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And this week on our podcast, Hungry for History, we talk oysters, plus the miambichir stops by.
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No way!
What if being a man wasn't about holding it all together, but learning how to let go?
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In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic.
How preventable is type 2?
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Every marriage ends.
It ends in death or divorce, but it ends.
If something 50% or more of the time ends in pain and heartbreak, it's actually reckless to do it.
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world.
Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow.
Today's guest is someone that I've been dying to sit down with ever since I came across his work.
It is meaningful, it's powerful, and the best part about it is that it's direct and to the point.
Our next guest is the author of How to Stay in Love.
Please welcome to On Purpose, James Sexton.
James, it is great to meet you.
It is great to meet you too.
Loved connecting with you offline for a few moments just before we started.
And I mean it.
I've been watching your clips, watching your interviews, thinking you have so much value to share with our audience.
And I know this is your first time here, but I hope it's going to be the first of many.
So thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me.
I have to say I'm a fan of the work and I've always found your conversations to be something that actually moved me forward in my own thought process.
So it's really, really lovely to hear from your team and to come and sit down together.
Yeah.
Thank you for saying that.
That means the world.
I want to dive straight in James, because you know, I think We all hear this statistic and I want to check, even if it's true.
Is it true that 50% of marriages end in divorce?
It's actually a little over 50%.
Yeah, it's a frightening statistic when you hear it, because I've often said it actually creates the legal supposition that marriage is a negligent activity.
In the law, we have this idea of negligence and recklessness.
So negligence is a failure to perceive a substantial but high likelihood of harm.
And recklessness is a conscious disregard for a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm.
And you could make the argument that if something, 50 or more of the time, ends in pain and heartbreak, that it's actually reckless to do it.
And You know, I'm always vexed by the thought that how do we gauge the success of something?
And so divorce is clearly a failure of marriage to sustain.
But then you have to think if over 50 of marriages end in divorce, how many people are unhappy with the decision they made to marry but stay together for the children or because they don't want to give away half their belongings?
If you're conservative and say it's another 10, maybe 20.
Now we're talking about something that has a fail rate of 70 or so.
That, to me, is just shocking.
It's stunning.
But the statistic that people don't talk about is that 86 of people who divorce are remarried within five years of their divorce, which to me actually speaks to the importance of marriage.
Someone who's gone through this process, it's ended in a manner different than what they had hoped for, right.
And they still, okay, let's try it again.
And what does that say about our need for that connection, how important it is to us as humans?
So yeah, but the unfortunate news is that that is a very high fail rate by any regard.
Yeah, and I think most things.
If you heard something had that fail rate, you'd probably not even try.
Even remotely.
Even with anything, right?
So if someone said hey, this investment has a 50 chance of failing or going wrong, you'd probably not consider it.
Of course.
Why do people still get married?
I think probably for a number of reasons.
I mean one is it's assumed for many years that it's the right thing to do, which is in and of itself strange, because
The supposition that one should marry in the face of those statistics is shocking.
And even the fact that it's considered indelicate.
Like if someone said to me, oh, Jim, I'm getting married.
The proper response is, oh, congratulations.
That's wonderful.
But it would be perfectly reasonable to say, really, why?
Why?
Like, why are you doing that?
Like, what is the problem to which marriage is a solution?
What...
What is the reason that this particular permutation of a personal, religious and or legal relationship is important to you or to your soon-to-be spouse?
But it would be considered terribly rude.
I would never in polite society say to someone, why are you getting married?
Because it just feels like such a pessimistic view of things.
But it isn't pessimistic if you look at the numbers.
And I actually think it's an interesting... thought exercise for people to have.
You know, why am I getting married?
What is the problem to which marriage is a solution?
We look at any other technology in our life, you know, this mic stand, you know, the glass of water.
And I can say okay.
The problem to which this is a solution is it would be awkward for me to hold a microphone in my hand, and we need to amplify our voices in some fashion.
So you can answer the question pretty easily.
But marriage is even asking the question is considered rude.
Yeah, I've never thought about it like that.
And I'm actually thinking about as you're saying.
It's fascinating that we've confused the emphasis on a wedding versus a marriage too.
So you spend more time planning your wedding than you do preparing for a marriage.
Well, I jokingly talk about the wedding industrial complex.
You know that it's a billions of dollars business.
And of course, like, what about it? wouldn't be appealing.
I mean, weddings are, I love them.
I get misty eyed at weddings.
Nothing about my job has made me the slightest bit less excited about a wedding.
The idea of two people coming together and standing before family and friends and saying I found my person.
Out of 8 billion, I found my person.
You know how could you not sentimental about that?
It's such a beautiful thing and but you know, saying I do isn't saying I can like, at best it's saying I'll try and we just don't.
We don't say that out loud and I think we might be poor for it.
I think it would be better if we had a more honest and realistic view of marriage, because there's nothing more fun than getting married, and Being married is much more challenging.
And we spend so much time in the excitement and the sort of pheromones of you know, we're going to have this cake and we're going to have this which, by the way, of course, it's so much fun.
Like any event, with cake I'll go to, but it really is something that we would do well to take the being married part from the beginning more seriously.
Yeah.
I've officiated a few weddings and there's never been a time when I haven't not wanted to cry.
Like I'm trying to hold it together.
And the only thing in my head is don't cry, don't cry.
God bless you, you can do it.
Hold it together.
It's so hard because I'm the same.
I love love.
I'm fully present.
It's something that gets me right in my soul.
When you're cheering for them.
Yeah, and I love hearing the speeches and the vows and self-written.
I'll share a personal experience.
My oldest son...
Noah got married a couple of weeks ago.
Oh, wow.
Congratulations.
Wonderful.
Why?
Why?
Exactly why.
He has good health insurance.
No, they had good reasons.
He's my son.
And he's also a lawyer.
So he's thought it through.
And she's a lawyer.
But I knew I would be very moved by it.
I'll let you in on a secret that I'm very sensitive.
For someone who's been described as the sociopath you want on your side in the courtroom.
I i'm actually.
I think my superpower is that i'm extremely sensitive and i'm very prone to tears, and i'm very prone to usually tears over things that move me and my son and his now wife i have to get used to saying that because his girlfriend for a long time that was fiance and now it's wife they wrote their own vows and And I fully expected that I would get teary-eyed during the ceremony
But when she was reading her vows to him, to hear someone talking about this little boy that I helped raise to a man and saying you know you're the strongest man I know.
Like, you make me feel so safe.
Like I could not Tears pouring down my face because it was just such.
It felt like a finish line of sorts.
It felt like, oh, okay.
Like that's the man.
She sees that man.
Like, I know I don't see my own kids.
Clearly nobody does.
We all think they're the most beautiful handsome, wonderful.
But to have this really intelligent young woman you know, looking at my son and saying like you're a hero to me, was one of the most powerful emotional moments in my life.
And I, I found myself, as I do at every wedding, just just cheering for them, just hoping they'll defy every statistic and every odd and they'll keep the feeling they have at that moment.
Yeah, yeah.
And at the same time, it's that paradox, isn't it?
Because I think I got married nine years ago, and still with my wife, and we've been together for 12 years.
And now I look back and I think to myself, I didn't know.
I didn't have a clue.
How could you?
What I was saying.
Yeah, yeah.
Like I said, I loved my wife that day and that I believed that we were meant for each other and everything.
And I had no clue.
Like the last nine years have been so much more illuminating about a commitment I made.
And it's almost like I made a commitment, with far less information, far less insight, far less growth.
And so what I wanted to dive into with you and there's so many things I want to unpack from everything you've just said But I want to help our audience understand from your perspective and from your insight and from your experience, like we've just talked about, the most beautiful moment and hearing you describe your son's vows and that moment there can't be anyone who's listening right now, who isn't just thinking, oh my gosh, that's beautiful.
I love that.
And then you're someone who's seen countless couples break apart, get divorced.
Yeah.
My day job is facilitating the demise of unhappy marriages.
And I've done it for 25 years at the highest level.
And I'm very glad it has not taken out of me my appreciation for love and my appreciation for how important romantic love is and how beautiful of a connection two people can have.
But yeah, I have seen good people at their absolute worst.
And I have seen intimacy weaponized in the most brutal ways.
And so I see the risk that we take.
But what it causes me to be very mindful of is how brave it is to love.
Because you should be scared to get married.
You should be scared to love anything.
To love anything is sort of insane.
Because...
Every marriage ends.
It ends in death or divorce, but it ends.
And to love anything is to open yourself up to the inevitability of losing it.
And so there's a good argument to be made that you just should never open yourself up that way, because the pain that will come is so great.
And yet, we love.
We love constantly, you know, because... the reward of it is so amazing and so beautiful.
And that's why, you know, if you're not scared, it's not brave.
It's only brave if you're scared and you do it anyway.
And so a wedding to me feels brave.
Like the marriage you just described.
You know, you and your wife are nine years in, so you're not newlyweds anymore.
The honeymoon's passed.
You know, especially if you have children, when you have children, that it's really- Yeah, we haven't yet.
Okay.
So that's another chapter.
So what you'll?
What you'll see though, is even what you're saying now that oh, these nine years were something different of a journey than I anticipated.
And I promise that the next nine and the next nine and the next nine, you have no idea.
None of us do.
My grandmother used to say, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I.
But the idea too again, of having a partner in that of someone who, like I'll hold your hand, you'll hold mine, and let's.
Let's do this together because it's so much better.
And I don't think I can learn everything I need to know about myself from myself.
I need help.
I need people who see my blind spots and love me and are cheering for the good in me and forgiving the weakness in me.
So there's something to me about again, even in facilitating the demise of unhappy marriages and seeing how wrong this can go, It's like you know, in the presence of death we're most aware of the beauty of our life.
And in the presence of illness, we're so aware of our good health.
I think doing what I do has made me appreciate love in a very deep way.
There's such a truth in what I'm hearing from you and even sensing and feeling from the way you're sharing what you're sharing in it.
It's so interesting because if someone's scared before they get married or before they fall in love, we usually tell them that's a bad thing.
We usually be like, oh no, no, you should be sure.
You should know, right?
Like if you don't know, and it's almost like, well, no, how could you?
Like it's putting yourself.
You know it's trying to get someone to hold your heart and hold this fragile vulnerable, deepest part of yourself and not knowing if they'll be able to hold it properly for decades and decades and decades.
You know, I'm 52 years into my journey of being a human being and I'd like to think I'm starting to become myself and starting to understand myself much better.
And that's after, you know, a long time of reflection and therapy and all those things.
So it's so hard to know yourself.
Mm-hmm.
To then know another person you know and then to be in such an intimate tie with this person.
And again in a way that requires a tremendous amount if you're going to do it right of vulnerability candor bravery, just the ability to say you know.
I mean, it really is almost discipline, like the trading.
What you want now, for what you want most, you know, and what you want most is deep long-term connection with this other person.
Sometimes what you want now is just like let's get through the day.
Let's not have an argument or a difficult conversation.
But sometimes you know, just like we have to go to the gym, just like we, you have to lean in to these uncomfortable things.
And that's a lot of what my writing is about is about the idea of leaning into moderately uncomfortable conversations for the good of the longterm relationship.
Because you know it's.
It's so easy to want to have your day-to-day go smooth in your relationship that you start telling each other what the other person wants to hear and not sharing what's really going on in your head and in your heart.
But I think if what we really want is long-term deep connection with another person, we can't do that.
We have to be disciplined.
We have to say, okay, I'm going to be radically candid with this person about what's going on.
I think a lot of what we've touched on so far.
Is this really root emotion, like what's really happening beneath the surface?
And I wonder not.
What are the top three reasons people get divorced?
That they say in the courtroom, or that they may say the first time they meet you or to their therapist what are the top three root reasons that you have discovered that lead to someone getting divorced?
Yeah, the most common question.
Anyone who finds out what I do for a living ask me other than oh my God, you must have some great stories.
And usually they're very pleased because I'll tell them one of the more outrageous ones, like oh, and then he cut the car in half with a chainsaw and said okay, you pick which half you want.
You know, things like, true story.
That's crazy.
That's true story, yeah.
Okay, you love to tell.
Oh yeah, I have some real bangers.
You have to tell us some new ones later.
Yeah, you know, I'm a lot of fun at a cocktail party because I have a lot of those.
But really, what people are, you know, asking?
I think they want me to say Oh, cheating or financial impropriety, because that gives us a sense of control.
Okay.
I can monitor my client.
My client comes out of me, but I can monitor my spouse or partner's whereabouts using my phone.
And I can, you know, be vigilant about, you know, like keeping an eye on what's going on with them and other people.
And it gives us a sense of control.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm worried.
You know financial impropriety is a huge piece of a lot of divorces, but you know okay, I can try to monitor finances and stay actively involved in it so we never have that happen.
But really underneath those things is what you know.
Those are the symptoms, not the underlying illness.
And I think the underlying illness.
It's maddening for people to hear, but I think it's disconnection.
I think the number one marriage killer is disconnection.
I think we fall in love incredibly fast.
And we fall out of love and we fall into those big marriage killers much more slowly, or really kind of the way that people go bankrupt very slowly and then all at once.
And by the time you've gone over that cliff, I actually think it may be too late to do something about it, which is why I'm very big on the idea of preventative maintenance and not getting to that place.
But I think disconnection from your partner, from yourself, from your true self.
I think I've been representing people in court for 25 years in divorces and I think the most dangerous lies we tell are the ones we tell ourself about what's making us happy, what's not, what's important to us and what isn't, how we've changed and how we've stayed the same, how our partner has changed and how we feel about it.
We lie to ourselves about those things so that we can sort of navigate a comfortable day-to-day reality.
But long-term, I think that is a very, very dangerous thing.
So I would say disconnection from yourself and from your partner.
I would also say that the biggest marriage killer is we stop seeing our partner and we stop making them feel seen because we're.
I think we become blind to the things we see most often.
Whoever discovered water, it wasn't a fish.
I have a couch that I've had for, I think, probably 20 years.
I couldn't tell you what color it is because I sit on it every day at some point.
But I've just become blind to it because it's just there.
It's the couch.
It's always there.
If I got a new one, then I would probably be very mindful of it.
But I think it's the same thing.
In a long-term relationship, there's a temptation to say, oh, I found it.
I found this person.
We did the thing.
We're in the rings.
We connected to each other.
We're good.
Like, I don't have to worry about that anymore.
I can worry about all the thousand other natural shocks the flesh is heir to, you know?
And in fact, like this, this thing, this connection is so important that you know when you, when you think about when you're dating someone, you feel interested and you feel interesting.
And those are both equally intoxicating.
It's lovely to sort of dive into someone.
This is our first conversation.
It's exciting for us.
We're kind of a mystery to each other.
And we know a little about each other, enough that we're interested.
But we want to know more.
And when you feel interesting, it's lovely.
It's lovely to have someone say like, oh, and then what did you do?
And where did you grow up?
And you know like it makes you feel sort of, oh yeah, I guess I joke because every summer we have law student interns who come to the firm for a couple months and share their talents with us.
And I always feel so proud to be a lawyer when they're around, because it's something they aspire to so much.
And you know it's been my day job for so long that I sometimes forget like, oh yeah, like there was a time where The only thing in the world I wanted was like everything I did was I want to be able to someday walk into a courtroom and say James J Sexton for the plaintiff.
You know,
And, and then I do it.
I've done it so many thousands of times that it's really easy to forget that.
What a privilege that is, what a goal it was.
And I achieved it.
And when you're around people that are chasing that same dream, you say, oh yeah, like I forgot.
And I think it's the same phenomenon in marriage.
Like there was a time. where all of us went, I just want to find someone.
Like I want to find my someone.
I want to find someone who loves me and sees me and I'll love them and they'll receive my love.
And then you have it and you just kind of, okay, I got that now and I'll move on to other things.
And so I think when you feel you know there's, I always say about New York City that there's a kind of loneliness in New York City that I don't see in a lot of other cities, because you're so surrounded by people and yet you feel very alone sometimes because everyone's sort of in their lane.
And it's a city where someone can just fall down in front of you and people just keep moving.
And it's so odd to be surrounded.
Like when you're home by yourself, if you feel lonely, it seems situationally appropriate.
But if you're sitting in a room with hundreds of people and feel incredibly lonely, that's a very different kind of loneliness.
I think when you are with the person who's supposed to be your deepest connection and you feel lonely and alone, that's a very unique brand of misery.
So I think a lot of that comes from not feeling seen anymore.
And I think that's something that kills marriages in a real way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I like those two.
And I appreciate those answers so much more than the surface answers of and we will talk about cheating and we will talk about money at some point, but I much prefer the disconnection and the lack of being seen as points of contention, because I think you're spot on, because when you didn't wash the dishes, someone felt like you didn't see them.
When you forgot to pick up something on the way back from home, they felt you were disconnected.
When you sat on the couch, both watching the same show but never looking at each other, you felt unseen.
Like that's what you felt.
That's what was going on phenomenon, that reality, I think actually can be flipped in the other direction to our benefit.
Because you've been married.
I don't want to put you on the spot, but you've been married nine years.
I'm willing to bet that if your wife was here and I said to her, when do you feel most loved by Jay?
Tell me some moments, tell me some things he does that makes you feel loved.
I bet There's some answers.
You would know like he listens to me when he cares for our family member, whatever.
But I bet there'd be some that you go, really?
That?
Like, that?
That little thing?
Like, that to me is such a beautiful expression of, like, what a mystery it is, you know?
But there is something about these little gestures.
Like, you gave the example of, like, the dishes in the sink.
And it is.
That's like a death by a thousand paper cuts.
It's this little thing that's like, yeah, I don't.
I don't care enough about you to do this and I don't value your time enough.
Like it can feel that way.
But also the act of like doing the dishes without being asked to do that is such as the opposite.
It's such a sense of like, oh no, I did this because I love you.
Like I did this because I don't want you to have to do it.
Like and there are so many little things when you're in love and when you feel loved that I bet your spouse like they're silly little things.
I can think of one right now.
My wife's told me before.
So, you know, and I'm pretty sure everyone goes through this.
So my wife gets into bed before me, maybe by a couple of minutes, she's brushed her teeth.
She's done everything.
She's going to bed.
I'm getting, I'm just about to get into bed.
And she's like, can you get me some water?
And it's like that.
So if I, if I snap and I go, no, get it yourself.
Like I'm getting into bed too.
Right.
Right.
Or, or if you get the water.
Yeah.
Before she even asked.
Yes.
Yeah.
And you say, Before you ask, I knew you'd want a little.
Like that's such a feeling of oh, like you didn't, you know, or even if you just get the water and put it on the nightstand and don't look for credit and you just do it.
And you know I had a client I talk about it in the book who I was talking to her after we'd been many miles together.
It was a very ugly divorce.
And we were sitting outside of the courtroom and I said to her Because we'd been some miles, so you start having more casual conversations
And I said, was there a moment that you knew the marriage was over?
And she said, yeah, I remember it.
And I said, what was it?
And she said, there was this granola that I really like.
And I used to have it for breakfast.
I'd put it on my yogurt, and I would have that every day.
And they only sold it at this one store.
And my husband used to always get it for me.
And whenever the bag was running out, magically, a new bag would be there.
She's like, and it always made me feel loved.
It always made me feel like, oh, look.
And he wouldn't even say, oh, I got you your granola.
We're prone to do as men.
We're like, I opened that jar.
We love that.
But he didn't even look for credit.
He just would do it.
And she said, it just always made me feel so like he sees me.
He knows what I need.
He tries to get ahead of it.
She said, and one day... the granola ran out.
And I thought, oh, that's strange.
And she's like, I didn't get my own.
Cause I thought, oh no, maybe he's just didn't notice, you know?
And a couple more days went by and granola never got replaced.
And she said, and I thought, okay, this is over.
Like it's starting to move in the wrong direction.
And I just remember thinking like what a what a powerful moment, but what a very relatable one, you know.
The funny PS to that story is I said to her, was there anything like that that you did for him?
And without hesitation, she said, yeah, blowjobs.
And I spit out my coffee.
Like I literally spit coffee across the courthouse hallway.
And I said, really?
She said, yeah.
She said, you know, when we were like dating and first married, like it was just Something, I did a lot like it was, you know, it didn't take terribly long and always put him in a great mood for the day.
And, you know, he would like text me later and be like, oh my God, this morning was so fun.
And she goes and then for some reason, like you know, once the kids came and stuff, we didn't have as much time alone together.
And she said, I didn't really have much occasion.
And so I would say like oh well, we'll wait till tonight, and then we can both.
You know we'll have sex and we'll both enjoy it.
She's like, but now I think about it and I think like, oh yeah, like that was probably like the equivalent of granola.
Now I'm not saying these are the same.
I think they're quite different.
But whatever it is like, whatever that little thing is not that that's little, but whatever it is that your partner does for you, whatever kindness they show you, selfless kindness that they show you, whatever gesture of warmth and love and prioritizing your joy and pleasure.
That's so important.
And it's so easy to lose it.
It's so easy to just not even know that you lost it.
Yeah.
And I think it's so important that there's recognition, gratitude, and reciprocity for it.
Because I think often when someone's doing something for a long time, it's like the couch.
You stop thanking them.
You stop noticing it.
You stop honoring it.
And that part is equally as important, because that person at one point will feel underappreciated.
And these are such.
They're simple.
These are such simple things.
Yeah.
Like it's so easy.
But it is that.
It is so easy.
It's not the birthday or the wedding anniversary.
And that's what we put so much on is these giant gestures.
And.
But the truth is like if you texted your wife right now and just said I married the prettiest girl in the world.
Like who, what does that take?
What does it take?
My wife would just send me a, Picture of her making a funny face.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You got a good one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's lovely.
But I bet it wouldn't be something that's uncommon for you to say.
No, I say it all the time.
Yeah, I think that what does it cost?
What does it cost to just take a moment and say, you know, I'm so glad.
I'm so glad I have you.
I'm so glad you chose me.
Like, what does it take?
It's such a low percentage move.
And if that's the secret, Like if that's the thing that keeps that connection wired, like what if it's not these giant things?
What if it's not, we have to go on vacations at this routine.
We have to have a date night and it has to be very formal.
What if it's just these little gestures that, at the beginning of a relationship, you feel them in your toes?
I mean, you know, you?
You just the feeling of intoxication when someone sees you and admires you, like it's such a beautiful feeling.
Why would you not just try to maintain that?
And what do you have to lose?
Like if you, if you did that, the worst thing that could happen is they don't really notice totally and and and that's okay.
You're not much poorer for that.
You know it's a low investment.
I'm Jonathan Goldstein and on the new season of Heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart.
How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again?
And I help a man atone for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old.
And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke.
And he got down and I remember feeling kind of a surge of like, okay, this is power.
Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother try to solve my problems through hypnotism.
We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time.
Being more able to look people in the eye.
Not always hide behind a microphone.
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So much of this is based on at least so much of what we grew up on.
Like for me.
For example, my mom, incredible woman, breadwinner of the family, cooked a fresh breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, dropped us to school, helped us with our homework everything.
Everything that's good about me is to do with my mom.
But when your mom does it, you assume that's just what life is.
Sure.
And so when I married my wife and my wife also loves cooking and it's part of her love language, but to me getting a hot meal was normality.
Yeah.
And so, even though my wife showed it as a way of showing love, because I had it from my mom is like a base level expectation.
Oh, you're the fish in the water.
You just not know.
Yeah.
You just don't see it.
And it took me a moment when I would actually watch my wife cook.
And then not only did my appreciation for my wife change, my appreciation for my mother changed, realizing what it took to do that for all those years.
But it's almost like- And what a gift that is.
What a gift.
Like what a gift that loving your wife helped you love your mother in a different way.
Like.
That's what I mean when I say like this transformative power of love.
Is that?
You know?
I remember when my sons were first born.
My admiration for my then wife was so, Because she wasn't just this woman I had dated in college, or this woman I had married.
She was like a mom.
And you love this little organism the same amount that I do.
So you do have so many occasions to deepen your connection to this other person which deepens your connection to these other people in your life.
But yeah, I think that we certainly...
And I have to say, when you were talking about growing up in a home where mom made these lovely meals and then to be married to a woman who does the same.
And so to you, this is sort of normal.
You can take it for granted.
Right.
You can easily take it for granted.
But that's also very often how people end up in very negative relationships.
So if you grew up in a home where your mother or your father or both had substance use disorder, you think oh, this is how a man is.
Men drink.
So you're much more prone to marrying someone who also has substance use disorder and looking at it and saying oh well no, that's just what men do.
I have represented victims of domestic violence and intimate partner abuse for 25 years.
And I've represented perpetrators of domestic violence.
And I'm not excusing anyone's abuse of anyone else.
99% of the time in my experience, they grew up in a house where there was abuse.
They grew up in a house where violence and intimate partner abuse was how you treat someone or how you're treated by someone.
And they just don't see how toxic of an environment this is.
So sometimes what you just described as a way to deepen connection and love to yourself, you know, It's also that same phenomenon, that same cognitive habit that can create in us, like we may be repeating the patterns that we watched the people around us, like mothers and fathers and grandparents, the way they communicated with their spouse.
There's no class in love.
Like there's no.
You know, I can tell you with certainty, I've used algebra very few times in my life.
You know, I have had almost no use for so much of dividing fractions that was taught to me.
But there was never a class about how to love, how to be loved, how to be in a deeply connected relationship with another human being.
So you really just learn on the job.
And you learn by watching the people around you.
And if you have people around you that do it well, it's an incredible blessing.
This is a gift we can give to the world, is to demonstrate how to love and be loved.
I often talk about in this sort of masculinity crisis, that there's been a lot of discussion about how there are not as many role models for men, young men who want to look at.
What should a strong, capable man look like?
We talk a lot about toxic masculinity, but what does non-toxic masculinity look like?
I'm interested in that.
What is the positive masculinity?
And I found myself thinking about most of my examples of it came from literature or film, like characters who were strong, protective men self-sacrificing, putting themselves below in terms of importance, the people who they were there to protect or love.
And so I think we need each other so much as a core unit, a family, a society.
And then, just as a world, we need to be able to look to examples of how to love and how to receive love.
There is, I think, a tremendous absence, a drought of that.
I know a lot of unhappily married people, and not just as a function of my professional life.
Oh, me too.
Of my friends who are married.
I can really only think of a handful of who.
I look at them and go, oh yeah, that's good.
That's really good.
And they're really glad they're in it.
But man, when you're around it, it's like the warmth of the sun.
It's such a beautiful thing to see that in practice.
And we need to find ways, I think, for young people, or even newly connected people, like people who are thinking about marriage, to be in the orbit of that.
Yeah. you know, and to learn from it because we just can't, we don't teach it.
I don't know that we could necessarily teach it in a textbook.
You know, you can read all the books you want about swimming, but you learn in the pool.
Yeah.
You know, and I think we're, you know, we break in relationship and we heal in relationship.
I think it's the only way.
Yeah.
I mean talking about the masculinity piece.
I was reading that the two times men are most likely to cheat are when their partner's pregnant, when the first child is born or when a child is young.
Makes sense to me.
That's consistent with my observation too.
I have something of a PhD in infidelity, having been a divorce lawyer so long, and I've seen it from both sides.
And I'd love to talk about why, but I think the- I have a theory.
Yeah, the fascinating part to me is that I spoke to a lot of men as well friends who haven't cheated but they talked about how, when they had their first child- just how hard it was to be second priority to their partner.
And when we talk about we can't teach a class, to me it sounds predictable and something you can prepare for, because no wonder you're going to be second priority, because there's this helpless little baby that demands attention.
And you actually want that baby to have that priority.
So then you start feeling guilty about why do I want this?
And why do I feel that way?
But, but see, I, Again, I think it's a perfectly understandable feeling.
Yeah, it's an understandable feeling.
And it can be articulated to your partner in a way that doesn't create a defensive reaction.
I think
Because you want your partner to love that child that much, and you love that child that much.
But yet, there is something about losing a little of your love and attention that is hard for me.
And what a lovely thing for someone to say.
Like, if it's said the right way, if it's said like well, I'm feeling neglected.
Of course, the response would be well, what do you want me to do?
Like, I got two hands.
There's only so many hours a day.
I'm sleep deprived.
My body's a train wreck right now.
Like, what are you?
And now I got to worry about you?
And that's the script.
Right.
And an understandable script.
Like, I get that frustration, how a woman would feel in that situation.
And yet perhaps, if it was parsed differently, you know the feeling of like I admire so much what you're doing.
Like I'm falling in love with you all over again, watching you spin these plates that are so important to both of us and giving our child this gift that only you can give.
And yet I have to say, and maybe I'm selfish and maybe I'm foolish and maybe I'm a child myself.
Like I just, I miss something about the warmth of you.
And I hope we can find a way, You know, to take time to like, see each other and connect to each other.
It's so interesting how, if you just and maybe it's because my job is to sort of parse argument you know that maybe it may be uniquely qualified for this.
But I find myself thinking that almost any of these sentiments, there is a way to parse it that I think it can actually deepen connection.
And it doesn't bring a defensive response.
Because if you say, you know, well, we haven't had sex lately.
Like we're having so much less sex than we used to.
Like what, what's going on?
Immediately.
Your partner's response is going to be well, what you know, you've been working all the time and you know, when you come home you're tired and I don't know that you want to.
You want me to initiate?
Like, what am I supposed to?
And now we're just having this thing.
Whereas if you just said, you know oh, like I miss, like feeling connected to you.
You know like I, I love like the, the smell of you and I love the feeling of your warmth.
Like, and I got it.
We have to like, I have to really make time.
If I haven't made time for that, like I really have to, I really want to.
What partner wouldn't hear that and go?
Oh well yeah, that's important to me too.
And let's, you know, like, yeah, let's make a point of doing that.
Like.
I really don't think this has to be, but again, perhaps it's a function of the times we're living in.
We're so hyper-partisan all the time and we're so on the defensive all the time from everything and everyone.
You know that perhaps we're just not approaching those interactions the right way.
And I'd like to think that those same phenomenon can be spun in a direction that can reverse that.
Yeah, it's almost like we only know how to share our emotions through a negative lens.
Ie we're not doing this enough.
We used to do this.
Where's this gone?
And all that language is looking at the gap, the scarcity, the missed opportunity.
Whereas what you just said was, hey, I'd love to connect again.
Or hey, I'd love to, you know, make some time for this again.
Yeah, and remember when we da-da-da.
Wasn't that?
So God, I was thinking about it the other day.
You know that we went for that walk and how nice it was.
Yeah, it's a positive thing to move towards.
Right, and now we're there again.
You know, it's...
I've always.
One of my favorite phenomenon is you know we've all been to like a dinner where there's a couple of couples and one of them you're just like man.
There was some kind of fight on the way here.
Like they just got that.
There's this energy between them of like you know, terse you know, and you're like.
I hope they're not like this all the time, but it might've just been on the ride over.
And if I found as an experiment is if you say to that couple, so how did the two of you meet?
Yeah.
There's a softening that happens very quickly because all of a sudden they're in telling the story, they're transported back to oh, I was here and she was in the dorm and we met and we were on that.
And they're remembering, you know, they're remembering viscerally, you know, that connection.
And I think, if we use that in our current relationships to, instead of saying hey, we're not, like you said, focusing on the gap,
Yeah.
Instead, bringing us back to what you remember when we did this?
God, that was so fun.
I remember that so much.
Or, oh, I stumbled on this picture on my phone.
Apple just suggested this one for me.
Look, remember that?
And you go, yeah, we have to make time to do that again.
Who wouldn't?
Who wouldn't go, oh, yeah, that was really nice?
And then, even if there is some resistance, even if the person says well, we can't really afford to go there again right now.
Or, oh, you know, it's everything going on at work right now, such a bad time.
There's at least this shared intention, shared experience of going back to that.
I mean, why are we as a species take a million pictures on our phones?
Because we want to like hold on to it.
You know, I went to a concert.
I tend to not go out a lot at night because I get up so early, but I went to a concert recently.
And it was my first time being at a concert in many years.
And everyone had their phones, their recording, whatever song.
And I found myself thinking, do you think that that little box is going to capture this?
This giant room we're all in and the vibration of this music.
It was a Nine Inch Nails concert, so it was really heavy.
And I just thought, oh, you're missing the whole thing.
You're missing the whole thing because you're trying to hold on to something that you won't be able to hold on to.
This will be a poor, poor copy of something.
So maybe just you know again that human desire to capture it so you can have some small taste of it again in the future.
Maybe there is a way that that can be used to, like reconnect us to who we were, what we felt, and maybe bring it back to the present.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's such a part of that passing of an argument as you talk about it, and part of that ability to initiate.
I feel like, at the root of it, there's a struggle that we have with our ego, where it feels like we don't want to be the one to look like the beggar, or look like the needy one, or look like the weak one.
And so there's this ego.
The vulnerability.
The vulnerability.
It's scary.
I have to tell you, I struggle with that in every relationship.
My longtime assistant, Teresa, has been with me a long time.
She's a wonderful, wonderful assistant.
And she's really the brains of my office.
She keeps the machine running.
And I actually have times where it's hard for me to say to her Cause I'm moving so fast between things.
Like, could you heat up my lunch for me?
Now she has offered this a million times.
Like she's happy to be of assistance to me in any way.
Like she's a wonderful resource in that regard.
And she's by nature, that kind of person.
Like I see it in a relationship with her husband and her kids.
Like she just, nothing makes her happier than feeding her family or feeding the people around her.
And my, everyone who calls my office is like, oh my God, Teresa is the best.
Like they all love her.
Because there's a warmth.
And I still have a hard time.
Even with such permission, I still have a hard time being vulnerable enough to say I need help.
Because that's what I'm saying.
Like, it's a minor thing I'm asking for help for, but I'm saying I need help.
And that's hard for me to do.
It's hard for anyone to do, to say I need help.
Because there's a vulnerability.
There's this fear that what if the person goes, well, I don't have time to do that right now.
And then that pain like that's such a childish wound.
You know that feeling of like not wanting something and not getting it, and asking for being brave enough to ask for it and not getting it.
That i, i certainly understand that pain.
Yeah yeah, and it's one of those ones that you almost have to be willing to go to with the right partner.
Yeah, i feel like with the right partner, with the right person, you almost are willing to go there more often Because you know they're not judging it.
Like with someone like Teresa in the assisting capacity.
But I think you fix that by the step of trying.
Because every time you are vulnerable in that way and the person shows up, that becomes a less terrifying and a deeper intimacy, I think.
Like a deeper connection.
And so, to give that example, when I've allowed myself to say like I'm sorry, I'm going a million miles,
Is there any way you could just like heat up my lunch?
And she goes, of course.
Oh my God, of course.
And then she takes the extra step of like she puts it on like a nice little tray and she brings like a little drink along with it.
And like, she puts a little, you know, little chips next to it or something.
And then I feel so loved, like legitimately loved.
I feel legitimately seen.
I feel like not only did you give me what I asked you for, But you gave me like more.
And that is just one example of like a relationship that you know and of course then I feel that way now about her.
Like if she ever says like, oh, I need some time off for this.
I'm always, of course, of course, because she always shows up for me.
I always try to show up for her.
I want to reciprocate that.
So I think, again, it's a muscle.
Yeah.
Yeah. that we have to exercise for it to get stronger and stronger and stronger.
But that's where, in a long-term relationship where you've both been brave enough to do that and to show up for each other, that's where I think you have these people that have this like they're just thick as thieves.
They have this bond that never ends up in my office.
Yeah.
If you were designing a contract for marriage, for modern love, what would you put in it?
Oh, wow.
I'm a lawyer, so we tend to be verbose in our contracts.
But I would put specific behaviors.
I would put a mandatory weekly check-in.
And I would even create a structure for it.
I would say that every week, I want to share with you, and I want you to share with me something I did this week that made you feel loved.
And then I want you to share with me something that made you feel less loved or less seen, or where I got it wrong.
Like, I want you to tell me where I got it wrong bravely.
And then maybe praise sandwich.
Tell me something I can do for you this week that would make you feel loved, that you think might make you feel loved, or that might be because I want to be good at this job.
Yeah.
Like, I want to be good at this job.
And it's a job.
Mm-hmm.
Loving another person, it's a career.
It's a vocation.
And I think you have to be brave enough to talk about those things.
So I would put that in a contract.
I think that's not a hard thing to do.
I like that.
It doesn't cost anything.
And I think that it wouldn't take a lot of time necessarily.
And it would stave off a tremendous amount of things.
I would also commit to or pledge to to hear the things that we say to each other as coming from a place of love and connection.
Even when we say something the other person might not want to hear, that it's coming from a desire to protect the bond.
So I would say that is a very worthwhile and worthy pursuit to say look, we've decided we want this particular permutation of relationships.
Love is loaned.
It's not permanently gifted.
And so if we want to protect and preserve it, I think saying to each other that we have to have this unflinching ability to kind of hit, send now like say to the person like hey, this thing's little and I never want it to get big.
But then you also have to be willing to hear that as coming from a place not of you're doing it wrong, but from a place of I want this to stay wonderful.
This is important to me.
And I think if those provisions could be complied with, I think that would be very helpful to people.
I also think again in romantic relationships, and this is, I think, part of the reason why cheating becomes such an issue.
You know, sex is the glue.
Like, it's the glue.
Like, sex is incredibly important to people.
I mean, it's the difference between having a roommate and having a spouse.
You know, like, there's a romantic element to it.
There's a sexual element to it.
There's a physical, not even purely sexual, there's a physical element to it.
I can't tell you how many men tell me yeah, we stopped having sex or we started having it very infrequently, some women, but mostly men.
And I can't tell you how many women have said to me in the context of divorce that yeah like, the only time he ever touched me was sex.
Like it was just prelude to sex.
The only time he ever kissed me was a prelude to sex.
I mean, come on.
When you first start dating, you could make out for hours.
Like literally there's just nothing more lovely than just the kissing this person.
When's the last time people really made out with their spouse?
Or just held their hand or just touched the nearness of them?
Good relationships, there's a lot of that.
There's a lot of this physical connection.
And so again, I don't think you have to write into the contract any particular frequency or specifics of what sex would need to look like.
But I think you have to make somewhere in that contract something, especially if I'm going to take a pledge that you're going to be my partner in this, in this physical aspect of things.
If we're going to be monogamous.
You know I used to say in the context of dating that if you're going to rob me of solitude, you owe me companionship because I enjoy solitude.
So you have to be better than that.
And companionship is better than that.
So if you're going to rob my solitude, you owe me companionship.
If you want us to pledge to each other that we will be each other's sexual outlet, we will be each other's sexual connection.
We will be each other's intimate touch connection.
Again, by intimate touch, I don't even necessarily mean sex.
There's an intimacy in holding someone's hand.
There's an intimacy in having your hand on their leg.
Anything you wouldn't do to a stranger on the subway, put it in that category.
And I think...
That if we're going to have rules in the relationship which I think there are good reasons for then we owe it to each other to see where that is.
Now, again, controlling for the possibility that that's okay if that shifts.
I think it's okay.
I don't think if you sustained the electricity of the initial physical bond people have with, Like when you're first dating someone and your hand brushes theirs and you just like feel it in your toe.
Like if you did that for nine years, man, you would never get anything done.
Like you just wouldn't.
Like society would crumble because we'd all just be like, oh my God.
She walked past me and I smelled her hair.
You know, like you just would have that intoxication all the time.
But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Like let's remember that there is some importance to this.
It's what makes that relationship important. a unique and special relationship.
And I think it's very easy for people to find surrogate activities, whether it's pornography, whether it's infidelity, whether that's with a person who's a sex worker, whether that's in the context of an affair, even whether that's in the context of an emotional affair versus a physical affair.
I think it's all about starting to say okay, I'm not getting what I need in this relationship anymore.
And it's going to be hard to have that conversation.
So I'll just have this little thing instead.
You know, I can't have a meal right now.
So I'll just have like a little snack bar.
But if that becomes the staple of your diet, you know, I see this a lot with men in pornography.
And I hear from a lot of my female clients that say like yeah, he started like being much more into porn.
And I think that that is a surrogate activity for a very real need in all of us, that it, for whatever reason, is no longer being met because again, we're no longer the perfect thing we were like.
Perfect is the enemy of good, you know.
And so I think we have to be conscious and communicative about when the physical aspects of our relationship are changing.
And again in a non defense invoking manner.
So you don't say why don't you ever hold my hand anymore?
Like the last thing I want to do is hold your hand.
Whereas if you just grab my hand and just go like, I just want to hold your hand for a minute.
Like who wouldn't go, oh, okay.
Like, yeah, that's nice.
You know?
Yeah.
And that's why you say that cheating is actually a symptom, not a root.
You don't believe that it's The reason marriages end and you don't believe it's the root of the issue.
It's actually because there's a disconnection.
Yes, I have a very high degree of confidence in that.
I think I spend a lot of time with the cheated and the cheated on, you know, or the cheater and the cheated on.
I spend a lot of time with every permutation of infidelity.
And I've talked to people in very candid ways about their affairs, men and women.
And there is an emptiness and a sadness in people that have gone that route.
Sometimes it's surprising because they will say, yeah, this had nothing to do with my wife.
This had to do with me and how I felt.
It wasn't her.
She was loved.
I've always loved her.
I still love her.
I just needed this.
And they didn't really see, like in that moment, they weren't thinking about their commitment.
They thought, well, this has nothing to do with that.
This is just like a human need, like I'm hungry, so I'm gonna eat.
And again, these are powerful forces in us.
You know, the desire for sex, the desire for food, the desire for like these are basic core human things, you know.
So I think infidelity is something that is a function of disconnection and a function of how fraught the conversation is with your partner about desire and how it changed.
I mean, how much do we really understand our own desires?
There's something mysterious about it.
Why do you like dark hair or blonde hair?
Why do any of us have these weird preferences?
But they're there.
You know, and maybe they're rooted in, you know, Freud is right.
They're rooted in some, you know, very basic childhood things.
Or, you know, maybe they're purely chemical.
You know, it depends on who you ask.
But they're a mystery to us.
I mean, I certainly know it's a mystery to me.
Like, I don't, like, why are breasts so appealing?
Like, they don't really do anything unless you're an infant, you know?
Like, they're just, and yet they just make me happy, you know?
Like, I don't know.
There's something in me that's like, ooh, you know, like that finds those appealing.
So what is it?
I have no idea.
What is it that when I see a man who has stubble or a nice beard on his face, I don't feel any desire towards that?
And yet, many of my female friends or gay friends are like, oh, I love that.
It's so sexy.
What is that?
Well, it's just in us.
It's just part of us.
So I think that's what makes it hard to articulate to our partner.
When it's not being met.
Maybe we don't even realize because we're not looking at ourselves close enough.
Yeah.
That's why I think the marriage contract that you just laid out is so important, because it's so and also a big part of it is a lack of understanding of men and women.
Like when you said a few moments ago, you were just like, you know, people have desires.
We have a desire to eat.
Like, you know, it's the same thing.
It's like, as a man, that makes a lot of sense in our brain.
And the compartmentalization also makes a lot of sense.
Like I've always said to when I'm talking to my friends who are girls who are having trouble in dating, and I'll be like yeah, he sees this as this and he sees this as that.
Like they're not connected, but I'm a man that makes sense.
And it's almost like we have such a limited understanding.
And I'm not saying it's only gender-based.
Of course.
But there's such a limited understanding of how the human brain and mind work because someone's saying well no, I put the commitment above my desire because the commitment's more important.
And the other person goes, Well, yeah, I just let my desire slip above the commitment.
But you can have both.
Yeah.
Like, I genuinely believe you can have the desire and the commitment.
Like, both can be fulfilled, you know?
With each other, you mean?
I think so.
No, of course.
You know, there's a chapter in my book called Go Without or Go Elsewhere.
Yeah.
And that essentially says that most people, if they're unwilling to actively communicate with themselves and with their partner about what's going on with their desire sexually, then you have two choices and they both suck.
Yeah.
Go without or go elsewhere.
Nobody wants to go without.
And going elsewhere is a very fraught terrain.
But it's not surprising to me that the conversation about this has become so challenging.
Because we live in a society that rightfully made some big, big changes in the last 50 years to what does it mean to be a man.
What does it mean to be a woman, right?
That is fraught terrain still, right?
I mean, growing up, you know, men...
In my generation, you were either Richard Simmons or Clint Eastwood.
Those were your two choices.
You either were very stoic or you were gay.
That was what the two choices were.
Or you were a feat.
And now thankfully, one of the beautiful changes that I think has happened in society is we recognize that all of us have, if you want to call it, the masculine and the feminine in us.
We all have varying ratios of it.
And we've changed what it means to be a man and to be a woman.
But we've kind of treated dandruff with decapitation because we've said hey, these fixed models of what is a man and what is a woman, and how do men behave and how do women behave, and what is a man's natural tendency, what is a woman's natural tendency, we realized those were prisons and those were creating unequal and unjust outcomes.
So I applaud that we've taken this step to go, all right, but not all men.
Okay, but not all women are that way.
Mm-hmm. but we've gone so far in over correcting as we, as a species are prone to doing that.
I think now we're not.
It's like scandalous to acknowledge what you just acknowledged, which is when, when I'm talking to a group of women who I'm friends with and I say they're describing something that you know a man in their life did.
And I go, Oh, I know exactly what that like, no, he saw this or, Oh no, he thought that they go.
Really?
Like I have a Rosetta Stone, a language they don't speak.
And by the way, it goes the other way.
Yes, 100%.
Like there are so many times I will listen.
I have an office full of women and sometimes of different generations, and they'll be talking to each other.
And it's a small office so I can hear their conversation.
And sometimes I feel like I'm like Margaret Mead observing like the Yanomamo, you know?
Like I'm just like a cultural anthropologist who's been dropped into a different planet.
You know cause they're talking about.
Like I had one of them said something the other day about she was describing a date she went out on.
She said Oh, he did that thing where, like when I got up from the table, he kind of went to get up but then didn't know if he should get up or not.
You know.
And the other young woman goes, Oh, I love that.
You know?
And I thought that is the weirdest.
And yet I I get it.
You know like, because it it was like a vulnerability and also a sense of chivalry, but also a sense of being self-conscious.
And I thought, like God, if you said to a guy you know here's, I'm going to be your new dating coach.
I'm going to be a new pickup artist guy, you know, like maybe this is my next career, you know, and you point out these strange little things, you know.
But to do that, we have to acknowledge that you know there are limits to our, our understanding of the opposite sex and that there, that there is some difference between us, again hormonal biological, on a very basic level.
Yeah.
And you know, I think even men, men's experience of sex.
I observe as a man and as friends of many men it's like much more reductionist and simple.
Like we're very like, you know, it's like eating, like, it's like, oh, this is great.
Yeah, like unloaded the gun, you know, we're good.
Whereas, like women, in my experience and observation it's like well, what feels good, like one day, two days later, doesn't feel as good.
And again, some of that is probably hormones and some of that is.
But I think like learning to navigate a relationship, perhaps same-sex marriages have less of a fraught relationship with that, because you understand each other's perhaps biology in a different way.
But I think opposite.
You know heterosexual relationships are.
We are really trying to navigate a creature that has some distinct differences from us physically and hormonally.
And I think without good communication, how are you supposed to learn that language?
I'm sure you hear this a lot as well.
We're like, after a while, he just didn't want to communicate.
More like they just didn't want to communicate.
We're like.
What you're suggesting is still part of a healthy relationship dynamic where you can initiate something.
And even if it's not met immediately, there's a certain point at which there's a conversation.
But it wasn't on the first date.
Yeah.
It wasn't on the first date.
See, that's the thing that I think makes marriage such an interesting entry point for a conversation about love.
Because I don't know that the two correlate.
Agreed, yeah.
And I certainly don't think there's causation.
I don't think marriage makes you really love each other more deeply or more likely to be fidelitous.
I don't think it does that at all.
It may have the opposite effect in some way.
But what it does give us is an entry point into.
We were at some point so enamored with each other that we said, out of the 8 billion options, I'm picking you.
I mean, that is a gigantic, like I live in New York City.
There's a lot of restaurants.
Sometimes I am paralyzed by the number of choices.
When I go, okay, I'm gonna order something.
There's so many options all within three blocks of my apartment.
8 billion options.
And you chose this person and they chose you.
So at some point, there is this abundance of goodwill, this abundance of connection.
And when I wrote the book, it really wasn't meant for people who were in crisis.
It was really meant for people who were not.
It was meant to be a wedding gift.
It was meant to be something you give to an engaged couple.
To say, it's like you just got the new car.
Here's how you maintain it so that it stays, Because this is a car you're going to drive for the rest of your life.
So don't you want to take care of it?
If I said to you, you're going to have one car for the rest of your life, you would change the oil.
Absolutely.
You would check the tire.
You would do routine preventative maintenance because this is the only car I'm ever going to have.
And if it starts to fall apart, it's the only car I have and I don't want to walk everywhere.
So I am going to take very good care of this.
And so I think leveraging like...
When you say people say, and I hear it all the time, you're absolutely correct.
Like, hey, just stop talking to me.
Is that a function of the fact that the way we were communicating wasn't productive?
It made this person feel defensive.
It made them shut down.
Like, because at some point you were still connecting.
And so there was a story you were writing and you lost the plot.
And that's okay.
Like, I love to read and I read at night.
It's sort of like my brain signal to go to sleep.
And I have to tell you so many times I'm reading and I'm tired and I'm in bed and I realize I don't remember what the last several paragraphs were.
So I have to sort of stop and go, okay, let me go back.
Let me go back to where I lost the plot.
That's what I would say.
Is that if you're at a place in your relationship where unfortunately, one or both of you are not communicating anymore, I don't think the answer is is keep going in that direction.
I think the answer is, where did we lose the plot?
And then I think there are some ways to try to correct back to it.
You won't be surprised to hear that when people tell you the story of their life, they're usually the hero.
Yeah, yeah.
And so when people come into my office and they tell me the story of their marriage, you know, David Byrne in The Talking Heads said facts all come with points of view, and facts don't do what I want them to.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that my, my career has been a a real example of that, because you, you do.
It's actually how I know I'm probably going to get along with the client is if, when they tell the story of their marriage, they they're neither the hero nor the villain.
Yes.
Yes.
You know, like if I said to you, tell me about your marriage, and you said you know, here's the things I think I do right.
Yeah.
And here's the things I could get better at.
Yeah.
And here's the things I'm, abysmally bad at and I'd like to get better, we're in a good place.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
We're in a good place.
But that's not happening when you go to get a divorce.
That's the point.
It's like... When you go to get a divorce, it's usually I've got a halo, they've got horns.
Yeah, of course.
Let's get after it.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Because you want to get someone on side.
And then you... Yeah, I have similar... I mean, I coach people and couples and work with people.
And like you said, people lie to their... kind of therapist coaches in that lane.
And that's for sure.
Cause someone will come to me and said they had their heart broken.
And then as time goes on, they'll send me emails that the other person sent them.
And the emails actually seem really thoughtful and comprehensive and like very emotionally intelligent and articulate.
And you're like wait a minute, like you told me that this person was the devil, and now I'm reading their emails and Cause you had to share them with me because of some context.
That's why I said, I think the most dangerous lies are the ones you tell yourself.
Yeah.
And you need them for survival.
You don't even know.
Sometimes you don't even know that you're lying.
Like you just, you know, you're just so caught in your view of the thing.
And we hold onto that so tight.
You know, like cause it again.
I feel like if if, if we can acknowledge that we're a mystery to ourself.
You know that, that That feels powerless and frightening.
I mean, so much of what we do wrong, we do for a feeling of control that we don't actually have.
Yes, yes.
I think that might be.
The secret is to learn how to find.
There's an axiom that if you don't learn how to find joy in the snow, you'll have less joy in your life and precisely the same amount of snow.
Yeah.
So I feel like if you don't learn how to find joy and peace in chaos, you will have less joy and peace and precisely the same amount of chaos.
Because chaos is the lack of control.
So I think that's a big piece.
Yeah, I love that.
I learned a lot of similar lessons in the monastery, when I'm totally digressing, but we're on this two to three day train journey in India from north to south, 48 hours roughly, with a bunch of stops.
It's a long journey and the toilets are so dirty in India.
I don't know if you've ever been.
It's like the toilet on a public train in India is like walking into a sewage system.
And so I decided I'm going to fast for three days.
Like I'm not going to eat because I can't.
I don't want to use the bathroom.
I don't want to be in that position.
And so, and I'm getting off at the stops to meditate because the train, a public train, in coach is like
Yeah, your bodies, right?
There's like, no like, and I've, we've got.
I meant to have a bunk, but I have my seat because everyone's sitting next to me.
There's people sitting on the floor, lying down on the floor.
They've got their cycle.
They've got their tires.
They've got everything.
So I get off at the stops to meditate.
And then my teacher goes to me after a while, he goes, what are you up to?
And I go, my monk teacher.
And I go, he goes, what are you doing?
And I go, oh, well, I'm getting off, finding a quiet spot, meditating because it's a long haul.
And it's like 10, 20 minutes.
And then I jump back on the train when I hear the train's about to take off.
And he goes, do you think life's going to be Like the chaotic train?
Or do you think it's going to be like the peaceful start?
Right.
And I was like, oh, I get it.
And he was just like, learn to meditate on the train.
He plays the teacher.
Yeah.
And it's your point.
It's the same thing as like, learn to meditate on the train.
But I think there's value also like in the context of what we're talking about.
Yeah.
Because it's very funny to me when people say you know, we've been having some rough patches in our marriage.
We're going to go on vacation together.
And I think there's value in that because we're going to give each other our undivided attention.
But I don't, It's like why those TV shows like The Bachelor and things like that.
It's not hard to feel in love with someone when you're on a beautiful idyllic setting and you have nothing to do all day except sort of love on each other.
Like in bikinis and shorts.
The hard part is in the midst of all of the day-to-day, how do we maintain connection?
How do we find peace in the storm?
Because life is constantly going to be the pact. and the storm and the chaos.
So how do we maintain that depth of connection?
Because by the way, that's when we need it.
Like when you need serenity that comes from.
Meditation is not when you're sitting by the idyllic, beautiful stream in the peace and quiet.
That is by definition going to be a peaceful, serene moment.
Like.
You need to find that in the chaos of the day-to-day and you need to find it on the packed train.
So yeah, I mean, how do you learn to do it except to do it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Should everyone get a prenup?
Yes.
Well, I'll actually take a different approach to that.
Everyone has a prenup.
You have a prenup.
Everyone has a prenup it's either one that's written by the government, or it's one that's written by you and the person who you allege you love more than the other 8 billion other options.
Because what is a prenup?
A prenup is a contract where two people agree to specific rules that will apply to their marriage if it ends in something other than death.
It's a weird way to parse it, but it's completely 100% accurate.
So all marriages end, death or divorce.
You hope yours ends in death.
That's a weird thing to say, but it is.
You hope it ends in death till death do us part.
But if it doesn't, there's a rule set that will apply.
Who should write that rule set?
Whether you're on the left or the right or the unhappy middle right now, we can all agree that the government.
There's some issues.
Whatever government we're talking about.
Like every country, everyone goes, there's some things I don't.
Anyone who's ever been to the DMV.
I've never walked into the DMV and thought these people should be in charge of everything.
This is great.
This is the best and brightest minds working in the most efficient manner possible.
I should let them make the rules that govern my marriage.
So if you don't have a prenup, what you're saying is I trust the government, present and future.
A government I haven't even seen yet.
Because, instead of writing this contract with my partner and amending it from time to time if we'd like changing it as our circumstances change, I'm going to trust that the rule set that will be in effect at a time in the future uncertain that that will be a rule set that is best for me.
That's crazy.
That's absolutely good.
There is nothing...
About that that is rational at all.
What you're simply saying is, I don't want to have this conversation right now.
I'll just whatever.
Whatever they're serving at the restaurant, I'll eat.
And I think that that's very short-sighted.
But it's a function of the fact that we've been taught to view prenups a certain way.
And that is that you have a lack of confidence in the staying power of this relationship.
I think that's changing, and I'm grateful for that.
Not just from a professional standpoint, because there's never been a divorce lawyer that made very much money on prenups.
It's just not a high profit item.
Litigation.
There's much more money in helping people tear each other to shreds in a courtroom than there ever was in mediation or in prenuptial agreements.
Prenuptial agreements, if anything, are bad for divorce lawyers because they simplify the uncoupling if it happens, because you have a rule set.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But I always...
I think we need, we are seeing, I think, some changes in the way we're normalizing prenups as a society.
And I think that's really, really healthy.
Well, I think it's even in the way you just spoke about it, because I think when you realize oh, you have one anyway.
And when that kind of locks in, you go, oh yeah, we, because you know, that's the fascinating thing about marriage is that you don't even, it's been so normalized that you don't even realize that you're getting into a contract with the state and with each other.
It's the most legally significant thing you will do in your life other than dying.
Seriously.
Like you buy an apartment.
There's lead paint disclosures, a HUD one.
There's a million forms that disclose information.
You get married, you didn't get a pamphlet.
Nothing, literally nothing.
You get no explanation.
The first time most people learn what happened legally when they got married is when they're in my office, which is the worst possible time to learn that.
Like you don't want to learn how to fight when you're in a fight.
Totally.
You need to learn in advance, as far in advance as possible.
So I have always thought like we would do the world a tremendous service by having anyone who's going to get married have some premarital education.
At least understand what you're signing on for.
The problem with it is without a prenup.
It is.
It is the most significant contract you would ever sign the marriage contract.
Okay.
But it can be changed without your consent and without your knowledge by the government, right?
In giant ways.
And unlike other contracts, like if I had a contract to, like what's a contract most of us do?
Like an apartment, a lease.
A lease is a contract.
So I'm going to rent this.
I'm going to give you money.
You're going to let me stay in this apartment.
Totally fair contract.
If one day you as a landlord come in and say, oh, I know we have that contract.
You're going to be in a different apartment.
It's much smaller and smells.
Then what do I say?
Okay, well then no, you're breaking the lease.
So now I'm not going to pay you.
That's fair.
That's not how it works in the marriage contract.
In the marriage contract when the state says, oh yeah, alimony now has a formula, or alimony is no longer taxable, or I know this is what we're going to do with the division of property.
You can't say, oh, well, that's not the, that's not the rules I signed on for.
So now we're just going to end this.
No, no, you're not allowed.
You're not allowed.
You can't opt out of the contract and they can change.
The government can change.
So again, you know I have lots of conservative friends and they're all very quick to talk about.
Your marriage is so important and no fault.
Divorce is the scourge of the universe.
And I always say to them I'm like, you have a tremendous amount of confidence in the government if you're getting married without a prenup.
A tremendous amount because you're saying not only is the present rule set that I don't necessarily understand acceptable to me, but any future rule set.
And over the last 20 years at least in the United States but most countries that I can think of, There has been shifts in government where, at any particular time, someone would say oh, I think the president is terrible.
I have several friends that four years ago thought the president was terrible.
And I have friends who think that this current president is terrible.
So, whichever side of the aisle you're on, we should have a healthy distrust of allowing the government to make a contract for us that we can't get out of.
And I think that's what a prenup.
Prenup takes it out of the hands of the government and puts it, I think, where it belongs, with these two people.
But what's the problem?
It's not the expense.
It's one of the cheapest things we do.
We have to have that conversation.
Yeah.
Well, it's a great, it's actually so.
I had a friend who got married recently and you know, in love everything else.
And before the marriage, they decided to do a prenup.
And he was talking about how hard it was to bring it up, how hard it was to have the conversation.
But he was saying that it actually gave them all the skills they'll need for the most difficult conversation.
I have to tell you, I've had a number of clients, many who come in and say I don't even know how to bring this up.
Like I represent a lot of people in finance, a lot of men in finance, young men late twenties, early thirties, high net worth.
And they're marrying someone who's not in that space.
So they're, they're marrying a yoga teacher.
They're marrying.
You know someone who's an artist and they say look I, I have a lot of confidence in the marriage.
I wouldn't marry this person if I didn't believe in it.
But I, you know, I want to have some protections in place.
And, uh, These are people who are phenomenal at their jobs.
Their jobs involve a tremendous amount of risk.
Like they're so much less risk adverse than I am.
Like they.
You know they move markets, you know, and they make big bets, you know, and they're terrified of saying Hey, you know, we're getting married and all like.
There's going to be rules that you know govern this.
And like maybe we should be the ones to make the rule, because it's met with such a sense of what do you mean?
And, by the way, it also creates in the person who has perhaps less incentive in that situation to have a prenup that a prenup would be worse for them rather than better in the event of a divorce.
Again, at that moment, you don't know what the future holds for anybody.
That person has plausible deniability as to why they're against it.
Like they're not going to say well no, I don't want a prenup because I want to be able to take you for everything you're worth.
What they would say is, oh, no, why would you need a prenup?
We're going to stay married forever.
Wouldn't you bet on that?
You bet on this stock.
You won't bet on this.
But here's the problem.
It's not betting on a stock, because investing in a stock, I know my maximum loss is whatever I put in.
So it goes to zero.
So I know what my loss is.
It's more like shorting the stock, where there's almost no limit to how much you could potentially lose.
Because you're talking about a future you that you can't foresee at this moment what it's going to look like.
So yeah, it's the same phenomenon that I think.
But I have had clients who then come to me and say, even if we never got a prenup, having conversations about it was so good.
Because really-
The way that I and I do get calls from a lot of particularly young men, but both genders, saying how do I have a conversation about a prenup?
And I've always thought a really great entry point is to say what I believe to be true, which is it's very hard to feel loved if you don't feel safe.
That everyone should feel safe.
Like I've represented victims of domestic violence for many years.
And I can tell you, if you love someone, you want them to be safe.
It's fundamental.
So I think that's a good entry point to say, what do we each need to feel safe?
And most of the time I think, if you parse it that way, you know, someone said to me look, I will marry you.
But in the event we split up because you have more than me, I don't want to have nothing.
I want to have some security.
Who could argue with that?
Who could argue with the logic of that?
Like, of course, of course.
And, by the way, I don't want you to be with me, purely out of the sense that well, what am I going to do?
I'm going to be destitute if I'm not with you.
I want you to have the option of not being here.
Like if your spouse is only not cheating on you because you're tracking their location.
What kind of security is that really?
If that's the only thing preventing them.
So I think it's the same thing like saying to someone look, I want to feel you're owed something, but are you owed everything?
Okay, we agree you're not owed everything.
Hey, I'm going to need help from you if we split up.
Of course you're going to need help.
So let's figure out what that looks like.
Let's have a conversation about how to make each other feel safe.
That feels like an act of love to me.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that's, yeah.
And that's a much healthier way to have that conversation.
And I think it's totally honest.
I really do.
I think it's totally honest, because even a lot of my job is figuring out what people are actually trying to say.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, like when someone says, I want 50-50 custody.
I want 50-50 custody.
Like no sane person analyzes their time with their children by percentages.
Like I never, when my kids were young, went, you know, I've only spent 47% of the time with this.
Grab your glove, Billy.
We got to go outside and have 3% of time.
Like that's insane.
It's an insane way to analyze something.
So really what is a man saying if he comes in and says, I want 50-50 custody?
He's saying, I don't want to be an uninvolved second-class parent.
I don't want to be like the fun parent.
And the other person does all the big decisions in heavy lifting.
Like, I want to be actively involved in the hard part and the fun part.
That's a very worthwhile sentiment.
That's the thing we need to learn to say.
Because when you hear that, there's just so much... You can argue with it.
Yeah, there's so much depth to it.
But when you argue both sides of every issue for 25 years, you really do start to figure out that a lot of this is we're saying underneath what we're saying, like the position that we're taking versus the principles behind it.
A lot of this is just like miscommunication.
And i don't mean miscommunication in that you're you're misunderstanding what i'm saying.
I mean that we're not really even in touch with what we're trying to say.
You know because again, even the practical example of like well, we never have sex anymore, we don't have sex as much as we used to common refraining people's marriages, What you're really saying underneath that is so lovely.
Like that I love that aspect of us.
When I don't have it, I miss it.
Who wouldn't want to be told when you're away, I miss you?
Why?
Because when you're here, it makes my life better.
What could be sweeter than to have someone feel that way about you?
But when you say it as, oh, you're going to the office again tonight?
Well, okay, now I'm on the defensive.
And, by the way, and me saying well, I have to, I've got this, you know, Whereas if you said, you know, I'm terrified.
Like, I want to be a really good provider to you.
Like, you've trusted me to keep you safe and to give you and our kids the things we need.
And I feel that weight sometimes.
And, like I don't know, maybe I'm doing too much but God, I'd rather do too much than do too little, because I'm terrified I'm going to fail you.
Who wouldn't say to that person, okay, you know, go.
And also, no, I'll love you even if you fail.
Like what a lovely thing if we could just put down that ego driven myopia that we all have, because I think underneath all of this you know I don't believe people do evil because they're evil
I think they mistake it for happiness.
Yeah.
I mean, even just hearing you say that, it just like you know, kind of gives me goosebumps and just kind of hits there because you're like gosh.
How many people would save the time, the money, the energy, the pain that they go through simply because we didn't explain our anger?
We just expressed it.
Right.
And we didn't understand it ourselves.
Yeah.
You know, I joke that I don't do much mediation.
I used to do more of it.
Litigation is more lucrative.
So unfortunately, it's taken aback.
And I'm very good at courtroom work.
So I've sort of found a niche that works for me.
But I used to joke that mediation, I used to say I was an English translator because I would always do shuttle diplomacy.
And I would put them in separate rooms and I would get them to talk to me candidly about what they were dealing with.
And they would say like, you know, I don't want to bring the kids around that whore of a girlfriend.
And then I'd go in the other room and I'd say you know, she has some concerns about how the children are being exposed to new relationships.
And I'm sure when she's in a new relationship, that's a concern you could share.
And he's like, well, yeah, of course.
We shouldn't both be introducing the kids to someone we're not serious about.
I'm like, exactly.
You don't want your kids to feel untethered.
Now we're having a useful conversation.
But if I'd let them go at it with each other?
The minute it comes out, there's this feeling of like, and now we're positional.
And now we're right at it.
Yeah.
What's something you've heard in your office or in court that broke your heart?
Like I said, I'm sensitive, so I think a lot of things break my heart.
You know I've developed such a professional callous that it shocks me sometimes because things that should register on my emotional radar.
But I think I would be much less effective at what I do if I let that happen.
I have a friend who's a pediatric oncologist.
And I said to him once, how do you do that job and not just cry all day?
Like you're just with children with cancer all day.
I can't.
That would be like one of the rings of hell for me.
And he said, it's not hard.
He said I'm here today be of service, and i will be less effective if i allow myself to do that.
So i have to learn to turn that part of me off.
I have to see this, not lose.
My humanity not lose.
You know, there's a saying from rhesus sardonicus um, he said.
Um, i have resigned myself to temporary complicity with evil in order to attain certain specific objectives for people whose suffering is greater than my need to maintain moral purity.
So I think sometimes I find myself saying I believe I represent the client, but I also represent the system.
And I don't always believe in the client, but I have to believe in the system.
And so the things that break my heart most often is when I am used as an instrument for cruelty to another person.
Or when people in a courtroom lose because they can't afford better representation.
I think in our judicial system in the United States unfortunately, you get as much justice as you can afford sometimes.
And it's not supposed to be that way.
It's supposed to be equal protection under law.
It's really supposed to be.
It's what drew me to the field is this sense that, like A multimillionaire and a poor person have equal protection under law and you're supposed to have vigorous representation.
But this is like any other field.
There are people that are excellent at it, and the people that are excellent at it very often rise to the top and start to only represent.
I jokingly say that I represent all kinds of people gay people, straight people, black people, white people.
I don't represent poor people very often.
I'm $850 an hour.
And so people sometimes get less apt counsel that's less expensive.
And the only thing more expensive than a good divorce lawyer is a bad one.
So I think sometimes that's a very unfortunate reality of our system.
I'd like to think that at some chapter in the not too distant future I'll be at a place in my career where I can just quit private practice and work for a legal services agency.
I've seen a couple of my colleagues do that.
And I
I'm just cheering for them because they suddenly bring this massive amount of experience and talent to bear to create access to justice.
So I think the things that break my heart in courtrooms are not what you'd think, which is the day-to-day testimony of listening to the pain of people and their children.
It really is when the system fails.
There are some judges that should not be wearing a robe, like they're supposed to stand for something.
And some of them don't.
And-
A bad lawyer can screw things up, but a bad judge can really screw things up in a gigantic way.
They're given power, and with great power comes great responsibility.
And some of them do not deserve it.
They won a popularity contest.
New York has an elected judiciary, so they won a popularity contest.
And we're blessed.
I have some judges I appear in front of who are perfect for the role.
They have the temperament, they have the experience they have, they have the empathy like.
But there are some that you know they're drunk on the power of it.
They're mad at the world, they're mad at their own ex-wife or ex-husband and they're taking it out on people in a courtroom and when that happens, that's um, there's a powerlessness in that that i i have a very hard time navigating because I can't be the out cause.
Like, I don't know how to fix that.
How does someone know if they should keep trying to fix a relationship or it's time to get a divorce?
I mean, that's such a subjective assessment.
I'm a fan of... There's that old axiom that quitters never win and winners never quit.
But if you never win and you never quit, you're an idiot.
So at some point, I think people have to know it's time.
I was a hospice volunteer for many years.
And the biggest thing that anyone who works in hospice will tell you is that people call hospice too late.
Like there's so much that you can do in palliative care if they come to you earlier and and they come to you early in the process.
If someone has a terminal diagnosis, even if they're not ready for hospice care yet, you can put a plan in place.
Okay.
When we hit this milestone, we're going to do this.
And when we hit this, we can't add, years to your life, but we can add life to your years.
By the time people are in my office.
It's so far down that road that it's, I think, quite hard to find your way back.
So I think when you've reached the point in a relationship where you have made real good faith efforts to identify and address the distance, And that has been wholly unsuccessful.
And the other person is not committed maybe not in the same level of commitment as you, but not committed at all.
Because identifying that there is a problem is the first piece.
So if the other person is saying no, there's no problem, I think there comes a point where again, sometimes happily ever after means happily ever after separately.
And I'm a believer in divorce.
I'm not I mean, of course, as a divorce lawyer, I have a self-interest in saying that.
But even in my own life, I divorced 20 years ago.
And my ex-wife is very dear to me.
She's still a dear friend.
She's been remarried for 15 years very successfully much longer than we were ever married to a wonderful guy.
I just got to spend a lot of time with him at my son's wedding.
And we had a lot of laughs and a lot of shared time and space together in this, these two boys who we both love so much.
And I think that was an example of you know, when my ex-wife and I, 20 years ago, when we decided we were going to divorce, we had a very difficult and honest conversation at the kitchen table.
And our kids were, I think, three and four, three and five at the time.
And we loved them more than anything.
And I remember...
She said to me after we'd had this very teary, very difficult conversation we were both really honest with each other about how deeply unfulfilled we felt and how much we loved each other, but that there's a lot of people that you love that you might not be well married to.
And I remember she said to me if sheer power of will could make two people love each other, we would love each other forever.
I remember thinking it was so honest.
And so true that sometimes love, just the feeling of love, is not enough to sustain this very particular kind of connection two people are going to have.
Like my sons thankfully grew up in an environment of tremendous love and a deep connection to both their mom and I. But they laughingly now say as adults, like, how were you and mom ever married?
Like you... you have nothing in common.
You don't like any of the same things.
Like, and I laugh and I say to them, yeah, we're, we're incredibly different.
Like in the best relationships, it's like the Venn diagram.
There's the you, the me and the we, and there's some overlap, you know, and us it just wasn't, you know, but we were, you know.
We met when we were 18, you know, she was beautiful.
You know, I was cool.
And I had a motorcycle, like, I don't know, like those are the things that matter at that age.
You know, we're making this decision.
Like I often say to people, you know, If I said to you you can have any car you want when you were 18, what car would you have had?
Yeah, it would have been some sports car, something quite like, yeah.
Okay.
If then I told you, oh, that's the only car you're going to have for the rest of your life.
Do you think 18 year old you would think, well, wait, it's not going to fit a car seat.
Yeah.
And when I'm 80, how am I going to get in and out of it?
So that's what we're doing when we marry.
Like we're this young, like I wish I was 25 again because I still knew everything.
Like I knew everything when I was 25, if you asked me.
Like now I'm humble enough, like life will humble you enough that you go.
Oh yeah, like the list of stuff I don't know gets bigger.
Yeah.
Not smaller.
Yeah.
And my humility grows.
Yes, yes.
And I think...
So true.
We marry at an age, rightfully so, where we want to have kids maybe.
Our biological clocks are ticking.
We're so gassed up on hormones and love and sex and everything.
So we're making this gigantic life decision at an age where we still think we know everything, but our prefrontal cortex isn't even necessarily fully developed.
So what do you think is going to happen there?
We have to be willing to say-
You know, hey, maybe we made the wrong decision.
Maybe we made the wrong choices.
Again, I'm a fan of doing everything you can.
It's just like hospice.
Do what you can.
Do what you can to sustain your life and have joy and quality of life.
You can have a lot of impairments happen to your body and still have a tremendous quality of life, a wonderful quality of life.
But when you've reached the point where now we've tipped to the direction where my quality of life, my prognosis, is so bad that the inevitable is going to happen sooner rather than later, that's when we should start talking about okay, what now?
And that's what I think this just is.
Yeah.
You talking about your former partner and your two sons and obviously being at the wedding like it's so fresh for you.
And I was thinking about it because I think a lot of people go through this.
You probably hear a million times.
And I've had so many friends talk about this but is staying together for the kids actually hurting the kids?
Well, this is a really important question because I think a lot of people stay in challenging relationships for the benefit of their children.
And I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think when you have children with someone, A, a lot of difficulty comes with children.
We don't like to talk about that in polite society, but children are antagonistic to marriage.
We talked about it earlier in this conversation.
Like, They take attention away from each other.
And, by the way, that's one of the great things about having children is it's not all about you anymore.
And that's good.
But it's also challenging emotionally.
And we feel guilty to say it out loud.
Again.
One of the great innovations, I think, of our present time is that for a time, there was a book called The Mask of Motherhood where, before the internet, women were constantly how's the baby?
Oh, it's great.
Everything's great.
It's great.
Everything's great.
It's great.
And meanwhile, they're like, oh my God, this is horrible.
I'm exhausted.
I love this baby, but I want to kill it sometimes because it won't stop crying and I feel out of control.
And now I think we have a society where I think there's a tremendous amount of like.
You can say that and other women will go yeah, that's okay.
I felt like that too.
We're supposed to feel like that.
It's okay.
Doesn't mean you don't love your kid.
That's beautiful.
That's wonderful.
But I think we've got to a place where you know, some of those hard things to talk about we don't talk about in the context of relationship.
And I think there is value in having bonds that tie us together like children.
But the skill set of a spouse and the skill set of a parent are different.
Absolutely.
You know, I would like to say I was not a great husband.
I'm not, like I have a number of, deficiencies, you know, like I'm impatient.
I'm, you know, some of the things that would make me a, make a good husband, I don't possess.
I'm an excellent ex-husband.
I'm reliable.
I'm communicative.
I'm, you know, I'm dependable.
I'm very child focused.
I'm a really good father.
You know, I'm a really good father.
I, so I think sometimes people come into my office and they say like, oh, he was a terrible husband.
And I don't want him to have any time with the kids.
And then you kind of go, well, wait a minute.
Is he a bad father?
Because even though some of the skills might overlap like patience would be good in both of those roles they're very different roles.
So I think identifying that is important.
I think what the long-term behavioral research on children and divorce says, and there's a great book called The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce.
That was the longest term study ever done of children of divorce.
And what it essentially found is that, although divorce and conflict, parental conflict correlate right.
Makes sense.
People that have a lot of conflict often divorce.
That the parental conflict is what's most damaging to children.
Yeah.
Loyalty binds and witnessing parental conflict is harmful to children.
It stands to reason that many children of divorce have grown up in part or in long in a home filled with conflict, because people with lots of conflict often get divorced.
But it's not the divorce.
It's the conflict and the parental conflict that's so harmful.
So I would certainly say if you are struggling in your relationship and you have children, you have a tremendous incentive to figure out.
Is there a way for us to reconcile this relationship, temporarily or long-term, in a way that doesn't betray our core identities or ideals?
Yeah.
But if you are in a relationship where you are, your children are surrounded by conflict in the ecosystem of your home.
I don't think you're doing them any favors, gutting it out and staying together.
Like, cause I, again, I don't think the goal of marriage should be, we did it.
We did it.
We made it to death.
We were miserable for the last 30 years, but we did it.
That seems strange to me.
I think the goal should be marriage satisfaction.
And are we, I would hope that at the end of your life, you are still married to your wife.
And that what she would say of you is, he made my life better.
He helped me figure out who I am.
He helped me become the most authentic version of myself.
What more noble goal could there be to life than to find someone and love them and help them become who they are?
And help them... help you become who you are and who you're meant to be.
So if that's the goal, if the marriage isn't facilitating that result okay, do what you can to fix it.
But if it can't be fixed at some point, I think letting go is hard, but I think it's right.
Yeah.
And there's also what you said.
There's a nuance there, because if it's the conflict that affects the kids, the conflict can exist when you're together and when you're divorced.
Of course.
So if you're still having that distance but you're still talking about the other person in an unhealthy way and there's constantly games with the kids
I've seen every permutation of that.
And that's the stuff that the way people unintentionally harm their children with permission of their own conscience, you know and they They genuinely believe they're helping their children.
But that's the danger.
Divorce is so challenging because there's become an increasing amount of attention paid in the legal system now to parental estrangement.
And parental estrangement can sometimes be rooted in something genuine.
If someone's a bad parent, children eventually don't want to be around that person.
But sometimes parental estrangement is caused by alienation, which is the active interference in the parent-child relationship and the natural development of that bond.
And sometimes it's what's called negative gatekeeping, which is where you could have been helpful in helping your co-parent stay bonded to your child, and instead you chose to do nothing.
So one is an active interference and the other is a passive.
And very often what you see in contested ugly custody cases, which I do a lot of.
You see some combination of those things.
So like dad steps on the rake.
He does something stupid.
He yells at the child the way he shouldn't have.
He punishes them in a way that he shouldn't have.
And mom could have helped the kid navigate that better.
But instead, because she doesn't like dad, she weaponizes it.
And she has the permission of her own conscience because she goes, I'm protecting my child.
But it's so subtle.
Like that's the danger is, you know, like when...
It takes a rare kind of crazy person to say, your dad is a bad person and you shouldn't love him.
But it takes nothing to do, hello, here's your dad.
Yeah.
I just said dad's a bad person.
I don't have to say it out loud.
You know, it's the difference between, oh, how was your weekend with dad?
What'd you guys do?
Oh, we went to the park and we, you know, met his new friend, Cindy.
Oh yeah.
Oh, that's nice.
What'd you guys, what'd you have to eat?
Oh, we've got pizza.
Oh, that's great.
What was Cindy like?
Oh, she's really nice.
You know, she's got pretty blonde hair and she likes to ride bicycles.
Oh, that's nice.
You like to ride bicycles too.
So that's nice.
I'm not surprised that dad likes her because dad likes bicycles too, you know?
All right, go upstairs.
You know, you got school tomorrow morning.
Let's figure out what we're going to do.
And I'm so glad you're back.
I missed you so much when you were with dad.
Are you okay?
Yeah, you okay?
Did everything go okay?
Are you all right?
Yeah.
What'd you do?
You went to the park?
You went to the, it's been so cold out.
Why'd you go to the, oh, you went, did you just, you and dad went?
Cindy who?
Who's Cindy?
Who's Cindy?
Cindy, dad's friend?
Do you mean dad's girlfriend?
Does dad have a girlfriend now and he's not selling anyone that he has a girlfriend?
You know, well, you know what?
Go upstairs and, you know, get whatever you do.
Like, Yeah.
I just told this kid so much.
And the part of the judicial system, because as a lawyer, it doesn't matter what I know.
It matters what I can prove.
So you know what the judicial system solution to that is?
We'll assign a lawyer to the kid.
And the lawyer is going to sit down with the kid and say, does mom ever say bad things about dad?
And guess what?
The answer is no.
I didn't say, what did she say that was bad about dad?
She didn't say anything bad about dad.
She asked, what'd you have to eat?
I missed you.
It's nice that you're home.
Who's Cindy?
Like, who's Cindy?
I was asking a question.
He brought this person around our child.
I don't know who they are, you know?
So I just wanted to ask my, oh, who is she?
But meanwhile, no, you sent a whole message to that kid.
And by the way, be a grownup.
Like, love your kid more than you hate your ex.
Because all you have to do in that situation is do what you do as an adult, which is pretend, right?
Like I remember my son Noah was now 28 when he just got married.
I remember him when he was about four years old having pneumonia and he had like 104 fever and he was burning up and he was in my lap.
And I remember like it was yesterday.
I remember the doctor said to us, cause we called him panicked.
And the doctor said, okay, if it goes to 105, you got to get him to the emergency room.
And I remember him like, so like, it's a visceral memory.
So sick.
And I remember being like, it's okay.
It's okay, buddy.
It's okay.
You're okay.
You're okay.
It's okay.
You're okay.
No, you're fine.
You're just sick right now.
It's going to be okay.
Don't worry about it.
It's okay.
Everything's going to be fine because that's what you do.
Like, that's what you do.
He did not need me. to do what I'm even recalling this memory 24 years later.
And he's fine.
He's on his honeymoon.
He's fine.
Like, but I I'm literally ready to cry thinking about it because I remember being so terrified.
I'd never been that scared in my life.
I loved this thing more than I'd ever loved anything.
And I thought, Oh my God, he's going to die.
But what he needed me to do in that moment is be strong and lie.
Yeah.
He needed that from me.
And so I, do that.
Just do that.
I don't care if you're upset that dad's dating Cindy and that dad really stepped on the rake and should have told you hey, I'm going to introduce our kid to this girl I've been seeing.
And you guys should have had a conversation where you say like hey, is this someone you're serious about, before you take them around our kid.
And what are you going to tell the kid?
And give me a little info on this so we can figure out how to like send the right message together.
You know, that's not the place to have that with the kid.
You we don't teach people how to do relationships.
And we don't teach them how to do when relationships end.
And with 50 or more of marriages ending in divorce, we could do better at teaching people how to be good ex-husbands and good ex-wives, how to be good co-parents after divorce.
But nobody wants to buy that book.
Nobody wants to buy that book because they all think they're great at it.
They all think they're great at it.
And I have some clients that are a really abysmally bad at it and a lot of what I have to do is give them credit where credit's not due.
I have to say to them, like right, but of course you would never do x, y and z, because I know you and I know you're a good person, I know you love your kids, you know.
So I have to play little mind games with them and say to them all the time, like you know, they'll say well, I'm gonna introduce, you know, the kids to my girlfriend this weekend.
You know, do I have to tell her I'll go?
Do you have to?
No, you don't have to, but of course you should, of course you will.
Yeah, like you're, wouldn't you want to know if she was good?
Yeah.
And obviously this person you're introducing to you you know, I'm sure you're not doing that with someone that you like met on Tinder and you're, you know, going to know for two weeks, like this.
I'm sure this is a serious relationship.
And they're like, well, yeah, it's sort of serious.
I'm like, cause if it's not, you know, you might, Obviously, you might want to wait a little bit.
I have to be in the position where I'm educating them as to what to do.
Without educating them, yeah, you've got to kind of be that.
Right, because I'm their advocate.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I'm their advocate.
But the truth of my profession and the best of us that do this, because I can say it about my colleagues, although I've never been their client in the courtroom at the negotiating table.
I am a vociferous advocate.
I'm a weapon.
I'll advocate for whatever crazy position is necessary in that situation.
Behind closed doors, I'm this.
I'm very blunt with my clients.
I'm very candid with them because they don't need me to tell them what they want to hear.
They need me to tell them what they need to hear.
And so I'm very, very honest with my clients behind closed doors.
I will tell them.
You're going through a process where you could spend 50000 arguing over a 60000 bank account.
And if you win, you didn't win $60,000, you won $10,000.
And if you lose...
You lost $110,000 like, so divorces like that.
I mean, I had a case, a multi million dollar marital estate, probably worth 30, $40 million.
The settlement fell apart because of a toaster oven, a $48 toaster oven.
Cause it was the one issue they couldn't agree on his division of personal property.
And I just remember being in the room and thinking I could, on my phone right now, with prime delivery, have every person in this room get one of this toaster oven tomorrow, and they're going to blow this thing up over this.
Because it wasn't about the toaster oven.
And they did blow it up.
They did.
They blew it up.
Yeah, yeah.
And listen, it was great for the lawyers.
Great for the lawyers.
We get paid to fight.
When your lawyer is telling you the settlement's good, let's take the settlement.
I'm acting against my interests.
I get paid for the fight.
And I manipulate people's emotional state for a living.
Like I make a judge feel sympathetic to my client, antagonistic to the other side.
I make the other side feel scared or vulnerable.
I make my client feel safe.
Like I manipulate people's emotional state for a living.
That's the job.
You don't think I couldn't use that to gas my client up and feel terrified so that they need me to do more work?
Of course I could.
Of course I could.
I could turn that right on and I could well, you know, listen.
It's all fine now, but what if forces are aligning against you?
I could scare the crap out of these people and get them to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The way you build a reputation and this is a business where you live and die by your reputation is by not doing that.
By being really honest with your clients, by being really blunt with your clients.
And that's what I try every single day to wake up and do.
And all of the best of my colleagues, I suspect that that's what they do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's painful though, because it all comes down back to what we've been talking about this whole time, which is this personal growth and ego of not.
Whether it's you being mad at your partner when you're together, whether it's you being on the honeymoon or dating, whether it's you thinking about divorce, it's always your ego and your control and your desire for power that's constantly getting in the way, even to the toaster oven, which is that final straw of no.
I want to have the final say, and they should feel the wrath and not me.
And it's that growth of like, when are those insecurities not going to be mine anymore?
And when are those?
You know, because hopefully I'm getting divorced so that I can move on from that.
But if I'm still upset that the person's with Cindy like that's just pulling me, I'm still controlled by that person.
By the way, it's perfectly okay to feel jealous.
It's perfectly okay to feel, but I totally agree.
I think-
All of these problems, whether they're in the context of divorce or in the context of navigating a functional relationship that's having challenges, or employer-employee relationships.
You're right, it's all ego-based things.
Neil Postman, who was one of my mentors at NYU, a beautiful, prolific writer about culture.
He used to say that technology offers us real solutions to imaginary problems and imaginary solutions to real problems.
And I think...
Marriage is an imaginary solution to a real problem.
The real problem is we're alone, feel terribly alone.
This world is easier to navigate with someone.
You can't learn everything you need to know about yourself from yourself.
You need someone who sees your blind spots.
There's nothing more wonderful than feeling loved, other than perhaps, giving love and having someone feel your love, who you love.
So these are all real problems.
But the idea that I'm going to get a piece of jewelry on my finger and I've got that locked down now and I'm going to not feel this.
Look, I represent some of the wealthiest people in the United States.
I am in the finance capital, arguably, of the world.
Some of my clients are worth billions of dollars.
My wealthiest client is probably worth about $8 billion.
He is as bad at this as anyone.
You cannot buy your way into it.
You can't.
There's no amount of money that you can spend to fix disconnection between you and your partner.
There's no Birkin bag you can buy them.
There's nothing you can do that will replace some of these fundamental things.
And The struggles like money, you know, neither you nor I grew up with money.
And I think when you grow up without money, I don't know if this was your experience.
It certainly was mine.
Money came to symbolize everything I didn't have.
Like if I have money, I'll feel safe.
If I have money, I'll feel valuable and worthy.
If I have money, I'll feel secure.
And then you get money and you just have money.
Like you don't, you still feel unsafe.
You still feel, are some things easier?
Of course.
Of course money's important and it does make some things easier and it does give some modicum of security.
But from the fundamental challenges of life, like these real challenges.
So those are real problems.
I think marriage, again asking the question what is the problem to which marriage is a solution, is the key.
Who falls for divorce more, men or women?
Women by a, Significant majority.
It's over 70% of divorces are accepted by women.
Unfortunately, though, that's a statistic that gets unfairly weaponized quite often.
How should we process it?
What does it tell us?
So the popular antagonism in the what do you want to call it?
The manosphere, or in misogynist spaces whatever you might want to call it, in spaces that are there to defend men's perspectives, is that women are somehow coming into the casino of marriage, amassing a lot of winnings and then cashing out.
And that's why the number of women is in the 70% in the commencement of divorce actions.
What I have found in my own practice is that, although that is certainly the case sometimes, that more often than not it is that men, more often than women, go out for milk and never come back, or just come home one day and say I'm leaving.
Part of that has to do with children.
I think we know you can be a Bella Abzug feminist if you'd like to be.
And I think you would concede that if you met me, a man, and said, Jim, tell me about yourself.
And I said, well, I'm divorced.
I'm a lawyer.
I see my children every other weekend and once a week for dinner.
They live with their mom.
This would in almost no way shape your opinion of me as a parent.
Whereas if I was a woman and I said I'm divorced, the children live with their father and I see them every other weekend and once a week for dinner.
There's some part of you that would go.
What's wrong with her?
Drug issue?
Or like, is there like, you know, substance use or some mental health?
Like what?
So why?
Because the overwhelming majority still of parents primary care of children is on women.
So I think that the reason why women are more often the plaintiff in the divorce action is that we have created a society where for a man to walk away, say bye, I'm out, it's easier.
And so when that happens and it happens often I have women who come into my office and say what do I do?
He left.
The mortgage hasn't been paid.
I don't know, like, how am I going to do X, Y, and Z?
And I say, okay, we have to file a divorce action.
And they go, wait, no, I don't want to file a divorce action.
I'm not the one who wants a divorce.
He is.
I want him to come back and for everything to be okay.
Okay.
But he's not coming back and everything's not okay.
But what you need is the mortgage to be paid and an order that gives you temporary child support.
And the only way I can do that is to get a judge assigned.
And the only way I can get a judge assigned is to file a divorce action.
So then what happens is we filed the divorce action.
And then, nine times out of 10, the guy who went out for milk and never came back.
I can't believe you filed for divorce.
Well, she's the one who filed for divorce.
And you kind of go, okay, no.
Like, you killed it, she buried it.
I get it.
But like, you killed it.
Like, what are you talking about, you know?
And by the way, I'm not suggesting you should have stayed.
There's lots of good reasons why a marriage might end.
But just leaving and not confronting, again, it's the same problem, right?
Is it surprising that in a marriage where people were afraid to have difficult conversations, that they might essentially do the equivalent of ghosting?
Like, I'm just going to leave.
I'm just out, you know?
So...
That's where that statistic, I think, it's abused.
Yeah.
Because if only, again, if only, if only.
In some ways wish we lived in a world like Solzhenitsyn said, where if only there were just evil people and we could just segregate them from the rest of us and live our lives in peace.
It's not how it works.
The line of good and evil runs right through the human heart.
Yeah.
And so...
There is not a simple answer that, oh yes, women are just gold diggers and they're filing for divorce because they're cashing their chips out.
I have seen many, many women commence divorce actions where they're taking a gigantic economic hit.
I have a client who recently we filed for divorce knowing that under the prenup, what she's going to get, she's no longer going to have private jets.
She is going to take a significant cut in her lifestyle.
But she's like, yeah, but I need to be free of this relationship.
And so to suggest that that statistic proves this other thing, I think is very self-interested by the people that are positing that theory.
Who suffers more from divorce, men or women?
I think the world is cruel to both in different ways.
I think there is sometimes a tremendous economic burden put on men that is well beyond their capacity.
I've seen child support awards and spousal maintenance or alimony awards that are so gigantic that it just literally cripples a man, especially when someone's lost their job.
And then the courts are very quick sometimes to say well, your earning capacity is commensurate with your last employment, so you'll find another job.
So the world can be cruel to men in that way.
And also, I think, even though we abolished what used to be called the maternal presumption, which was a presumption, or used to be called the tender years doctrine, which is the presumption that women are better custodial parents to children than men, we still live in the world and there's a tremendous amount of bias there.
And there are a lot of really good dads and a lot of really awful moms and vice versa.
But to suggest that because someone gave birth to a child, like under your skin, is under your sovereignty, to assume that that person is a better caregiver to a child is absolutely ridiculous.
So men are terribly hurt by the divorce system and the divorce industrial complex in those ways.
They don't have the time with their children that they probably would benefit from and that the children would benefit from.
And it's very easy to weaponize those things.
Women, the divorce system is sometimes very expensive to get the relief that you're entitled to.
The barriers to entry into getting that award is very challenging.
And I think post-divorce, my observation has been a divorced man, his parents, prospects for future relationships are better yeah i think when and again i i this is not a you know an indictment of i believe me i'm sure that there are exceptions to this like there are to everything but by and large women in my observation of many many many many clients divorced men have a much bigger menu of options like There's, you know, a guy gets divorced in his early 40s and he's got a couple of kids.
He can usually get women in their 20s and their 30s because they'll look at it and go oh, instant family, just add me.
Like, great.
Like, I'll be a step-parent and, you know, I'll get involved in this.
Maybe we'll have our own kids too.
But even if we don't, I'll get to have something quasi-parental.
And by the way, there will also be divorced women who he, you know, hey, our lives are similar.
We have co-parents.
We have these things.
Let's get together and let's get married and Brady Bunch it, you know.
Women...
I think get a shorter end of the stick on that.
I think that there are a lot of men who see a woman who's divorced, even a young beautiful intelligent, articulate woman who's divorced through no fault of her own, perhaps.
Maybe she made a bad choice and this was not a good person for her or for her children.
And a lot of men will look at it and go, it's got baggage.
I don't want to deal with that.
And I don't want what comes with that.
Again, many men step up in that situation.
And I think...
I've had the amazing experience of watching some men step up where I've had these young female clients and they get divorced and they're just convinced their life is over.
They're like, I'm 34 years old.
I got two kids, and I'm divorced.
And then some guy, very often unexpected, like a young guy with no kids who's never been married, steps in and is like a hero.
And a couple of years later, I'm going to their wedding.
And a few of them.
I have one couple in particular I'm thinking of.
She's had the greatest post-divorce life and greatest post-divorce marriage I've ever seen.
And now they have a baby together, the two of them.
And this guy really stepped in to be a step-parent for her kids in a beautiful way.
And, you know, it's amazing.
But I think as a general rule, my observation has been divorce is hard on men and hard on women in just different ways.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
James, it has been such a joy talking to you today.
And I feel like I'm Learning so much, and just what's really incredible talking to you about it is that you really do have this rare ability to go from being really logical and rational about something to then being really emotional and emotive about it.
Try being this person.
Yeah, it's really beautiful to watch.
I really appreciate how you can oscillate between the two quite comfortably and gracefully.
And it's really powerful.
Just taking it all in.
And again, the reminders are powerful yet simple.
That's a wonderful thing because it's that with which we're stumbling.
And those are the same things we're all stumbling over.
And it's a wonderful commonality for us.
Yeah, yeah.
It's really part of our humanity.
It's great to know that that's what it is, that it wasn't some big thing that you didn't become, or that you didn't become successful, or that you didn't you know something that was so far away and that it was right there.
Right.
And the thing, the piece...
The peace we're all looking for may not be so far away.
The questions we need to ask may not be so complicated.
And the things we need to do to sustain or repair our relationships.
They may not be that inaccessible.
It may be right inside of us.
Yeah, yeah.
We end every interview with a final five.
These questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.
However, I'll probably break my own rule knowing how good our conversation's been.
And so- Unknown for my brevity.
Yeah.
James Sexton, these are your final five.
So the first question is, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
And of course it can be intertwined to love.
So what's the best love advice you've ever heard or received or given?
The best advice I've heard in general and it applies to love as much as it applies to anything else is the hard thing to do and the right thing to do are almost always the same thing.
That any time you're confronted with a choice, that the harder thing is usually the right thing.
It's easier to sleep in than to exercise, but it might be the right thing to exercise.
It's easier to just hold your tongue and not share with your partner something that needs to be shared, but the right thing to do is to do the hard thing.
So the hard thing to do and the right thing to do are almost always the same thing.
That's a great answer.
I love that.
Never had it on the show.
Question number two, what is the worst love advice you've ever heard or received?
Happy wife, happy life.
Why is that?
People say it all the time.
And whoever created that, I want to just throttle them.
I have an amendment to it.
And that is, it should not be happy wife, happy life.
Because what's meant by that is just shut your mouth and just do what she tells you.
And I just think it's terrible advice.
I think it's a way to build estrangement between two people.
It's a way to disconnect.
I think it could be amended to happy spouse, happy house.
I think that's true.
I think that if you can help your partner find joy, that your joy will be more accessible and their desire to help you find joy will be more accessible to them.
And it creates a positive cycle.
So I would say, I would say happy wife, happy life is, is the worst advice.
The other, the runner up would be follow your heart, follow your heart.
That's one of those things people say, like it is what it is.
It's like a thing you say when you don't really know what to say, because I I genuinely, you know, like I don't.
I don't know that you should listen to your brain, because your brain is lying to you all the time.
It's good to listen to your body, because your body doesn't lie to you, you know.
It doesn't have the agenda that your brain has, but your heart.
What you're really saying is listen to what i think, what my mind is telling me, my heart is saying, and that's that's dangerous.
Yeah yeah, i like both of them great picks.
There's something you've really talked about today which was a resounding kind of principle was this idea of it's so much raising above just pleasure and happiness and comfort.
And this idea of being with someone who wants you to become the most authentic version of you, and vice versa.
And that's such a different thing that you think you're signing up for when you get married.
Because most people were just signing up for you make me happy.
You make me feel good.
And those are a part of that.
And those are important.
And no one's saying those things are not critical.
But signing up to say well, the long term that's going to evolve into, I'm going to help you become the most authentic version of you.
And you're going to help me become.
And that's a massive evolution from you make me happy right now.
Because I think it says something of our humanity.
Because my personal belief is, my personal experience has led me to believe as a human being.
You know, I was raised very Catholic, very religious.
And I've since left faith, you know, but I still believe in God and I still like the concepts.
And I don't believe in a devil.
You know, I don't believe that there's this nefarious evil force.
But if there was a devil, I think his principal function would be to tell us what I think many of us secretly believe.
And that is that we are so awful that God couldn't possibly love us.
And I think there is some part of us as human that sees all the ugliness in us.
That's in all of us.
All the selfishness, all the greed, all the lust, all the envy, all of it, all of it, all of our humanity, that piece of our humanity, and is convinced, and doesn't want to say out loud, that if someone knew us, they couldn't possibly love us.
That's, I think, our deepest fear.
Our deepest fear is that if you knew me, you wouldn't love me anymore.
And so the opposite is true, which is when you feel truly known your good parts, your bad parts, and loved.
That is the greatest feeling.
Like that is the greatest experience a person can have.
And by the way, we have it very often with our children.
We're like, we don't care.
Like, no, no, they make mistakes, but it's okay.
I love them anyway.
Oh no, they're bad at this, but it doesn't matter.
I love them anyway.
Like I see them, warts and all.
I see all the bad and all the good and the whole amalgam.
I love them anyway.
Like I love them with all my heart.
So to me I think that's the core of it is we're just afraid that if someone knew us, they wouldn't love us.
So we add all these other things on.
Well, how can I make this person feel pleasure?
And anytime they don't serve my pleasure, well, now they're failing my needs.
And we create all these ways to self-sabotage relationships when, in fact, what it really is is we don't really love ourselves.
We don't think we're worthy of love.
And I think again.
I'm not really Christian, but I think the most radical message that Jesus said in the gospels was essentially that we are worthy of love.
Not that we should love others, but that we should love ourselves, that we should believe that we are worthy of love, God's love, the love of each other.
And I genuinely think if we gave each other the grace, like gave ourselves the grace we give each other, you know, like cause, if you described to me all of the horrible things about you right now, like if the mics were off and you said to me you know Jim I'm, I know that we've met and we've now had a lovely conversation, but if you got to the core of who I am, I have all of these horrible things.
And you told me about all these selfish things like people do all day long in my office.
They tell me all the horrible things they've done.
And I was to say okay, that means you're human.
Yeah, that means you're human.
That doesn't mean you're an awful, terrible person.
Yeah, you screwed up.
You did some things that maybe you shouldn't have done.
You should learn from that.
You should figure out how to not do that.
You see what it's led you to, but like it's okay, like I don't think you're a bad person, like that's the loveliest thing in the world and that's what I think love can be at its best and marriage can be at its best.
Is that creation of that authentic self.
Yeah, I'm doing great with the one word answer.
No, no, no.
I wanted you to, I was really happy about that.
Uh, question number three.
What's the question people never asked before marriage, but absolutely should.
I mean I'll.
I'll go to my earlier question, which is what is the problem to which marriage is a solution?
For you specifically.
Yeah.
Why am I getting married?
Yeah.
And why, and why is this other person getting married and are those goals aligned?
I think that's a very worthwhile question.
Yeah, I think that would be the best question to ask.
I think, is that what is the problem I am trying to solve by getting married?
And what is the problem that this person is trying to solve?
And are those goals aligned?
I also think it's worthwhile to ask at the risk of being unromantic although it's fairly obvious I'm a romantic at heart I think there's also some really practical questions people should ask.
Like, are you a night person or a morning person?
Are you okay with dishes in the sink?
Cause I'm not at all ever.
You know what I mean?
Like, are you a neat freak?
Are you somebody that's kind of, you know, do you leave your socks everywhere?
Can you tolerate someone who leaves their socks everywhere?
I do tend to leave my socks everywhere.
So I think, you know, having some honest conversations about you're not just going to look cause your wife's your wife.
She's also your roommate.
She's also your business partner.
She's also your vacation companion.
She's like she's got a whole bunch of.
If that was a job description for your companies, it's a long one.
So have some practical conversations about the nuts and bolts of being married and the nuts and bolts of having a life together.
Yeah, great answer.
Question number four.
What's a lie that couples tell themselves at the start of a relationship that ultimately breaks them?
Two opposite lies.
That this will change things.
And that nothing will change in different measure.
So sometimes people marry and they go well.
He wasn't the most fidelitous boyfriend, but now that we're married he'll be committed.
Or, you know, he drank a bit too much when we were together, but now, you know, and she was a bit of a compulsive spender, but once we marry, that'll reign in and we'll settle into it.
So thinking that this person is going to change and that the act of marrying someone will change fundamentally the relationship?
And also thinking I'm marrying this person how they are now, how I am now, and it will never change.
We will always be what we are to each other.
It will always feel the way it currently feels.
We will never change that much.
I think that's ridiculous.
We change a tremendous amount.
With each passing decade of my life, I look back and go, oh my gosh, what changes in me?
Not just my hair and my back hurting.
Like, what are the changes?
There's so much change as to how I approach things.
So I think the two lies are that nothing will change and that things will change.
Great answer.
Love that.
Fifth and final question.
We ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show.
If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
Shortly after your 18th birthday, you would have to spend six months or so volunteering for hospice.
I think we shield our society from death.
And I think it infects the way we look at life.
It morphs in unhealthy ways the way we view death.
And it causes us to focus on a lot of the wrong things.
A divorce is a death of sorts.
It's not surprising to me that I went from hospice to divorce work, because it's all about endings.
Everything is ending all the time, and so i think if, at the age of 18, everyone had to do mandatory service, where they spent time working with the terminally ill, i think it would change fundamentally the way that our society was structured.
I think that you would.
I think so much of our world is designed to take your attention away from the fact that you're definitely going to die, because if you thought about the fact that you're definitely going to die, you wouldn't really care so much about what everybody else is selling.
You would be much more focused on what really matters in life and you wouldn't chase so many phantoms.
So I would say that we would do society a tremendous service to do that.
And answer number two to that would be you know, there'd be like a mandatory waiting period to get married.
Like.
It should not be something that you can do just for 50 bucks by a guy who's dressed like Elvis when you're in Vegas, hopped up on hormones and alcohol.
Like it should be, there should be like, you know, with guns, there's like a waiting period.
You know, you get a driver's license.
You gotta like take a written test.
You gotta, you know, practice.
You get like a learner's permit.
And then there's restrictions on how much you're allowed to drive.
Like married man, it's nothing.
You just, here it is.
Knock yourselves out, kids.
Figure it out.
You know, I think there would be some, some form of premarital education there.
Maybe you have to talk to people that have been divorced.
You have to talk to people that are divorce lawyers.
You have to talk to some people that have been successfully married that volunteer for the gig.
And then you can decide if you can get married or not.
That's a great answer.
I love it.
James Sexton, the book's called How to Stay in Love.
If you don't already, follow James across social media.
Make sure you subscribe on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, everywhere.
James, honestly, I love this.
I hope you'll come back on.
I feel like there's so much more we can explore.
There's so much more we can go into, but I'm so glad.
I suspected it would go this way.
Yeah, it's three hours.
Is it really?
You know I could always.
There's very few conversations that I can say that about, but it's really lovely, because there's nothing more lovely than when I absolutely lose track of time in a conversation and it feels like it was a half an hour and I go how long was that?
So this is one of those.
So of course, I would very much welcome the chance to sit down again.
And I'm really glad we made this connection.
Yeah, thank you, James.
Yeah, you're very welcome.
You're awesome.
That was amazing.
You're incredible, man.
Thanks, man.
If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr Gabor Mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds, to start moving on from the past.
Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable.
So a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it?
It grows where it's soft and green and vulnerable.
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