need this tie.
You're going to you had this tie.
You're not because you're not OK.
You could be OK.
Redemption is available, but you're going to need to do a few things.
Right.
The message no advertisement has ever said to anyone ever is you're fine.
You don't need anything at all.
You're fine.
And, by the way, what is love?
Marriage, love like i'm not going to call marriage because marriage to me is a legal status what is deep romantic love for another person?
It's it's.
It's exactly what you don't see in advertising, like it's marriage to me or love to me.
Love worth having and trying to keep forever is the following four words.
You're my favorite person.
That's it.
And, by the way, Could you think of any words, much less four words?
Could you think of any words that it would feel more beautiful to say and mean and to then have the other person say to you and you know it's true, then you're my favorite person.
And when they say you're my favorite person, you go, I know that.
Like, And so I think it's so simple.
It's so wonderful.
It doesn't cost anything.
So advertising would hate it, right?
Because like you don't need to buy anything.
Like you don't need to spend three months salary, you know, to prove it.
You don't have to do anything.
So we've created a culture that I think, without meaning to do so, is incredibly antagonistic to marriage, because it's antagonistic to our sense of self.
So to tie it back to the question or how do we start that process, right?
The tactical answer to that is really easy.
Go talk to a lawyer.
Like, that's our job.
But if you're talking to a responsible lawyer, like, I don't make it rain.
I sell the umbrella.
Like, I don't.
I'm a divorce lawyer.
I'm not like the grim reaper of marriage.
Like I'm not walking around, you know, bars and saying like, you could do better, man.
Like to people like I don't I don't take any joy in people getting divorced.
And if you speak to a responsible divorce lawyer, they're going to first say OK, is there anything that could be done to like heal what's happening between the two of you?
And if the answer is no okay, could you maybe go to mediation together, where the two of you work with one attorney or one trained professional and you work together to figure out a sensible way to sort of unravel the various ties that constitute your marriage?
And if you can't do that, okay, then hire a lawyer, right?
Because a divorce is like a table.
There's you and your spouse and then their lawyer and your lawyer.
And so it's like four legs.
If one of those legs is off, it doesn't matter how nice and straight the other three legs are.
Table's falling down.
Like you need one unreasonable person in this equation for a divorce to go sideways and get ugly really fast.
Because, doing this for over 25 years, no one has ever once, I've seen every permutation of human craziness, every permutation of anger vindictive, like everything.
No one has ever once ever come into my office, sat in front of me and said...
I would like this to be ugly and expensive and terrible and the worst experience ever.
I'd like to put your kids through college instead of my own.
No one has ever said that.
They always say the exact same thing.
I want to be fair.
The problem is their spouse is in another lawyer's office saying, I want to be fair.
And their definitions of fair are completely different.
So the first step to extricating yourself from these situations is, even if it is an intimate partner abuse situation, like the caller said, or even if it's just your generic, this marriage is not working for me.
I feel restlessness in it.
I feel like I need to get out of it to become the most authentic version of myself.
I think the answer first, is to find a responsible attorney to talk to about what your options are, because the best option is the one that creates more options.
And I think that it is perfectly okay, living in the world we're living in, to feel restless in your marriage sometimes, to feel questioning of your marriage sometimes.
And I think the world is antagonistic to marriage.
You know, it is constantly pulling us away from each other and pulling us away from our authentic self.
And so I really genuinely think the first step is speak to counsel, start to identify what's actually going on in the ecosystem of your family.
And I say the ecosystem of your family.
It's a deliberate choice of words, because an ecosystem, you add a salamander to a forest.
You don't have the forest plus the salamander.
You've got a whole new forest because that salamander eats this bug and that bug used to eat this plant and that plant's growth used to inhibit what happened in this stream.
So now we have a whole new ecosystem.
And if we figure this out and we go, okay, let's take the salamander out, guess what?
We don't have the old ecosystem anymore.
We don't have that ecosystem minus salamander.
We've got a whole new ecosystem now.
So I think before you start making moves You need to first go to first principles of what's going on here.
And the very specific problem of do I get a two bedroom?
Do I get a three bedroom?
Because a lot of what I'm discussing here is these sort of existential aspects of things.
But there's also a tremendously pragmatic side to what I do, which is helping people with the nuts and bolts of their day to day lives.
And, you know, what you need in life, you need shelter, you need food, you need safety.
I personally believe, and have counseled many of my clients, that it is better to be happy and connected in a small apartment where all of you are sleeping in the same room but you are not suffering from economic instability and the tremendous stress that comes with unnecessary financial pressure.
Look, I represent now some of the wealthiest people in the world.
Like one of my clients, is worth 8 billion with a B.
In that kind of a case it's super easy to make sure everyone's going to get their own new house and their own New Hamptons second residence and their own private jet.
But for most people, it's hard to pay the electric bill.
So now you're going to have two electric bills.
Right.
And it's hard to have a now.
You have two cell phones and now you definitely need a cell phone for the kids because they're going between your respective residences.
And that creates all kinds of second order effects, both financial and interpersonal.
So again I I like to go back to.
What do our children want, whether they're the children of billionaires or whether they're the children of just a person who's struggling with whatever wage life they're living?
I genuinely think our children want our presence.
They want our stability, consistency, predictability.
And I think that putting financial strain on yourself when you're already so strained and there's already so much change going on,
If you think having a slightly larger bedroom for your children is going to be the balm of that, makes your divorce less painful for them.
I understand why you would think that, because advertising has been telling you, if you just have the right couch, things are going to be fine.
But I just genuinely don't believe that that should be the priority.
The priority will be love, peace, stability, connection.
And very often there is an economic disparity post-divorce.
One person has money, the other one doesn't.
And I have not found, in doing this for a very long time, that the parent who has more money somehow has a deeper connection to the children or a better life.
Very often, they're absolutely miserable.
And I say that as someone who represents billionaires, because I think fundamentally, one of the places where our messages intersect is, I think there are two amounts of money enough and not enough.
That's it.
Those are the only two amounts of money that exist.
And I think enough is enough.
And I think in this situation, this caller is realizing this marriage is enough.
I'm enough.
I deserve to be safe and to feel good and loved.
And whatever bedroom you choose, it will be enough.
Yeah.
Yeah TK, I'd love to talk to you about courage real quick, because you brought up an important point there that courage doesn't exist in a vacuum.
As soon as the fear goes away, then I get the courage.
Courage is a saddle that rests upon atop our most aggressive, scariest monsters, right?
And it's being able to put that saddle on the monster and then see it through to whatever.
The end here for this caller.
It happens to be divorce and then post-divorce as well.
Talk to me a bit about courage.
The first step to becoming more courageous isn't in trying to force yourself to act like people who look courageous.
It's by honestly facing your vulnerabilities, because it takes a tremendous amount of courage to say I feel very weak.
I have no idea where I'm at, how I got here, how to get out of this situation or what in the world I am doing.
That kind of mindset, that kind of honesty leads to the kinds of answers and insights that produce competence and consequently more confidence, which the world will look at later down the road and say wow, you're courageous.
But you will know for yourself that courage began with the willingness to embrace my vulnerability.
And when we go through transitions.
Transitions have a way of disrupting our lives in a manner that exaggerates that need for stability.
And so you think about things like well, I'm accustomed to having each of the kids having their own room.
And now everything in my life is being disrupted.
Anything I can hold on to that feels like the life I'm losing is a good thing that I must prioritize.
So maybe I put first keeping the kids all having their separate rooms.
But that's a trick.
That's an illusion.
That's not going to make anyone happier.
What you have to do is you have to say I'm going to exercise the courage to recognize that my life isn't what it used to be, that I now have less money and I have less options.
And yeah, that stinks.
And I don't have to pretend that it doesn't.
In fact, I can be honest with my children.
I don't have to have the most sophisticated conversation with them, but I can say hey look, mommy and daddy are going through a hard time.
We're going through changes.
A lot of things are going to be different.
We might not have some of the things that we used to have, but we're going to be okay.
We're going to be okay because we're family and I love you and I'm going to be with you and I'm going to make things better, but I'm going to need more time.
And if they're not old enough to understand that conversation, then you don't even need to have it.
But then, when you start to think in that way, you can say all right, I can live the life I can afford to live because I have courage and my ability to improvise and love in spite of my conditions.
But that also becomes the life that makes it possible for me to invest in something that is closer to my ideal.
Why spend an extra 200, 500 a month trying to cling to what is familiar when I can take that and store that away for emergencies, for future needs, for the life that I really want, where maybe they do have their own separate bedroom?
But I can get there in two years, three years, four years, five years, just like we do with anything else that's worth having in life.
And that type of clinging leads to a ton of emotional clutter as well.
There's a lot of baggage there.
Kim, I'd love to send you a copy of TK's book, Emotional Clutter.
You can download it for free over at theminimalist.com.
Or if you want the audio book, I'd be happy to send that to you as well.
Jim, we've got a bunch more callers to talk to.
But first, let's dive into the Patreon community chat.
This is where we try to answer a question, the question of the week, with a short shareable.
We call them minimal maxims.
Don't worry.
You can monder on as much as you want.
I'm not particularly the strong silent type.
I'm not known for my brevity.
TK and I will wrap it up with some pithy bows at the end of all of this.
You can find all of the Minimal Maxims for this week's episode in the show notes over at TheMinimalistscom, and every Minimal Maxim ever at MinimalMaximscom.
We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox for free, if you sign up for our email newsletter over at theminimalistscom.
We'll never send you spam or junk or advertisements, but we will start your week off with a dose of simplicity.
All right, question of the week this week.
How do you know whether a relationship is worth staying in and fighting for?
Now I want to hear what you have to say here, but let's hear what some of our listeners had to say first.
Maria said, an action that cannot be forgiven, or if you completely lose trust, then it's time to move on.
So it's sort of the opposite of relationships worth staying and fighting for, which is the question of the week here.
So I think that everyone wants to know where to start, but people rarely ask when to stop.
It's like the marriage is like the exciting place to start.
But also you come to an end.
You get to a dead end in some relationships.
And it's like we're going to hang out here at this dead end for a while.
Jim, in fact, you wrote a book called If You're in My Office, It's Already Too Late.
So you're probably the perfect person to answer this.
When do most people know that a relationship is over?
You know, it's the question.
Yeah.
Like that's the question.
So I would say a few things.
One is that, you know, we fall in love very quickly.
Like we fall in love very quickly.
It's amazing to me how quickly our heart recognizes that, you know.
And falling feels like flying for a little while until the ground, you know.
But it feels like flying.
And people's marriages end the same way that they go bankrupt, which is very slowly, and then all at once.
You know, there's no single raindrop responsible for the flood.
Like, it's just these little drops and little drops and little drops, and then it's the flood.
The flood comes.
And it comes all at once.
You know, my mom used to say to me when I was a kid that—
It's really hard to define intelligence, but she could spot stupid a mile away.
And I actually think that's true.
And I think similarly a really good relationship, like what makes a relationship good is kind of hard to define.
But man, like I can bad ones, like you can see them.
You know you go out to dinner with a group of couples.
You can just feel sometimes the heaviness, the tension, the like, disconnection between people.
You know it's in the gestures, it's in the way, the eyes when the person is talking, like there's so, there's so much there, you know.
So I think what's interesting to me is is how romantic love is a combination of simplicity and complexity.
Like there's, Fundamentally, it's really simple.
You're my favorite person.
I'm your favorite person.
There's 8 billion options in the world.
I'm you, I pick you.
We're gonna hold hands and we're gonna just, this shit is scary. but we're going to hold hands.
And when it's good, we're going to celebrate.
And when it's really scary, we'll be a little less scared because we have each other.
Like what a lovely, worthy thing that is, you know?
And I think most people start that way.
Like that's where they start, but they lose the plot, like overwhelming majority lose the plot.
And so to me, then the question becomes, okay, so what does, what does it look like?
And I guess the question to ask is, You know, what does real love look like?
And I was talking to a friend the other day because this question came up.
Like, I have weird conversations with my friends.
And I imagine you guys do too.
And he said something about like, well, what do you think real love looks like?
And he has a cat.
He has a really lovely cat named Delilah.
And I know he loves Delilah.
Like most people who have pets love their pets.
I have two dogs.
I love them like in just insane way.
And I said to him, well, and he has a watch.
He has a nice watch.
I think someone bought it for him.
It's a lovely watch.
And I said to him, well, here's how I define love. how much is your, did you pay for your watch?
And he says, oh, it's like a $5,000 watch.
And I said, okay, if I said, I'll give you $5,000 for that watch, would you give me your watch?
And he said no, because it's you know, it was like I've had it and I have a sentimental attachment to it.
I said, okay, if I said, I'll give you $10,000 for your watch, would you give it to me?
He said, yeah, absolutely.
$10,000.
Like I'll give you this watch.
I said, okay, great.
How much.
If I said I'll give you a million dollars for Delilah, your cat, would you give her?
He said no, absolutely not.
I would never sell you.
And anyone with a pet will tell you like, I would never sell you my pet.
I'll sell you my husband.
But here's the question, right?
Here's the question like that.
That is absolutely true and funny.
But it's a really interesting question, because I then said OK, I pardon this thought experiment, which is painful to hear.
You would not sell me Delilah for $10 million.
No.
Okay.
If you knew you were only going to have Delilah for 30 more days, that she was going to pass.
She was going to, because you do know she's going like we're all going to die right.
We all know this.
Every time you get a pet, you know, this pet's going to die.
Like you accept the inevitability of that loss, right?
So to Matt, I hate to break it to anyone who doesn't know every marriage ends, right?
Every single marriage ends.
It ends in death or divorce.
It's so odd because what you're saying is, I hope this ends in death.
Like if you said to me, I'm getting married next week.
And I went, oh, that's so good.
I hope it ends in the death.
I definitely hope it ends in death.
But it's going to end.
Like it's going to definitely end.
Okay.
So now we've got 30 days with this cat.
Now will you take $100 million to sell me that cat right now?
And he immediately said, absolutely not.
And I said you're telling me that lifetime financial security.
You would not trade 30 days with an animal that is about to be gone anyway for lifetime financial security.
And he said, I wouldn't do it.
I would actually want to keep her more because I only have 30 days.
And I said, that's love.
Wow.
That's so good.
That's love.
Heather said, if you can't 100 trust your partner and feel safe with them, then it's.
If you can trust them, then it's worth saving.
I'm going through my divorce right now and it is a total mess.
She says, I can't stay with a serial cheater.
I've tried marriage counseling and all that.
And it's not worth it for how long I've stayed, which is 20 years.
Jim, what have you learned about marital infidelity as a divorce lawyer?
I feel like I have a PhD in infidelity, because I've I've represented the cheater and I've represented the cheated on and I've represented the paramour, which is what we call the mistress, or male equivalent.
There's no word for the male equivalent of a mistress.
It's very like a mister.
So it's very odd to me.
It never made sense.
You know, what's interesting is, I spend a lot of time with people who commit infidelity in marriage and I spend a lot of time with people who have been victims of infidelity in marriage.
And what you certainly learn when you spend that amount of time around the ecosystem of infidelity is that it really just creates a lot of victims.
Like, it causes a lot of pain.
Everyone in that equation gets hurt.
The cheater, the cheated on the person they're cheating with.
They're just victims and victims, and victims.
There's nothing but victims in that equation.
But I tend to believe and it's not always a popular opinion that happy people who have the right kind of connection to each other don't cheat.
So I don't think that the cheating is the Illness.
I think the cheating is the symptom of the illness.
The illness is the underlying disconnection.
So people very often want me to give them like a pithy answer that you know like how do I do infidelity proof my marriage.
Or how often is infidelity the reason people divorce?
And I find that latter question like very problematic, because I don't think like yes, how many divorces is infidelity a factor?
A tremendous number.
But is the infidelity the cause of the demise of that marriage or a symptom of the problem that caused the demise of the marriage?
And that is disconnection between two people, which, by the way, may not even be just the cause.
It may be that you don't know what you want anymore.
And you don't know how to express it to another person.
You know, to bounce off of what you said earlier, TK which I thought was really really well said that you know, if there's a question to be asked in therapy, like one question you should be entering therapy with, is what is it that I'm afraid to feel?
That is the most useful question you can ask in therapy.
And as Carl Jung said, that which you most need to see is in the place that you least want to look.
And so I think that there is a reality here that Maybe look at like when you talk about serial cheating, what you really should be asking is what is going on in that person that they have this massive restlessness that they think they're going to solve through sexual connection to another person, and what's going on in this person?
This other person, the spouse, who's married to a serial cheater, meaning this person has cheated repeatedly and you've taken the back and you've forgiven it.
What is going on in you that believes that this is the love that you're worth, that this is the behavior that you deserve and that you should tolerate in your partner?
And I think that often is going to be a function of we don't know what we want or what we're really feeling.
And if we can identify that, we don't know how to express it to another person.
If there's time, on page three.
I've got this article I want to share with you about micro-cheating, which is Just so.
We needed another form of cheating.
Yes, yeah.
I often think... It already got two of the Ten Commandments.
Like, thou shalt not kill got one.
And out of ten, God was like, you know, we got ten rules, guys.
Ten, okay?
Don't kill, that's one of them.
You know, like, honor the Sabbath, that's one.
Don't cheat, right?
Seriously, don't covet your neighbor's wife.
I mean, it's hilarious to think.
And I say that to people because even if you're not religious...
We all agree the Bible was written a long time ago.
Even if you don't think it's true, it was written a long time ago.
And it was a top 10 problem to the point of two out of the 10.
So you're not alone.
You know, this person saying this serial cheating is a problem.
I genuinely think like infidelity as a technology was invented, probably like five minutes after monogamy was invented.
Yeah.
Like there was some primal human in a cave with their now like spouse grunting at each other of like you know, like where are they going to be?
And they're going to be together.
And then he went out to like kill the elk and he saw some other woman in a loincloth and went like that's not bad.
You know, and I think it was just that it's been around that long and we're still as bad as it is ever.
Yeah, so good.
Dimitri, one more for you here.
Dimitri says.
What's interesting in my case is that we divorce after 27 years of marriage, but the divorce has actually strengthened our relationship.
The divorce didn't end our relationship.
It simply created a new chapter in it.
I'm grateful for that.
We still spend time together as friends and also with our kids, all adults now, as a family unit.
We no longer live together.
We do not have a romantic connection, but we talk more than we have in a long time and get along better now.
Plus, we have each other's back.
Jim, this sort of relationship improvement happened in my own life when my first marriage.
We're still really great friends, but it didn't work as a romantic monogamous relationship for us.
How common is that?
You know, it is so much more common than the world thinks, and i'll tell you the reason why.
I i've been a divorce lawyer a really long time and i don't go to cocktail parties.
But if i was invited to a cocktail party and someone said, what do you do for a living?
And i said oh, i'm a divorce lawyer, The first thing every single person says is oh my God, you must have some stories.
And if I said, well, I have, I've got one here.
There was this couple and they were quite young and they met each other and they found each other very compelling.
And that was enough that it caused them to say hey, we should enter into this very specific kind of pair bond.
And then they did.
And they even had children together and a life together.
And then it came to be that the Venn diagram of their sort of overlapping interests and how they felt about each other got to a place where you know they really no longer had that much intersection.
So they, you know, sat down together and, with the help of professionals, they figured out how to divide their various things that they own and how to like, effectively care for the children that they love.
You know so much more than anyone else in the world.
And then they went on and just did that you'd go.
That was like the worst story ever, that was like the most boring story in the history of story, whereas if I went, like and then he took a chainsaw and he cut the car, literally cut the engine block in half and said you pick which half you want.
True story, by the way.
True story, that's the story people want to hear And so that's the story people tell when you put a microphone in front of them or when you're a divorce lawyer and someone goes, you must have some stories.
I got a lot of those crazy ass stories, by the way.
How often, like I had a divorce like yours, okay?
Great friends with my ex-wife.
There's a lot of people I love that I wouldn't want to be married to.
Amen.
Like all of them, actually.
Like for me, all of them.
And I love them so much.
But there's a very specific way you should love a person you're going to marry.
And I don't love... those people that way.
It doesn't mean I don't love them.
There's all kinds of love.
The way I love my grandmother and the way I love coffee are very different.
But I mean it when I say I love them.
Right.
So I really think that we we the kind of people.
Like, I don't talk about my divorce a lot because it's not interesting.
She was lovely.
We met in college.
We were I had a motorcycle and long hair and tattoos.
She had like a great body and blonde hair.
Like, what more do you need in life when you're 18?
Yeah.
And then we figured out like, oh, we have like fully nothing in common.
But we'd had two kids at that point.
And by the way, we really like each other.
Like she's still one of my favorite people.
She's hilarious.
She's smart.
She's a million wonderful things.
But like you meet her husband, who she's been successfully married to now for 15 years, and you put he and I next to each other, you would go.
No woman who likes this one would like he's quiet.
He's a therapist.
He's like the most like sedate, mellow guy.
Like he's the exact opposite of me and he's perfect for her.
But I don't talk a lot about my divorce.
And I imagine you probably don't talk a lot about your divorce because it's not that interesting.
You know what talks about their divorce?
People who've been terribly wounded by their divorce, to the point where it becomes like definitional in their life.
Like I know people who got divorced 10 years ago and they're still talking about it like it happened to them a week ago.
Because there's this unattended sorrow.
There's this trauma, this just breaking.
And as you said, and I loved it, I felt like I want to give almost all my clients your number.
Because there was so much of what you said about how, when you're feeling this trauma, this pain, this disconnection,
And something you said that I love a therapist of mine once said to me because I was talking about how difficult a change that was happening in my life was.
And he said, you know, change is really good, but transitions are really hard.
And seeing the difference between change and transition, right?
And what you're having a hard time with is this transition, you know?
And what was amazing is that the same therapist said to me, I said, I'm just so anxious.
I'm so nervous.
And he said, you know, I want to change your vocabulary.
Could you maybe think about it like I'm feeling really disoriented right now.
Because here's the thing in order to reorient to a new way of living, And what we're doing is reorienting our lives.
And to do that, you have to first be disoriented.
So don't look at it as I'm anxious.
Look at it as I'm disoriented right now, right?
And what do you do?
What you just said, grab onto things.
Oh, if I have the same house, if I have the same house, it'll be like the kids won't notice we got divorced.
If I could keep the house.
The kids are going to notice your divorce.
Dad's not here anymore.
Like they're going to notice.
So trading all of these other things so you can keep the house.
It's so well intended.
Like I want the kids not to feel pain.
But this isn't the thing that's going to make them not feel pain.
So I think to answer the question.
I think fundamentally, like people who talk about their divorce endlessly are usually people that had a terribly wounding divorce that they never really healed.
And so we have this cultural perception that that's what divorce looks like, because that's the divorces you hear about.
What, what movie like?
Watch a marriage story with you know Adam whatever, and Scarlett Johansson, like which should have been called a divorce story, by the way.
And it's a knock down, drag out brutal divorce, like they wouldn't make a movie about a friendly divorce.
It would be a very boring movie.
Like they don't make movies about cars not exploding.
They make movies where the cars explode.
Like if you just had a film where all of the people in Vin Diesel's car were doing the speed limit, you'd kind of go.
This is like the slow and the curious, not the fast and the boring.
So you have to just sort of realize that there are so many people that it just doesn't work out.
It just doesn't work out.
And and Sometimes now we've created a world where you have to like I don't know, it's like little kids.
We love pro wrestling.
We're like the bad guy's the bad guy.
Yes.
And when he comes in, the dun-dun-dun-dun, music comes on.
And the good guy is like the good guy.
And then the dun-dun-dun-dun music when he comes on.
God, if only that were true.
Wouldn't that be great?
Wouldn't it be great if they were just like evil people?
And all we had to do was just... find them and sort of segregate them.
But the truth is like the line of good and evil runs right through the human heart.
And who wants to cut out a piece of their own heart?
Like we have darkness in us.
We have evil in us.
We have every base thing in us.
And we also have so much beauty and love and compassion and empathy in us.
And I genuinely believe that there is a way and I've seen it thousands of times for people to say I don't love you, the way that married people should love each other.
We don't love each other that way, but we love each other.
And love is a feeling and love is a verb.
And so I feel love for you and I'm going to act with love for you in our uncoupling.
And there is a way to do that, with a tremendous amount of dignity and a tremendous amount, I believe, of not setting on fire the aspects of this person that you cared about and that you loved.
And I have to tell you, I personally, when my son got married a few months ago, getting to spend the weekend because my ex-wife and her husband live five or six hours away from me
And spending the weekend with her was lovely.
Like to be around the warmth of her humor, to be around her with my sons and to see how they love their mom.
And you know the way we went right back to joking together and the way that her husband and I like sort of bonded in this experience of what we've experienced.
We've both been her husband, you know, and I kind of had the joy of you know, like when something would happen, I'd be like that's your problem now, buddy.
But it it was like a lovely thing.
And I think that you can, if you can accept that transition and that change and say you know, the barns burned down and now I see the moon.
I think that has tremendous value.
Oh, so good.
TK, you got something pithy for us to wrap up the question of the week segment.
How do you know whether a relationship is worth staying in or fighting for?
If it builds you up, it's worth it.
If it breaks you down, it's not.
The thing about fighting.
I think about Steven Pressfield's words in The War of Art resistance with the capital R.
That's the discomfort you must face any time you reach for something good on the other side, you're going to have to deal with fights.
Fighting for something in every arena of life.
If you say, I'm out of this marriage, I'm getting a divorce, that's going to be a fight.
You're going to have to pay social costs, financial costs, hits to your reputation.
You will have to fight to rebuild your life.
And that's what we see with the earlier caller.
If you stay in that, there are going to be some moments where you may have to say I have to speak up in ways that are uncomfortable.
I have to ask for things that require me to face my insecurities.
I may have to do some things that don't feel good in the moment.
There will always be a fight.
But the question to ask is, what is this fight doing to me?
Who am I becoming in the process of having fights like this?
I had a good friend, who won't be named, who talked about how a company acquired his, but he kept a small portion of it.
And he would have to have these meetings with the acquiring company.
And then one day they brought in their lawyers and they made it clear that they want the remaining part and he wasn't willing to give it up.
And so he showed up to all of these meetings with his lawyers and he was fighting them back and resisting.
One day he turns to his team and he says, hey, guys.
We're becoming really good at standing up to people that try to bully us and being confident in the face of adversity.
And that's one thing I don't want to spend my life becoming good at.
We're going to give up this part of the company and opt out of this fight.
The Mike Tyson of that fight.
But is that fight making you the kind of person that you want to become?
If the answer is yes, keep on fighting.
If the answer is no, it's time to consider an alternative.
Jim, you see why he's my counselor.
I swear, every time he finishes, I'm like, preach.
I got to write this down.
I have to really save this episode.
This is really good.
I'm just going to repeat everything and just claim authorship of it to my clients.
This is really, I'm charging $1,000 an hour for the discussion.
So I appreciate this.
Yeah, no, that was incredible.
TK as well, clutter counseling.
He helps people with emotional clutter, physical clutter, psychological clutter.
TheMinimalistcom.
For anyone listening to this who wants to do a clutter counseling session with TK Coleman.
You can do that from anywhere in the world.
TK, you made me think about The fighting bit here, it depends what we mean by fighting.
My pithy answer was if it requires fighting, it's not worth fighting for.
But it kind of depends on what do we mean by fighting, right?
Like I'm okay with a disagreement.
Sometimes when we say we had a disagreement, oh, we were fighting.
No, it was just a disagreement.
We disagreed about something.
Or maybe there's even a time to argue your perspective, right?
When I think about fighting, I think about I'm clinging to something.
I'm clinging to the way I wish things were.
I'm clinging to changing your mind.
And I think that's how to unlove someone.
To love someone is to see them for who they are, without trying to change them, coerce them, manipulate them.
But to unlove them is to drag them kicking and screaming to your point of view, because this is something that is worth fighting for.
You know, what's most compelling about TK is he's convinced me of so many things since he joined the show three years ago almost four years ago now he's never once tried to convince me of anything.
And I've been convinced so many times, not because he's trying to convince me, because his point of view happens to be so persuasive.
And I think the moment where he's like I'm going to force you to see my point of view it's easier to shut down.
I'm like, well, no, no, I am definitely right.
And so when I think about fighting in a relationship, I know Bex and I have had one fight in over a decade.
And it was totally my fault.
And it was a misunderstanding of what she meant by something.
And recognizing that, like, what I was trying to do in that moment was cling to being right.
And righteousness came out in that moment of being right.
Now, we disagree about stuff all the time.
We have different preferences as well.
That's not a fight, but I'm going to force you to believe like me and have the same opinion as me.
That becomes a significant problem.
You know, just to bounce off of that, I mean, I would push back in the following way and maybe it's because I fight for a living.
But, you know, I view my job as, I jokingly say, it's full-contact storytelling.
Mm-hmm.
Because I'm there to tell a story while someone else is trying to stop me from telling the story and tell a different story.
So like that's a very specific tool.
But what I would push back on is this.
I don't think every couple fights, right?
Like people will say like well, if you don't have fighting in your relationship, then you're not invested in your relationship.
It means that you're not invested in your relationship and you don't care about each other.
And I think there's something to that in the sense that the opposite of love is not hate.
The opposite of love is indifference, right?
Love and hate are very passionate emotions.
So you've got emotional skin in the game if you're angry at someone, if you're fighting with someone.
What's the opposite of love is I don't care.
Like, I just don't care.
Like, I don't care enough about your point of view to want to persuade you.
I don't really care what you think.
Like, that's the opposite, right?
So what I would push back on is the following.
I see conflict as clay sometimes.
Like.
It's the clay from which we can sculpt some resolution that that works for both of us in some fashion.
I think one of the reasons to be married is that I can't learn everything I need to know about myself from myself.
I think I need someone who sees my blind spots, because I can't see them.
That's why they're blind spots to me.
But my partner could see them, and I can see theirs.
And again going back to simplicity, if you're my favorite person and I know I'm your favorite person then if you're telling me something I need to work on or something that you know, I know you think this, but I don't think it's serving you.
I don't think it's authentic to you.
I don't think it's expressing who you are authentically.
I know if I'm your favorite person and I know that to be true.
I'm not going to hear that defensively.
I'm going to hear that as you're seeing something I can't see.
You're seeing behind me or something.
You're seeing some part of my blind spot.
And I have to tell you, in the vision of your life as a married man, you will lose your wife someday.
I'm sorry to say.
I hope like there is no greater wish I could make for you than when you lose her, whether you die or she dies, or Maybe, like you know, at the age of 150, in the middle of great sex, the roof just caves in.
Both die instantly.
That's actually what I wish for, for the two of you.
That's a great way to go.
Great way to go.
Yeah, yeah, simultaneously.
All likelihood it probably won't happen.
Roofs are really sturdy these days.
All those details.
Yeah, all those details.
But what I hope, at the end of your life you'll be able to say about your wife and she'll be able to say about you, is two things.
I hope the last thing you would say about her is This person helped me become the most authentic version of myself.
Wow.
And she's still my favorite person.
Oh, that second one.
If you can say those two things that this person helped me become the most and I helped her become not what I want her to be.
I helped her become the most authentic version of herself.
And she was still my favorite person.
That's the greatest blessing I could ever ask for.
And that's the only wedding toast worth saying is that I hope at the end of this, because here's the thing it's ending right now.
It's ending.
All of it is ending.
Like there's a finite number of times you will kiss your wife.
I don't know the number, but there's a number.
Someday we'll know it, but we don't know it right now.
It could be thousands.
I hope it's thousands.
It could be five.
But man, I would, if I'm you, if I have a wife, I'd have that in my mind every day when I woke up.
Every day I would think, I have to remember to kiss her.
Yeah.
Every day.
It's so funny because we do say this literally every day.
You're my favorite person.
I've never heard you say that.
I've never really said it before.
Yeah, it's so powerful because there's something else to it.
I think about what Orion Taraban says with respect to love.
He says love is the humiliated self exultant.
And I find that really fascinating, because there are times when you see the other person and they see you, and it's humiliating.
And we can we can honor that in a way that that's why I don't push back on.
You're right.
Every relationship is going to have conflict.
The fighting thing for me is about like, you should do this.
No, you should do this.
No, you shouldn't.
You're talking about a kind of fighting.
And there are a lot of people who think that kind of fighting is productive.
And by the way, there might be people that that kind of fighting is very comfortable for them.
Maybe they grew up in a household where that that is how conflict is done.
I have some friends that like very vigorously like, argue with each other, like good friends, you know, not married people even that just argue in this very intense way.
And then they're like, oh, I love you, man.
You're like, I've been doing Brazilian jujitsu for 20 years.
Like almost every one of my best friends has tried to choke me or break my arms.
Almost every one of them.
And none of them do jujitsu.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
But there is always this feeling after of like okay man, that was awesome, you know, because we go into it knowing that we're not actually trying to hurt each other.
And political debate can be that way.
Like any kind of disagreement can be that way.
Like I'm fighting the idea, not the person, and I'm trying to persuade you.
And But again, like, do I love you anyway?
Of course I love you anyway.
You're my friend.
Like, you don't have to agree with me for me to love you.
But I love you enough to like point out, I think you're wrong.
I think you're wrong.
I love you enough to say, I think this thought isn't serving you or it isn't worthy of you.
I think you're better than this.
But if you never get there where I'm trying to lead you, I'm not going to not love you.
I'm not going to not love you.
Like, I love you.
I can't help it.
That's why I like when people break up.
Or when you watch these like reality TV shows, like the where the bachelor or whatever, and they're like okay, I think I'm going to propose, you know.
And then they're like, okay, I proposed to the person and the person says no.
And then they're like, well, I'm never speaking to her again.
Well, I'm sure glad you didn't marry her then.
Because if you're like, I love you more than anything in the world.
And I want to spend the rest of my life with you, you, and only you.
And the person says, well, I don't want to marry you.
I think your response would be well, that sucks.
Because then I'm just going to be this person that's incredibly in love with you forever and isn't married to you.
I'm gonna just be a fool and i'm just gonna be around you all the time and want to be in your orbit because, even if you don't love me like, i'm still just gonna want to be around you because i love you more than anyone.
And i don't know, like.
But for the answer to be like oh, you don't love, all right, well then i hate you.
I hate you like wow, did we get whiplash?
Like that was a big one.
At best it should be like well, I love you slightly less now, you know, but don't just say no, I love you more than anything where I spend the rest of my life with you.
Oh, you don't want to marry me.
All right.
I hate you.
And there's nothing redeeming about you.
That's borderline personality disorder.
That's not love.
How about you, listeners?
How do you know whether a relationship is worth staying in and fighting for?
Let us know your thoughts in the Patreon community chat.
Let's move on to we got a whole switchboard of callers here.
We have a quick segment we do called Right Here, Right Now, where we talk about one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist.
So when this episode the day this episode comes out.
I have a new audio book that is coming out.
It's called Very, Very Simple.
And TK and I actually recorded it together.
So I wrote this audio book.
You can download it for free right now.
It's not going to be free in perpetuity, but I wanted to give our audience the chance to get it for free.
It's called Very, Very Simple.
It's 12 tools for a simpler life.
It's just some heuristics that we live by some adjustable.
We call them tools or rules in the book, but they're really just these boundaries.
And I find they work really well in relationships too, because in a cluttered house there's often a lot that's going on beneath the clutter.
Our material possessions are a physical manifestation of of what's going on in our internal lives.
And so if I've got a lot of mess out here, there's probably a lot of mess up here, a lot of mess in here, relationship clutter.
And so what very, very simple is is these 12 heuristics that will really help you sort through the mess, both externally and internally.
It's 12 practical tools.
They're flexible rules.
They're not rigid dogmas to help you define what's no longer acceptable in your life and let it go.
You can find that at very, very simple.com.
You can download the ebook or the audio book for free over there for a limited time.
Less clutter, fewer distractions, more life.
Also a bonus right here, right now segment, since we have the divorce attorney here.
My good friend, Sean Mihalik is a talented novelist.
I think his.
This is your ninth novel that's coming out and it's called Divorce, with an exclamation point.
It's kind of like Jeopardy.
You got the exclamation point there.
It sounds more severe.
Isn't that kind of how divorce often feels?
And when you talk about divorce, you're talking about divorce.
And it's a rather NC-17 novel.
So please don't read it in front of the kids.
But if you're interested in it, it's available for pre-order right now.
Where do I go for that, Sean?
I've got it written down here somewhere.
Oh, yeah.
It's anslimpress.com.
We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
It's called Divorce.
Kind of think about a Fifty Shades of Grey for Divorce.
I know that's not exactly it, but that'll give you the feeling of it.
It's an erotic novel.
In fact, that is the subtitle, Divorce, an erotic novel.
And also he wrote it.
I mean, he's not hiding that he's the author, but he wrote it pseudonymously, so it's under a pin name as well.
You can find all the details to that in the show notes at anslimpress.com.
Much more coming up, y'all.
But first, here's a minimalist tip from one of our listeners.
Hi, Josh, TK and the Minimalist team.
This is Jen from Herefordshire in the UK.
And I just want to express my sincere thanks to you all.
I found your podcast coming up to a year ago and I will remain forever grateful.
I've been decluttering for a while, but what you taught me was that I needed to let go of the stories behind the stuff.
We learned to accept that two of our medically complex children, and indeed our own future selves, will be different from the past versions whose belongings we were clinging to.
So for the first six months of 2025, I practiced letting go.
Letting go of inherited furniture that was taking up a whole barn of the clutter that we'd accumulated over the past 25 years, and learning that there were other forms of emotional clutter.
And that made the most enormous difference.
Life became vastly simpler.
Items that had required time and effort to maintain, we gave away.
We brought joy to others.
And rather than rotting away in a dusty barn, the staff were georgia, a local primary school, and even a trike was taken by a 90 year old lady to cycle down her drive every day to collect her newspaper.
So by mid-july our barn was clear and ready for the upcoming apple season.
With fruit farmers, we cleared the clatter we'd become blind to and we all felt a great weight had been lifted.
The next day i had a severe brain hemorrhage whilst traveling on a train to london.
Over the next hours and days my life was literally saved by being able to remain relaxed, largely because I felt safe in the knowledge that I'd laid the foundations for my family to move on, with or without me.
The brain injury has left me unable to spatially map to safely negotiate clutter or out-of-place items.
Decluttering enabled me to return home.
I'm most thankful for the knowledge of identity clutter not clinging to the person I was before has enabled me to accept my current situation.
I know I'll be a different version of me again in the future.
I'm really proud that I previously focused all my energy and love into that which I valued.
Yes, you also taught me to identify my core values and with your help, I'd unwittingly laid strong foundations for life to continue.
So, while I'm an, I'm using neuroplasticity to rebuild skills and constantly consider and refine my identity and practice, letting go in ways I'd never have imagined.
I will, however, hold on to the fact that the brain has a remarkable power to heal and grow.
Thank you.
Jen, thank you for that compelling story.
Wow.
You remind me of why we do what we do here at The Minimalist.
TK, I suspect this also applies to relationships too.
We often We think we're like clinging to a person, but maybe we're just clinging to a story that we have wrapped around that person.
Man, I remember my first breakup after like my first major relationship.
I dated a girl my entire college career.
And the first time I went out to eat without her, I felt like a total loser for being alone.
Anyone who knows me today will laugh, because I don't feel like I'm winning unless I can have alone time like that.
And the last thing I would ever feel today is a loser for going to the movies by myself or a restaurant by myself.
But in the immediate aftermath of not having her there with me, I felt like I was a loser.
Everyone's looking at me like a guy that can't get a date.
It's stories like that that bind us to things that are unworthy of us, bind us to things that have toxic effects on our lives, because of a narrative that says I can't live without it.
I can't be someone who matters without it.
I'll never grow beyond it.
This is the best that I can do, etc.
Jim, I imagine part of your job is helping people let go of the stories about their relationship.
Yeah, I mean, I love the thought of it being sort of relationship clutter.
You know, I think one of the things I talk about in my book How to Stay in Love Practical Wisdom from an Unlikely Source is.
I talk about routine maintenance in relationships in a very practical way.
And one of the things that I think is really valuable about this stuff is all of it is free.
Like none of that costs anything.
Like what does it take to, to send an email to your partner or to go for a walk together?
If you're not the kind of person that can do things off the cuff if you.
That's why I think an email sometimes is like helpful, because you can compose your thoughts.
But if you're the kind of person that does well in conversation, that's good too.
To say like, Hey, every week we're going to make this a practice.
Like, tell me three things I did this week that made you feel my love.
Tell me three things I did this week that made you feel less than loved.
Tell me three things I did this week that made you want to rip my clothes off.
You know, tell me three things this week I did that gave you the ick.
You know like, because here's the thing like we do hold on to these patterns, these habits, these ways of being together.
We don't check in on, like, are they still serving us or are they cluttered?
Or worse than clutter, are they weighing us down and creating drag that we don't need, you know?
And all it would take is a very short check-in.
A very short check-in to say, you know?
Because, by the way, who wouldn't love to hear the answer to the question?
What are three things I did this week that made you feel loved?
Like I would love to hear the answer to that.
Like we're standing here, you know, three men talking to each other.
If you said to me like, hey, Jim, tell me three things that you like about me so far.
Like I could, both of you, I could give you three things really easily.
And by the way, it would be really fun for me to tell you them.
It would feel really good.
And I think it would feel really good for you to hear them.
And I think you might be surprised by them.
Like you might, it might be something that you just completely take for granted.
Like, cause whoever discovered water wasn't a fish.
Like you're just, you're you.
So you don't know like, oh, you know what I like about you?
I like this, you know?
And by the way, what are some ways I might've missed the mark?
Cause I want to know, I want to be good at this job.
You signed up for a job when you got married and I want to be good at this job.
So you know I'm reminded when, cause sometimes I make that suggestion to people and they'll say like well, you know, like it sounds like a thing.
Like you had to do a whole thing.
You got to do this every week.
And like, here's what I'm going to tell you.
If you don't have 10 minutes a week to devote to your marriage, you're going to need a lot more time than that to devote to your marriage.
Like you know, the the Dalai Lama is credited with having spoken to a, a ceo a fortune 50 ceo and he was talking to him about how he feels restless and lost.
And the dalai lama said i think you should meditate for 15 minutes a day.
And he said well, i don't have 15 minutes a day to meditate.
He said well then, i think you should meditate for an hour.
And i think it's the same thing.
Like i think that there's clutter in relationships and just like the clutter in your house, like you didn't go oh my god, i want to buy that so it can be cluttered.
Like I want to buy that.
What is it?
It's a dust catcher.
It's just going to sit on a shelf and just get dusty.
And I'm going to stop seeing it because it's just sitting in this room.
And eventually I'm just going to go kind of blind to it because it's just there and it doesn't add any value to my life.
And eventually it's just going to weigh me down.
Okay.
Well, how many things in your relationship are like that?
They made sense at one point.
There was something that at that stage in your relationship, it made sense.
But now we do it.
And if we didn't do it, there'd be the feeling of now we have to have a conversation about why we're not doing it anymore.
And my partner might really like it, by the way.
And maybe your partner is like, I don't actually know why we do that either.
Like, why do we do that?
Like one of the most controversial hot takes I've ever had on the Internet is a few weeks ago I said in an interview that I don't understand why people feel like they have to sleep in the same bed.
10 million views shared thousands of times.
People have very strong feelings on this.
And by the way, why do you have very strong feelings upon where I like to sleep?
That's very strange.
And, by the way, if you have a problem with how I like to sleep, don't comment on it on the Internet.
Me on my cell phone.
And if you don't have my cell phone number, then you don't get to have strong feelings about where I sleep at night.
You probably shouldn't have strong feelings about that.
Because here's the thing.
Why do we do?
It's okay to check in with your partner and say why are we sleeping in the same bed?
We kick each other.
You like to starfish out.
You snore.
Whatever.
You wake up so early.
I like to sleep in.
You make lots of noise.
Whatever it might be.
And to say, hey, you know what?
Maybe this doesn't serve us.
Maybe we're a couple.
We'll snuggle in bed.
We'll watch TV.
We'll whatever.
And then we'll go to our neutral corners and sleep like civilized people.
Or...
Maybe one or both of you will say, oh my God, I love that time.
I love when we're like all tucked in and we're in the cave and it's just us and we sleep and I wake up in the middle of the night and you're right there and I can smell you and reach out to you.
Great, great.
I'm not saying don't do that.
Right.
I'm saying for me, that's not the thing.
For you, that's the thing.
If it's for the two of you and it doesn't scare the horses, knock yourself out.
Like, I don't care what you do.
So what is relationship clutter in your marriage?
What is, again, peer pressure exerted by dead people, you know?
And what is serving you?
And how do you check in on that from time to time?
How do you sort that out?
Because again, I think it's not only a useful practice, It's free.
I think it's fun.
And I think it deepens your connection to each other.
And that's like a win, a win, a win.
But again, you're not going to hear anyone suggesting that to you because you don't need to buy anything.
You don't need to do anything.
You're never going to hear anybody say, buy my new book.
Talk to your spouse.
You know, I think about one of the most controversial things that I said was I didn't realize it was accidentally controversial as well is my wife and I live apart half the time.
And people have opinions about that.
Strong opinions.
You shouldn't do that.
You don't love each other.
Clearly, you don't get along.
You guys have a talk and go like.
Darling, we apparently don't love each other.
JohnXYZ23 at Gmail told us and to go, oh, no, I really thought I loved you.
I can't believe John42613 figured it out that we don't love each other.
I was still feeling really strongly about.
Well, you know, i guess we'll move on yeah yeah, and the funny thing is like we actually do enjoy sleeping next to each other when we do, and we often like hold hands in the middle of the night and it's like so sweet.
It's like cliche almost, but i found i think if we did that every single night, it would feel obligatory.
And I think that's part of the thing as well that it may be the objection to like asking those questions every week.
You don't want it to feel obligatory.
You want it to be sincere.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I think, I think there are some patterns in our life.
Like I kind of don't care why you exercise a little bit every day.
It's good for your body.
Yeah.
It's good for your body.
If you do it because you are worried about maintaining your weight and you have like, body image issues or body dysmorphia.
I think it's good to work on those things.
But the solution is not going to be, you know, no, don't exercise at all.
Because I would be, learn how to exercise in a manner that doesn't exacerbate your body dysmorphia.
Do yoga, do something like that.
The answer is not, don't care at all about your health.
So like you, may you don't have to like.
There's so many things that You know.
I tell clients this all the time.
Like I'll tell someone you have to pay $2,500 a month in child support.
And they'll say, well, I don't want to pay $2,500 a month in child support.
And I go, well, good news, you don't have to.
And they go, I don't have to pay it.
And I go, no, you don't have to want to pay it.
You just have to pay it.
Like, you don't have to want to do this thing.
There may be a week where you don't feel like doing that.
And, by the way, wouldn't that be a lovely thing to share with your partner and to have the kind of space that you could say I don't know.
This week this feels like an obligation.
And maybe you could go, are you feeling that too?
No, actually, I was looking forward to this this week.
Yeah, so what's going on in me this week?
Like, I don't know what's going on in me that I'm feeling that.
Like, be curious still about each other.
Like familiarity breeds contempt sometimes.
You know, no man's a hero to his butler.
And so you're around each other and in each other.
Because when you meet, you're interested and interesting.
And you don't just fall in love with the person.
You fall in love with the person you are when you're with that person.
Like every time I've fallen in love, I fell in love with a woman and I fell in love with me.
I fell in love with the me that she saw and that she made me look at and that she like oh, I don't.
I don't feel very handsome a lot of the time.
But God when, like a beautiful woman to me, is looking at me and says like, oh God, you're man, you're my flavor.
I feel really handsome.
I feel wonderfully handsome.
And by the way, is that a healthy way to be?
No, but it's human.
It's human.
Like I should certainly have an internal sense of self and a compass that I can find my own beauty inside of me.
But maybe one of the ways to get to that place is through connection.
Like we break in relationship and we heal in relationship.
So you've been cheated on by a prior relationship.
The answer is not okay.
I'm going to build these giant walls and I'm going to like you.
Don't learn how to swim by reading books about swimming.
You learn how to swim by getting in a pool.
Like someone broke your heart and broke your trust.
Trusting someone again and having that trust not be betrayed is how you heal from that.
So I think that it may feel like a chore sometimes if you make a practice of a thing.
But that feeling is worth looking at too.
Yes.
Yeah, that's good.
Every other Friday, we do a day date together and it's like we just take the day off work.
And sometimes it's it's an incredible burden in terms of like setting aside that time.
There's stuff to do.
Yeah.
I'm going to have to work the weekend now or whatever.
But it's it never feels like an obligation.
I think that's the thing where it can feel like a burden.
But what's going on in my own life or my own story that I'm telling myself about, this schedule that makes it feel that way?
And man, it's like, I can't do it this Friday.
Well, maybe I need to do it two weeks in a row then, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I love that.
We've got a lot more to talk about.
Let us know if you have any listener tips or insights about this episode.
Just send a voice memo to podcast at theminimalistscom so we can feature your voice on the show.
Up next, page two and page three.
But first, let's take a quick pandiculation break.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
That's like the first 33 of episode 524.
The full three and a half hour maximal edition with James Sexton includes answers to a bunch more questions, like should I hold on to sentimental items that trigger bad memories?
Should a married couple ever keep separate bank accounts?
His answer to this really surprised me on this one.
Actually, a lot of his answers surprised me.
How would your marriage benefit from term limits?
We also had that article on micro cheating and we talked about religion's role in divorce and how that can complicate or, in some cases, simplify things for us.
Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the Minimalist Private Podcast on Patreon.
The link is in the description.
When you subscribe, you can listen to our private podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.
Plus, you'll gain access to all of our archives all the way back to the very first.
Big thanks to James Sexton for joining us today.
His book is called How to Stay in Love.
We'll put a link to that and all of his books in the show notes.
Also, his YouTube channel.
He started a YouTube channel recently.
And it is irreverent and fun and playful about a topic that often isn't very irreverent, fun or playful.
We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
And that is our minimal episode for today.
On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, TK Coleman Audio Bin Spire Jeff and Spire Dave Jordan.
No More Tomcat.
Professor Sean Savvy D.
Also, we had my wife Rebecca and Beulah on the couch today.
My name is Joshua Fields Milburn.
If you leave here with just one message.
Let it be this love people and use things because the opposite never works.
Thanks for listening, y'all.
We'll see you next time.
Peace.
Every little thing you think that you need.
Every little thing you think that you need.
Every little thing that's just feeding your greed, oh I bet that you'd be fine without it.
