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- [00:01]
Mike
This episode is sponsored by Avocado Green Mattress. They make certified organic mattresses, pillows and solid wood furniture, all created without harmful chemicals and with carefully chosen materials designed to support healthier living and better sleep. I've realized over time how much my sleep affects everything else, from my focus and energy to my mood. During the day, when sleep is off, even small things feel harder than they should. Or what stands out with Avocado is their focus on creating a healthier home environment. Their products use certified organic non toxic materials, which helps reduce unnecessary chemicals in the space where you spend a huge portion of your life resting and recovering. They also design their mattresses to support deep restorative sleep, the kind of sleep that helps your body reset overnight so you wake up feeling steadier, calmer and ready for the day ahead. And if you're unsure, many of their mattresses come with sleep trials of up to a year, so you have the time to decide whether it's the right fit for you. When it comes to what you sleep on. Real wins. Real is better. Go to avocado greenmattress.com trigger to check out their mattress and bedding sale. That's Avocado GreenMattress.com/avocado greenmattress.com trigger capitalism is evil.
- [01:21]
Francis
You hear that all the time these days in Internet clips, on tv, even in real life. But has anyone actually expl or why it's responsible for the greatest increase in human prosperity the world has ever seen? Hillsdale College is offering a fantastic free online course called Understanding Capitalism and I've been watching it myself. I found that the course does an incredible job of making complex concepts like the market economy understandable. In just seven lectures, you'll learn how capitalism works with human nature, why it relies on freedom and private property, and why it's actually a system that rewards virtue and responsibility, not greed. And this is just one of over 40 free online courses Hillsdale College offers. You can learn about the U.S. constitution, the book of Genesis, the Roman Republic, even the history of the ancient Christian Church. Go right now to Hillsdale Edu Trigger to enroll in this course, Understanding Capitalism. There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale Edu Trigger to enroll for free one more time. That's Hillsdale Edu Trigger. What is the fastest and best way for me to end up sitting across from you in your law office?
- [02:36]
James Sexton
Infidelity would be number one. Men losing their job is a tremendous tracker as to divorce, Very often substance use issues come up because A person starts drinking more to cope. If you want to screw your marriage up, the best way to do it is to just stop paying attention to it. Just don't water the plant. It'll die. Everybody harps on the statistic that roughly 56% of marriages end in divorce. But the more interesting statistic to me is that 87% of people who get divorced are remarried within five years of their divorce. It failed catastrophically. The wheels came off. And 87% within five years. Go. All right, let's give it another shot.
- [03:21]
Francis
This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College. Right after this episode, go check out their incredible online courses, which are absolutely free at Hillsdale. Edu Trigger. James, welcome to trigonometry.
- [03:35]
James Sexton
Great to be here.
- [03:36]
Francis
Oh, it's great to have you on. You are literally like the world's leading expert on divorce, which is a great thing to be an expert in.
- [03:41]
James Sexton
I guess it feels a bit like being like the best looking leper. You're known for something that people really kind of don't want to even talk about because saying the word is like saying Voldemort and that somehow you'll summon it. So. But yeah, no, I appreciate that I've become well known as a divorce lawyer.
- [03:58]
Francis
Right. And look, to be honest, we're not pro divorce, obviously, but the reason we wanted to talk to you is one of the things I imagine is true is if you've seen a lot of people go through that process and help them through that, you probably have a good insight into how not to be in that situation in the first place. Is that fair to say?
- [04:13]
James Sexton
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think if you wanted to talk to, you know, someone about how to take good care of your car, you wouldn't talk to the person at the car dealership who sells brand new cars and only deals with brand new cars. I think talking to a wedding planner about how do I make my marriage and the happiness and contentment within it last would probably be the last person to speak to. If I was looking to find information about how to keep my car in its best mechanical shape, I would talk to a car mechanic because all they do is see cars that break down all day and they see where, where do systems start to fail? What are the parts that there's strain on? And I think as a divorce lawyer for over 25 years, yeah, I've seen all the permutations of ways that people lose something that they never meant to lose. I mean, I think divorce is in an incredibly performative moment in our Culture, it's something you can't pretend you meant to do. Like everyone who got married gets married with the hope at least or intention of staying together. And yet over 50% of marriages end in divorce.
- [05:13]
Francis
And that has amplified over time, as I understand. Right. We didn't used to get divorced at these sort of rates.
- [05:21]
James Sexton
No, I mean divorce was not culturally as acceptable of a thing. So I think there's a huge piece of that. But yeah, no, generally the divorce rate has been above 50% since the 1990s. And it sometimes goes up as high as 56, it sometimes goes as low as 53, but it hasn't been below 50 in quite a long time.
- [05:43]
Francis
And by the way, just one thing to clarify, cuz I think people get confused. It's not that 50% of people who get married get divorced, it's 50% of marriages get divorced. In other words, you've got some serial offenders going on.
- [05:54]
James Sexton
That is correct, yes. And although the statistic for first marriages is somewhere in the area of 48%, so it's not far from 50%. And what I would say in response to that, because I think people say that in a way to sort of assuage the concern of. Well, it's not quite as bad. I mean, first of all, Toyota had a car that the brake line failed 0.0001% of the time. And they spent billions of dollars recalling all of those cars because that was considered an irrationally high risk. Even if it was 48%. 48% is a gigantic number. If I said there's a 48% chance when you walk out of here, you're going to hit the head with a bowling ball, you'd either stay inside or wear a helmet. But I also think what's important is that's how many catastrophically fail, meaning that they divorce.
- [06:42]
Francis
Right.
- [06:42]
James Sexton
How many people stay together unhappy for the children for religious reasons because they don't want to give up half of their things because there's pressure in their culture? I mean, let's be conservative and say it's another 10%. I would say it's probably closer to 20 or 30, but that's speculation. There's no way to prove it. But now we're talking about a technology that fails 60 to 70 to 80% of the time. You could make an argument from a legal standpoint that that is a reckless act. It's no longer negligent. You know, negligence is a failure to perceive a substantial risk. Recklessness is a conscious disregard for a substantial risk. So there's a good argument to be made that marriage is not not only negligent, it's in fact reckless.
- [07:24]
Francis
So if I'm a man and a woman, I imagine some of the reasoning is different for the two sexes. What is the fastest and best way for me to end up sitting across from you in your law office?
- [07:35]
James Sexton
That's a great way to parse the question. I mean, my answer's not going to be a sexy answer, I think, because I think we fall in love very quickly and we fall out of love the same way. We go bankrupt very slowly and then all at once. And so I think the answer I would say, is if you want your marriage to fall apart, stop paying attention. Just stop paying attention to your marriage. Just say, okay, I've got that now. I'm married now. I don't have to think about that anymore. I can focus on all the other things in life. I can focus on the kids. I can focus on work. I can focus on my hobbies. I have this. I found my person. We've signed on with each other. We put the rings on. We're locked in. They're stuck with me, I'm stuck with them. That's it. And no longer do whatever that thing was that you did when you first met this person, whatever the thing was that you did that made them feel loved and seen and that showed them that you saw them and that you loved them and maybe inspired them to make you feel loved and make you feel seen. Because I think there's a spiral that happens in unhappy relationships where it's like, well, she's not sleeping with me. Well, I'm not sleeping with you because you haven't said a kind word to me in weeks. Well, I haven't said a kind word to you in weeks because we're never in the same room. Well, we're never in the same room because the kids are really demanding. Well, the kids are so demanding. I'm at work half the time. What would you like me to do now? We've got a great. You're both right. And miserable, you know? But you could reverse that spiral just as easily, which is by showing each other some kindness, some attention. I mean, what does it take? I've often said, like, what does it take to leave a note for your wife? You know, it was so fun watching the TV with you last night. I married the prettiest girl in the world. What does that take? 10 seconds? 5 seconds? And what does it cost? Nothing, right? But when we're dating someone, when we first meet Someone when we're trying to close the deal, we do these little things that again, we're interested and we're interesting to this other person. And then once we marry, we have a tendency to just stop doing that. So I would say if you want to screw your marriage up, the best way to do it is to just stop paying attention to it. Just don't water the plant. It'll die you.
- [09:50]
Mike
Isn't also part of the problem, James, that you sign this contract? It's a legal contract, and you basically sign it when you're out of your mind on the most powerful drug in the world. It's like you get MDMA mixed with ecstasy mixed with a running endorphin type high. And then all of a sudden you get presented with a contract.
- [10:14]
James Sexton
You're like, yes, please, I'll sign anywhere. Yeah, wherever.
- [10:17]
Mike
All over it. If I get to have sex and see you again one more time, Amen.
- [10:21]
James Sexton
Amen. And it's absolutely that. And I'll even take it a step further. It's not even a contract. You'd get to read like the contract that you sign. The marriage license that you sign doesn't have any terms and conditions. That's right. It just says, I'm agreeing to the terms and conditions. Which terms and conditions? Whichever ones the government comes up with. Like, that's why I always tell people, you know, people, I do a lot of prenuptial agreements. And people come in and they'll say, well, what's the best way to talk about a prenuptial agreement? And I say, well, every marriage has a prenuptial agreement. Every single one. It's either written by the government or it's written by the two people who purport to love each other more than the other 8 billion other options. So whether you're on the left, whether you're on the right, whether you're in the center, I don't think anyone has ever walked into the Department of Motor Vehicles and said, oh, yeah, oh, these people should be in charge of everything. These people should be in charge of my intimate relationship and what the rules are in the event that it falls apart. So if you don't have a prenuptial agreement, what you're essentially doing is saying, whatever the government thinks is best is fine with me. And by the way, what other contract that you ever sign in your life, other than a marriage contract, can be changed by individuals outside of the relationship, with or without your consent, with or without your knowledge, unless you were looking for it. And following the statutory changes that are happening in family law, and when they change it to something you don't agree with, you have no right to opt out. You have no right to say, oh, oh, you know what? Now that there's a formula for alimony, and I don't actually think that's fair, I would like to declare my marriage void. And they'd say, oh, no, sorry, you already signed up. You already signed up. So you are in this rule set that we've just made up for you. But most people don't even know what those rules are. The first time they learn it is sitting across from me.
- [12:18]
Mike
It's such a profound point, and it's the harshest way to learn that particular lesson.
- [12:23]
James Sexton
The worst time. The worst time to learn how to fight is when you're in a fight.
- [12:26]
Mike
Exactly. I think the thing that a lot of people feel with prenuptials is, is that. Isn't it the ultimate boner killer? You know what I mean? You're in the romantic phase of love. This is gonna work forever.
- [12:40]
James Sexton
See, they're not lawyers. You know, lawyers are. I jokingly say my job is full contact storytelling. And I think that it depends on how you parse it. If you parse it as, look, I love you more than anything in the world, but this might not work out. So we really need to sign. Okay. Yeah, you're right. That's a total boner killer. Like, it's a lady boner killer more than anything else. Like, most men, it'd be like, whatever, I don't care. So, like, let's be honest. There's not a lot of men that are prenup adverse. There's a lot of women that are prenup adverse. And that's okay. That's the structure of the economy that we've created for love. Because love is an economy. I don't think it's a dirty word to say that love is a kind of an economy. It's an exchange of value between people. And that doesn't mean it's not useful. It doesn't mean that it's not important, but it's an economy. And anytime. If you're trading apples for apples, there's no need for that economy. How many apples is worth how many apples? It's an equal number. How many apples worth how many coconuts? Okay, now we have something different in play. But I think fundamentally, when you talk about a prenuptial agreement. Yeah, you could talk about it in that bare bones way, or you can say something like, I don't just want you to feel loved. I want you to feel safe, because I don't think you can. I've represented victims of domestic violence and I can tell you you can't feel loved if you don't feel safe. Like, fundamental to our intimate relationships is the ability to feel safe, to feel physically safe, to. To feel emotionally safe, to feel that we can be ourselves and that this person will love us even if there's an ugly side to us, even if there's parts of us that we don't particularly like or understand. To know that this person said, no, I'm signing up for you, warts and all. I'm signing up for you. When you have the flu and you look awful. I love you and I'm going to be here. And when you're all dressed up and we're going out to dinner, I'm here and I love you. But you don't have to be all dressed up and ready to go out for dinner for me to love you. So that's part of feeling safe. And I think a prenuptial agreement is about. Look, all marriages end. They end in death or divorce, but they all end. So is getting life insurance saying, I hope we die, or I'm certain that we're going to. I mean, I'm certain you're going to die. We're all going to die. But really what you're saying with the prenuptial agreement is, look, in the event that this marriage ends in something other than death, whether it's my fault, your fault, the fault of circumstances beyond our control, what would you need to feel safe? And what do I need to feel safe? And how can we make each other feel loved and protected and seen by each other? And I think that can actually be an invitation to a very meaningful connection between two people.
- [15:08]
Mike
And is it the case that I've read, and obviously push back on this, that a lot of prenups aren't worth the paper they're printed on? Or is that merely a UK law thing?
- [15:17]
James Sexton
No, and it's not even merely a UK law thing, because even in the uk, there are prenups that are binding. The problem is, and this is getting exponentially worse thanks to large language models, because now everyone thinks that, why would I bother paying an attorney? I can just go to ChatGPT and I can spit out a prenuptial. A properly drafted, properly executed prenuptial agreement that contains all of the necessary information and waivers and statutory language is a binding contract between two people. And they are very Heavily enforced. And I could tell you some horror stories of prenups that I wish couldn't have been enforced because I represented the person who wanted to set them aside. But in fact, they were upheld by the court because the right to contract is a fundamental right as long as the contract is not what we call unconscionable. An unconscionable contract is a contract that no fair dealing person would ever offer and no reasonable person with knowledge of the circumstances would ever accept. So it's a very high burden, unconscionability. So prenuptial agreements are, in fact, binding. But what happens is, people go on, they try to find one online, they try to save the couple of hundred dollars it might cost for them to have a prenuptial agreement, and they make something that's not properly put together, it's not upheld by a court, and then they go around and tell 4,000 people that they know, oh, prenups aren't worth the paper that they're printed on. Okay. I mean, yes, prenups that you drafted yourself and didn't include statute, but a prenuptial agreement drafted by an experienced attorney who understands the law and has experience with what these kinds of agreements need to have in order to be, you know, binding and defensible is a binding contract.
- [17:00]
Francis
So coming back to the way that marriages head towards ruin, what are some of the most common things that people will say? I understand the big picture is you stop paying attention to the relationship. But what are the things that tend to be the final straw that breaks the.
- [17:15]
James Sexton
I mean, infidelity would be number one. Infidelity is. But I often say I think infidelity is the symptom as opposed to the underlying illness. I think that people who are still deeply connected to each other very often don't have the prolivity towards cheating on each other. But, of course, infidelity is present in a good. Probably 75, 80% of the cases that we encounter as divorce lawyers.
- [17:36]
Francis
Wow.
- [17:36]
James Sexton
And again, whether that is a function of the fact that these people have disconnected so much and there's a human need to find connection with another person. Um, that's entirely possible.
- [17:46]
Mike
Can I just put a. Just to clarify, what. What do you mean by infidelity? Are we talking about the sexual act? Are we talking about something called emotional infidelity? What. How do we classify.
- [17:56]
James Sexton
I'm generally referring to some intimate contact. So physical contact with some intimacy, whether that's actual sex or whether that's some other physical intimacy between two people, I do think there is such a thing as emotional affairs. And I do think that is valid. I, I, I think, you know, if you really tried to drill this question down with an unpleasant thought experiment and you thought, well, which would you rather have? That your partner, you know, on a random night, went out with friends, has a couple of drinks and ends up making out with someone?
- [18:26]
Francis
Making out is kissing.
- [18:27]
James Sexton
Kissing, right. Versus them having an ongoing texting relationship and sending suggestive messages to someone over the course of six months. Now, one of those feels to me much more intimate than the other. So I don't, I mean, I would choose to have neither if possible. But I think we can agree that there is something about, you know, the intimacy of a relationship. It doesn't just have to be manifest in the physical. It's often manifest in the things we share with each other, the vulnerabilities we share with each other, the, you know, the ongoing connections. Who is it we want to share our experiences with, you know, So I think there are tremendous, and I think again, men and women maybe process those things differently. I've always said that in my experience, when a man and a woman find out that their partner has cheated, they ask different questions. A man's first question is, did you sleep with him? And a woman's first question is, do you love her? And I've always said that says something about how we interpret love in heterosexual relationships.
- [19:31]
Francis
Well, right. And we had evolutionary psychologist David Buss, who's one of the founders of the field, who talks about the evolutionary reasons for that. You know, the man's concerned about, about paternal certainty, effectively. The woman's concerned about attachment, and is he going to remain and provide and be committed, etc. So infidelity is kind of the final symptom. Anything else?
- [19:52]
James Sexton
Financial impropriety is a big piece, I think. Dishonesty and betrayal, I mean, they're really all forms of betrayal. You know, I think financial betrayal is a big piece.
- [20:02]
Francis
What does that look like? What does that mean?
- [20:03]
James Sexton
Where someone has been incurring massive amounts of debts and not letting their spouse know it. Where someone has entrusted to their spouse, usually a woman entrusting to a man, that, you know, that you're a good provider and you're maintaining a financial stability for her and for the children. And in fact, it turns out it was a house of cards and you weren't being honest about that. Sometimes it goes the other way where you have a man who, you know, his wife has a spending issue and she's been dishonest about it and Suddenly she turns around and says, yeah, I've incurred several hundred thousand dollars worth of debt. And now, you know, he's the breadwinner, so he's the one who's gonna be responsible for dealing with it. So those kinds of betrayals are, you know, they're not the same as a sexual impropriety, but it's similar in the sense that, you know, I, I thought we had an agreement. I thought we were going to be honest with each other about this particular thing, and we're not.
- [20:53]
Mike
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- [22:24]
Francis
And what about timelines? Are there any, like, if you're looking at it as a young couple and you're going to. No one ever tells you any of this, right? But I've been married for 23 years now. My wife and I got married at 20. And you know, you have your ups and downs, everybody does things. And what I think is also true from some of the things I read, but you tell me what you think is that there are certain points in the relationship that almost like relationships, each one is unique, but they all follow certain pathways where after X number of Years, a certain thing happens. Yeah, yeah. Is there any truth to any of this?
- [22:59]
James Sexton
Yeah, I mean, you know, there was often talk of what was called the seven year rich, you know, that after seven years and in variables of seven, you know, so seven year, 14 year, there was some, you know, luster of the marriage gets lost. And I think there's something to that. I think it's tied to life stages. So I think when you're newly married, of course you're newly married, it's excitement, it's early days, it's, you know, the intoxication we were talking about earlier then. I think very often within the first five to seven years, there's the presence of a first child. Right. And a first child creates a tremendous bond between two people. They see each other in a different way. It creates some stresses too. It creates some fatigue.
- [23:36]
Francis
It creates for a three year old, I can tell.
- [23:38]
James Sexton
Okay, so you know very well. Yeah, yeah. But it, but it also, in addition to creating fatigue and stress and those kinds of things, it also, you fall in love with a different version of your wife. She's not just your wife now, she's also the mother of your child. And you watch her with your child and you kind of go like, oh, look at how, how our child loves her and how much I love the fact that she loves this child. And I'm sure she feels the same way. She looks at you and she says like, it's not just my husband now, this is also, you know, like my little, you know, my child's father, you know, like, and that's a very, like a new person you're falling in love with again. After a few years of that, you know, around the kids, three, five, maybe goes off to school now we start to have again, because this is a multivariate equation, we start to have a loss of identity because now the child is not as dependent. I mean, what other species other than humans come out that half formed, that helpless, right? Like we, we come out completely half formed and hope whoever's waiting on the other side is gonna fill us in. You know, so this is something that there is an extended period of time. You're just coming out the other end of where you know, this is a helpless creature. So, you know, after that passes and now this child has a little bit of autonomy and agency and kind of is doing its own thing a little bit. There is a sense of a little loss of identity. There's a little loss of the hands on nature of that project that can start to create in people a sense of distance from each other or of reconnection to each other. If it's handled the right way. If it's handled the right way, it can be an opportunity to say, hey, this organism's not as dependent on us now in that time that we used to have together that we've lost. We can reconnect during that time. But very often people do other things with it. They say, oh, you know, I've been putting off getting to the gym because, you know, I haven't lost all the weight or got my body back to where it was. So they go to the gym now. They're in a different social circle. They're interacting with other people who don't know them as a mom and who know them as an independent woman or a man. And suddenly we have opportunities. We have opportunities for new connections with people that start to create in us a dissatisfaction. Add to this what I consider the greatest amplifier in the world and the greatest help to the practice of matrimonial law that we ever didn't need. That is social media. Because in social media, you're watching everyone's greatest hits while living your gag reel, right? So you're comparing your relationship and all of its flaws and all of its chaos with the curated, perfect images of everyone else's marriage and parenting. So, of course you're going to be very dissatisfied with yourself and you're gonna feel like you're not doing as well. So I think that that is where those things start to strain. I think once kids go off to, you know, once kids get some autonomy in the form of, you know, a car or a license or go off to university, that's another opportunity for people to connect. Once the children have, for example, completely gone out of the household, now they finish university, maybe they marry themselves or they become autonomous. That's another stress point. So I think it's always transition points and stress points. I think for some people, we have what we call the midlife crisis. I think it happens later than midlife. I think it happens in the late 40s, early 50s. And I don't think that many people live to a hundred. So it probably should be seen as the life stage of when people's children aren't as dependent on them or where people are solidified enough in their career that it's kind of set it and forget it, and it's no longer as much of a challenge their career. They know how to do what they do, and it's not, you know, you're not out there, like, hunting the way that you were of, like, I gotta eat what I kill. Like, you've got an abundance. If you've done it right, you've got some money put aside. And now you start asking questions about, like, what's the point of all of this? Your body's starting to change in ways that are not the desirable way. There are ways that are. Your back hurts a little more and, you know, everything feels a little bit more. I'm there. I've got the gray hair for it. And you start to say, you know, hey, if I have a limited number of days, is sitting next to this person, you know, who we've heard all of each other's stories and they no longer find my jokes quite as funny because they've heard them all. Is that the best life has to offer? Because I think love, if you think about it, love is not just something we experience in our feeling towards the other person. I think if you think about when you first met your wife, it wasn't just that you fell for her. You fell for who you were when you were with her. How you felt about yourself when you were with her. How seeing yourself through her eyes, the wonder she felt towards you and the adoration and admiration that she felt for you, how it made about yourself.
- [28:17]
Francis
I mean, you're making me hard. Yeah.
- [28:18]
James Sexton
Yeah. But I think that's a piece of it. And no one's a hero to their butler. Like, familiarity breeds contempt. There's no way around that. I'm not saying we don't have bonds with people we spend a long time with, but there is something about having a person who you have a physical and sexual relationship with who just thinks you're amazing, totally thinks you're the most handsome man in the world and brilliant and funny and so smart. And we've really, culturally, I mean, not just in the US in the uk, everywhere, we've made it sort of cute to talk about your spouse. Like, my husband is just such a lovable idiot, you know, and my wife is like, yeah, the most loathsome harpy ever to castrate a man. You know, and it's sort of like, quaint. Like, that's an acceptable way to the person. You've chosen over 8 billion other options. That's the person you're gonna take the piss out of on a regular basis and around other people. Like, that seems very odd to me. But it is something that I think in early days, anything that person does, it's kind of cute. You know, if she snorts when she laughs, you know, you're like, she snorts when she laughs. Ten years into the marriage, when she snorts, you're like, is there something wrong with you? Why do you do that when you laugh? You know, it's just the nature of how we are.
- [29:35]
Francis
So these transition points, it's such an interesting thing. I mean, my wife and I are desperate for some time together because our son's been.
- [29:42]
James Sexton
Yeah, three year old.
- [29:42]
Francis
Yeah, full on. And we both look forward to that. I think I'll go back home and check.
- [29:49]
James Sexton
You better check.
- [29:50]
Francis
But how does.
- [29:51]
James Sexton
She hasn't come to my office, so
- [29:52]
Mike
that's a good sign.
- [29:53]
Francis
That is a good sign. How does a couple really navigate those transition points effectively? How a couple think about those periods and prepare for them, perhaps.
- [30:08]
James Sexton
Yeah. So in my book, what I talk a lot about is Tell everybody the title. Well, if you buy it in the uk, it's called how to. If you buy it in the usa, it's called how to Stay in Love. If you buy it in the uk, it's called how to not fuck up your Marriage, which tells you everything you need to know.
- [30:23]
Francis
That's exactly right about the US and
- [30:25]
James Sexton
uk and it tells you why. I've always enjoyed UK humor better than US humor, from Douglas Adams to the Young Ones. I was bred on it, but yeah, there's a chapter in the book called Hit send Now. And it's about this, I don't think, particularly radical concept, but it's about whenever you send an email, if you're sending a heartfelt email, something that you're gonna quit a job or you're gonna tell someone something you're afraid to tell them. I've always said there's something odd about when you hit send, but it's like, whoa, it's out there now, can't take it back. And so that inspired the idea to me of. One of the things I like about email is I can be very thoughtful in how I compose what I'm saying. I can rewrite it, I can leave it in drafts until the next morning and decide, still say what I want it to say. And when I receive an email, I don't have to automatically acknowledge I received it. I don't have to immediately respond to it. I can digest what it's saying and I can give my response the same thought, maybe, that this person ideally gave to the draft itself. So I had this idea of why couldn't you in your relationship do something similar to that? Work that into a sort of day to day or week to week practice of really before the fire becomes fire while it's still smoke. Just sort of putting things out there. And it doesn't even have to be only sort of negative things, although the negative things are normally born, like no single raindrops responsible for the flood, but the flood's made of nothing but raindrops. So it's all these little things. And you know, if you've been married for 20 years, then you know the feeling of sitting with your spouse and you're at the kitchen table and you're having a, a heated discussion about the best traffic route to take to get to the place you're going that afternoon. And 20 minutes later it's like, and I never liked your mother and she's never respected. And you're like, wait, wait, where did that come from? How did we get to that? How long have you been holding that in your back pocket? But that's what happens is there's these little things that build up over time. So I think the antidote is to those kinds of catastrophic failures, as silly as it sounds, is very basic communication. It's very basic and early communication. If something blips on your emotional radar, what is the harm in saying to your partner, look, I just want to say, when we were talking the other day and you made that little joke about my sister, maybe you were just joking, but for a second it sat kind of weird with me because I like the fact that you like my sister and it felt like what you said maybe means that you don't or something. So if I misunderstood you, I'm sorry, but. And then it's an opportunity for this person to say, oh no, no, I was just kidding, or to say, but again, it's not in the context of the conversation because that can bring out something defensive in someone. And it also gives you a chance to think about how you parse it. Because if, for example, and I'm not using your relationship as an example, but if you were to say to a spouse, when you have a three year old, if you were to say to your spouse, you know, we don't have sex as often as we used to, you know, we got a three year old running around all the time, like it's understandable, but we don't have sex as often as we used to, that invites a defensive dialogue. Well, of course we don't. We've got a three year old running around and I'm exhausted at the end of the day. And you've been traveling all the time interviewing James Sexton. So, I mean, you know, what am I supposed to do. Whereas if you were.
- [33:38]
Francis
I've spoken to my wife, Glenn.
- [33:40]
James Sexton
I mean, I can neither confirm nor deny attorney client privilege. But if you said to her, you know, gosh, I miss you so much. Like, I miss feeling even just physically close to you, you know, I love when we're so, like, connected to each other in that way. You think she's not gonna like hearing that? You know, and then that parlays into a conversation about, like, oh, remember when we did it? Remember? God, we gotta. I would love to get back to that where we could do that, you know? And I know I'm not around as much, but, man, when I'm around, I really wanna make a point of making sure that we stay so connected, because it means so much to me. Who's gonna argue with that? It's all really about the framing of the dialogue. And I think that that is what the idea of hit send now is.
- [34:18]
Francis
Is.
- [34:18]
James Sexton
It's the idea of making a deliberate practice of that. Of telling your partner, hey, I want to love you. Well, and I want you. I know you want to love me well, right. I want to be good at this. I want to be good at us. This is important to me. So I want you to feel free to tell me when I get it wrong. I'd even love it if you'd tell me when I get it right. Like, you've been married 20 years. I bet if you said to your wife, or if I said to your wife, tell me 10 times that you felt loved by him. 10 things he's done that made you feel loved. Five or six of them, you could probably guess. I bet there'd be a few that you would go, really? I didn't even know you noticed I did that, or I didn't even notice that I did that. And I bet the same is true if I said to you, when do you feel loved by your wife? But don't you want to know? Is there anything you'd want to know more? Like, what a wonderful thing to know when you. Because don't you want the people who you love to feel your love? Well, when do you feel it, like, and when do you not feel it? What are some things I do that make you not feel my love? Because I know I'm not doing them intentionally, you know, so what can I do? How can I get better at this? You know, we're constantly refining. Like, it astounds me that, you know, my book is a relationship book at its core. And if you walked into, you know, someone's home who's married. And they had the seven habits of Highly Effective people or the Power of Habit by Charles Durring, or they had, you know, any of those Tony Robbins, you know, any of those books. You go, look at this. Jim's so successful, but he still wants to keep the point on the sword sharp. Like, I love it. You know, he's always self help.
- [36:02]
Mike
No, not in Britain, Mike.
- [36:03]
James Sexton
You see, really, you see a relationship book and you go, oh, shit, what's going on at home with Jim? You know, instead of saying, oh, look at this, like, his relationship means so much that he wants to. He wants to stay good at it, he wants to continue to. There's just something about acknowledging that we might not be great at this as a species that feels like you're acknowledging you're doing something wrong or your partner's doing something wrong or you've chosen incorrectly. I don't understand why that is.
- [36:30]
Mike
You know, it's so many interesting points that you've raised. And one of the myths that I want to explore, and maybe it's not a myth, maybe it's truth, but it's misrepresented on the Internet is the classic one that all angry men use online. And there's lots of angry men who say the line, 80% of women initiate divorce.
- [36:52]
James Sexton
78%. There you go, 78%. People love weaponizing that statistic. Yeah, I think that I understand why people try to weaponize that statistic. They're trying to present the suggestion that marriage is like a casino, that women get entry to being very good looking and young and youthful. And then they get in there, they watch the man accumulate a big bank of chips. And then when the guy's high up enough, they go, all right, I'm cashing out. And then they go, okay, if that was the case, I would be the first to say it. Believe me. I say lots of things that I get accused of misogyny because I talk about a lot of gendered things. And again, these aren't my opinions. This is what I'm observing. I represent men, I represent women. I've been representing men and women for 25 years of practicing matrimonial laws. So I'm just reporting who's sitting on the other end of the chair and what I see in the quotes. People lie to their therapist all the time. They lie to their friends all the time. They don't lie to their divorce lawyer. There's no reason to lie to your divorce lawyer. I'm gonna find out. I have subpoena power. I can look at all your records like there's no reason to lie to me. My only job's to protect my clients so you can tell me the truth. I'm here to protect your secrets and advocate on your behalf. So I get a very, very unfiltered view of things. So if women were just saying, oh yeah, I've cashed out, I'm doing great, like I got into this thing and now he's not doing well and I'm out, or he's doing so well that I can now afford to take half his shit and I'm gone. The truth is I don't think that's why that statistic is what it is. I think that there are probably an equal number of women that are as dissatisfied in their marriage as there are men. Cuz men, you know, men represent 30 something percent of commencement of divorces. Something I have seen many men do. And I think I've in a 25 year career only seen maybe two women do is go out for milk and never come back. They just leave. They just go, yeah, I'm done. Or they go away on a business trip and then they send their wife an email or call her and say, yeah, I'm not coming home, I've met someone else, I'm sorry, that tends to be a male thing. Okay, it's not a female thing. Part of that is that men are still primarily the wage earners and breadwinners. So they have the funds with which to go and get themselves an apartment or to do whatever it is that they need to do to just leave. But very often when they do it, they just go. And then they don't make any arrangements, they don't say, oh, and here's how the electric bill is gonna get paid and here's how the mortgage is gonna get paid and here's how the children's school tuition's gonna get paid. So then the woman comes into my office, or an office like it, and says, what do I do? He left. He says he's not coming back, the bills aren't getting paid. He's been the breadwinner, I've been home taking care of kids for the last 10 years. I can get a job but I'm only gonna make minimum wage. I'm not gonna be able to pay all of these expenses and I don't know what's going on. And I say, okay, we have to commence a divorce action. And then they say, well no, I don't want to get divorced. And I say, well, it doesn't matter. If you don't want to get divorced, you need a court order. And the only way to get a court order is to commence an action. And the only action you have to commence is an action for divorce. You can't commence an action for the guy left. There's no such thing. It's a divorce action. So then you have to file a divorce action. So that's where a lot of that statistic comes into play. If I saw a trend of a large number of women in the world who were just deciding, you know what, I'm just gonna cash out on men, I'd be the first to say it. I know I have lots of friends in the red pill space that would be thrilled. I could write a book about it. I'd sell lots of books because there's lots of people that want to hear simple answers to complicated questions. And if I could offer it to them honestly, I would. I don't think that's the case.
- [40:30]
Francis
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- [42:13]
Mike
You know, I've got a lot of female friends and when they break up with their relationship or they get divorced and I ask them why, they always say the same things. He wasn't checking in. He wasn't appreciating. He wasn't listening. He wasn't making the effort. He wasn't taking the time. I checked out and then it was a couple of years before I made the break.
- [42:33]
James Sexton
Yeah.
- [42:34]
Mike
Is that what you find?
- [42:35]
James Sexton
Yeah, all the time. I think that's a very, very common fact pattern that you just described. What I would add to it is very often it's he checked out. He stopped paying attention to me. Look, I think attention is for women what sex is for men. You know, women, women, men want sex and will give you attention in exchange for it. Women want attention and they'll give you sex in exchange for it. You know, and so it's an economy. And again, I think that's a very fair economy, which is why the chances of you getting laid if you say to your partner, you're the most beautiful woman in the world, you're just so, you're so wonderful, you know, my. I'll digress for a second. My son texted me the other day and he said, dad, can you send me some money? And I said, you know, son, I just looked at my text. I haven't got a text from you in a week. I said, let me give you a bit of advice because I feel like I'm a financial booty call for you. I said, and I have no problem with the concept of a booty call. But if you're going to be a man, let me tell you something you need to know about a booty call. If on a Friday night you text a girl at 1am saying, hey, are you up? I was just thinking of you. She knows why you're texting her. If you haven't texted her in a week, she's not necessarily going to be receptive to that text. But if on Wednesday you think, you know, I'm going drinking on Friday, I should send that girl. And you send her a, hey, I just heard a song. It made me think of you. Hope you're doing well. The chances when you text her on Friday at 1am and say, hey, are you up? What are you doing? There's a part of her that's gonna go, I know why he's texting, but he did text on Wednesday. Like, he is clearly interested in me. Your chances are gonna go up. I said, if you texted me on Wednesday and said, hey, dad, how are you doing? Hope all's well. Just wanted to say hi. We should get lunch sometime soon. Now, when you text me and say you want some money, I'll be very quick to send you that money. But because you didn't warm me up at all with any kind of foreplay, the answer's no, you know, so I think that that's a bit. The attention piece and the sex piece, something men need to figure out is pay a little bit more attention, give a little more compliments to your spouse, and the receptivity towards what it is that you need is going to be much more receptive. I believe in the long term. But I do think that ultimately, you know, when it comes to women falling out of love, when they feel unseen, unappreciated, and we live in a society, by the way, that is constantly. There's a barrage of attention coming at women. I mean, any woman goes on Instagram, she's instantly, you're a queen.
- [45:10]
Mike
Fire.
- [45:10]
James Sexton
You know, all the million texts. Whereas men, who cares, shut up, go to work. Like, there's not a lot of that coming from us dating apps. The same thing happens, you know, So I think that there's a tremendous amount of affirmation coming from all directions for women. This is why I've always said, by the way, that I think the. I don't know if in the UK you have the concept of hall pass. Do you have the concept of the hall pass? So everyone has, like, a celebrity that you say, like, oh, you know, if I. I get to sleep with, you know, this celebrity. Nigella Lawson was mine for a long time, you know, and, you know, a woman's might be, you know, Harry Styles. You know, here's the problem with that equation. The chances. I'm not. I'm using them as examples. I don't know either of them. The chances of a male celebrity, like a Harry Styles meeting my girlfriend at an airport lounge and her saying, hey, do you want to run off in the restroom and have a quick shag? And him saying, yeah, why not? Is probably higher than if I ran into Nigella Lawson. And I said, you know, just so you're aware, I'm allowed to have sex with you if you'd like to. She's going to go, really, I can't. Because women walk out the door and it's just they're barraged by penis options, you know, whereas men, it's not quite so simple. So I think for women, the flow of attention that's coming from random places, the amount of cultural messages telling them how wonderful and amazing and how girl boss that, we're just girl bossing them right into the sun that's coming at them constantly. So I don't know how many men can really keep up with that. But if you don't keep up with it at all and you just have a sort of learned helplessness where you go, all right, look, I can't possibly give her enough attention, so I'm just gonna give her none whatsoever. I think that's when the disconnection happens, and that's when very often infidelity happens with women. I've always said men cheat more, but women cheat better. Like, women cheat bigger. Women cheat in ways that are like the soft place to land the exit out of the relationship. And culturally, by the way, women get away with cheating in a way that men don't. If a man cheats on his wife, he's a piece of garbage who couldn't keep it in his pants. If a woman cheats on her husband, you know, she was desperate for love and attention, and this was her journey and she needed to figure out who she was and she needed to learn that the relationship was truly over. And only by crossing that final threshold of being with another person did she really solidify in her mind the distance that had developed between she and her spouse. She's the hero of that story, even though she's the one who cheated.
- [47:42]
Francis
Do you think there's some truth to that, though? You kind of did a satirical take on it. It was.
- [47:47]
James Sexton
I think there's truth. Look, I think the truth is at the bottom of a bottomless pit. And I think as someone who gets paid to tell people stories, I will tell you that most people, if you really listen to their story, there's some element to it where they're a sympathetic character. I mean, I'm skeptical anytime someone tells me the story of their life and they're the hero of the story. I prefer when someone tells me the story of their life and they have heroic moments and they have weak moments, and then, you know, that gives a credibility to the story. But yes, of course, there's something to that. But it's equally true that, you know, that the man might be in a position where, yeah, she Just has continually beat me down emotionally and egotistically, and she's so constantly getting praise and attention, and I really am just this person by the side. And meanwhile, I take such good care of her and our family and. And, you know, I have a barrage of attention from women, but I've always ignored it. And then finally I got so lonely that, you know, that the attention of this other female just started out as something that was kind of innocent, and then it turned into something less innocent. But it really taught me how disconnected I had come from that and how hungry I was for the connection physically and emotionally to another person. That's a real story. It's a truthful story. It's a fair story. Again, the answer in both of those situations, if we're being moral and truthful, is to go back to our partner and say, hey, I'm thinking of sleeping with this other person. That's how far apart we are. Now, can we fix this? Because if we can't, let's end it. And if we want to fix it, okay, then we got to fix it, because it's broken right now. We don't want to do that. That's hard.
- [49:27]
Francis
But that's exactly the right thing to do.
- [49:29]
James Sexton
It's exactly the right thing to do. It's the only thing to do. It's the moral thing to do. I mean, but it's understandable that people don't do that, right? I mean, my sons are adults now, but when they were growing up, I said to them, look, I don't have a lot of wisdom to offer you because I think a lot of the wisdom that's out there isn't worth very much. But the most wise thing I've ever been taught and the most wise thing I have to impart to you is that the hard thing to do and the right thing to do are almost always the same thing.
- [49:59]
Francis
That's such a good point about life
- [50:01]
James Sexton
in general, but in relationships in particular, because in a marriage, the hard thing to do is to tell your spouse how you're feeling honestly and candidly. The hard thing to do is when your spouse says something critical of you or something you don't want to hear but need to hear. To hear it from love. To hear it as, yeah, this person wants to tell me the truth. They love me enough to tell me an uncomfortable truth. Like, that's the hard thing to do. But it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do if you want what you purported to have wanted when you married this person, which is. I want it to be you and I, the two of us, a team together, connected, holding each other's hand in this terrifying, uncertain world. And we will have each other because I tell you, I believe very deeply in the romantic love of two people. I really believe in the. I won't even say marriage, because I think marriage and love are, you know, correlation isn't causation. And I don't really know that there's even much of a correlation between marriage and love, but I. I don't think I can learn everything I need to know about myself from myself. I need someone who sees my blind spots, and I want to have someone who I can help see theirs. And. And we can, ideally, at the end of our lives. I mean, there's no greater blessing I could offer your marriage than to say that I hope at the end of your life, your spouse says, this person helped me become the most authentic version of myself, the realest version of myself, and that you can look at her and say, you helped me become the best and most authentic version of who I am. Like that. What greater blessing could you offer someone's
- [51:41]
Mike
marriage than that, James? And there's some other stats that I want to look into as well, because that'd be very.
- [51:47]
James Sexton
We go from love to stats. I know, just right in there.
- [51:53]
Francis
But what about this numbers?
- [51:56]
Mike
Yeah, go on, man, go on. So I read this stat. The. I think it's around a third of men leave their wife or initiate divorce when they have cancer or they get diagnosed with a serious illness.
- [52:09]
Francis
The man gets cancer or the woman.
- [52:10]
Mike
The woman gets cancer. Right. And on the flip side, another stat that I read was about, I think it's 30% of. Of all women initiated divorce when the man loses his job.
- [52:23]
James Sexton
Yes.
- [52:24]
Mike
How true is that? Or are there myths surrounding it and is it just stats that we actually need to explode the cancer?
- [52:31]
James Sexton
1 I can't speak to. I will certainly say that in my experience of watching the demise of thousands of marriages ringside, that I do think men sometimes hit the eject button faster than women when challenges occur, which is always a bit surprising to me because I do think the masculine ideal is one of meeting challenges and the warrior concept. And so I've always found that sort of baffling that when things get hard in a relationship, that a man would not want to deal with the hard aspect of it is a little strange. But I can't speak to the veracity of that statistic. I can tell you if the statistic about job loss is only One third? I'd be surprised. I think it's probably actually much higher than that. My experience is that when men lose their job, there is a tremendous high divorce rate that comes with it. The only thing that I have seen as reliable of a tracker of a coming divorce, other than a man losing his primary wage earning function, losing his primary job, is the death of a child. The death of a child is almost always the death of a marriage. That when people lose a child, the statistics are very, very grim. Over 85% of people who lose a child end up getting divorced. Partly because I think they remind each other of this very painful reality of having lost a child. But men losing their job is a tremendous tracker as to divorce. I think again, there is a school of thought that would like to say that that's, that women are cashing out the chips and oh well, he lost his job, he's no longer useful. I think the rate of increased substance use issues that comes with a man losing his job, I think Scott Galloway could speak very intelligently to this, that the things that happen to a man as his place in the society, in the ecosystem of the world, that when a man loses his job, he is losing his manhood, he is losing his function as a wage earner, he is losing the way he defines himself. I mean, within the first 10 minutes of meeting a man. Oh, so what is it that you do? You know, I mean, it's ingrained in our cultural zeitgeist as to how we interact with each other. I mean, in Japan, you hand your business card to someone and you take their business card. It's sort of fundamental to us. So what is it that you do? You know, so I think when a man loses that, he's losing his identity. Very often substance use issues because a person starts drinking more to cope with the stress and depression that comes with having lost their job. So it's also a powerlessness that men have to experience when you lose your job. I mean, very often you're talking about people who work within the context of a corporate structure. So when they lose their job, it's through no fault of their own, but also they're utterly powerless. And now they can't provide for their family, they feel powerless, they feel impotent, they feel awful. And that's going to impact the manner in which they interact with their spouse. So again, if a woman files for divorce because her, oh, you lost your job, Sorry, I'm out. That is probably different, but I don't think statistically that's what's happening. I think what's happening is a man loses his job and then some time passes and during that time period, very often that man increases the amount he's drinking. He's angry, he's frustrated, he's lashing out at his spouse. These are all things that have a concomitant effect. So then when she leaves, oh, you're leaving me because I lost my job? No, I'm leaving you because you lost your job. You've been sitting around the house depressed, you're screaming at me and at the children constantly and you're drinking 10 times more than you used to. So if you want to say it's cause you lost your job, yeah, that was the first domino that fell. But plenty of people lose their job. And don't add all of those injuries to the insult. Right. So I think that is again one of those. I wish. I'm constantly looking for patterns. I'm constantly older man, younger woman, younger man, older woman. Like what I'm constantly l together before, didn't same religion, different religion. Do Jews do better at marriage than Christians? How are Muslims at it? Like I'm constantly trying to look for patterns. If they were there, I'd be the first person to say it, but I really don't. I think we are multidimensional organisms. Human emotional complexity comes into this and it's an ecosystem, you know, and like any ecosystem, like you take the lizards out of the ecosystem, you don't have the same ecosystem, less lizards. Cause the lizards ate the insect and the insect ate the plant. And the plant was something that this other animal ate. And now everything's screwed up. We have a whole new ecosystem. So a man loses his job or a baby is born, or a person gets diagnosed with cancer. It's not just we have the old marriage plus baby or we have the old. I mean, I'm sure when you look at your marriage, it's not, it was our marriage plus baby. It's like before baby, after baby.
- [57:26]
Francis
Correct.
- [57:26]
James Sexton
Everything is different after that. Cause it's an ecosystem, it's a non additive system. So you have to think about the problems in marriage that same way. Which is why when you're saying to people, here's how you fix marriage, or better yet, maintain it. Because it's a whole lot easier to maintain it than to fix it. It's like it's a whole lot easier to maintain a healthy weight than to gain a ton of weight and then try to lose it. So my books, my writing, all of my speaking on this is all about, how do you stay in love? It's easy to fall in love. Any idiot can do it. But now we're in love. How do we stay there? Because once we go off the cliff and we fall out of love, it's much, much harder.
- [58:08]
Francis
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- [59:24]
Mike
It's a really profound point. And there's another thing I wanna talk to you about which angry men talk about. And it's not just angry groups. Are you hanging out in really I'm too right wing.
- [59:36]
James Sexton
Paretic groups? Yeah, I was gonna say.
- [59:37]
Mike
Yeah, no, I'm joking but it's a very serious issue and I've seen friends go through it and it's really, really has a profound impact on them, which is the family courts and they say family courts are biased in favor of the mother. You know it's. As a man you are gonna always get a rough deal. It feels like you're always trying to prove that you're not an asshole and you're gonna get completely cleaned out by lawyers, et cetera. What are the truths, what are the myths, what's the gray areas?
- [60:06]
James Sexton
Yeah, I mean, look that is fair comment. I will not say that it that all court. Look, courts are made up of people. I mean, our legal system, I jokingly say our legal system is the worst one in the world, except for all the other ones. But. But you are absolutely correct that there are a gigantic number of men that get an incredibly raw deal in the family court system. Why? I think there's a very complex myriad of answers to that question. I think you have to start with the fact that under her skin is under her sovereignty. Right? So a baby is born from a woman. Maybe it's a controversial thing to say that, but I don't think shouldn't be. But you are in New York. This is a controversial thing to say. But women have babies and women theoretically feed babies, Right? So there is a bond between a mother and an infant that is undeniable. And I don't think that we devalue men. I don't think it's misandrist to say that there is a very special and unique bond between mother and baby.
- [61:07]
Francis
100%.
- [61:08]
James Sexton
She carried himself, she carried this child for nine months. The sound, the scent, all of the things. There is a bond between mothers and children that is beyond something that men, particularly when they're in those what we call tender years or those very early infant years, very hard to. And look, I say that as a father. When my kids have a very deep relationship with me, they always have. But when they get sick, they want their mom. When they are scared, they want their mom. When they love their mom, especially when they were quite little, when they were afraid of the monster in the closet, they needed dad. And I was very quick to come in with the anti monster powder that was actually just baby talic, but they didn't know it. But the reality is that, yes, we serve different roles to say, and the woman's role with a child early on is very profound. So we're starting from that place now. Courts are made up of people. And for a long time, like many institutions of power, I mean, early in my career, 25 years ago, the bench was predominantly white heterosexual men. It was old white men. It was old men with gray hair. Like, it was great because I would go in and I would wear my suit and I was very sort of. I looked like the kind of guy they used to have a beer with when they were young. And I kept my hair short and I kept my face, you know, nicely shaved shape so that I would please that type of a person that has changed dramatically. Like judges now, primarily women, very often women of color, very often lesbian women of color. There has become again, the bench, particularly in New York, where I practice, resembles society now. And it almost has overcorrected in the same way that like every bank commercial, the bank officer is black. You know, the couple is biracial or gay or gay and biracial. Like we've just created this world of like, oh yes, this is the imagined world that we all would like to live in. And the bench is starting to look like that now again. What has that created? Well, it's created opportunities for the court system to view gender differently, to view male and female roles differently. We also now have marriage equality. So, you know, you have two men with children, two women with children. So there's no mother or father. There's now just two parent one and parent two. So a lot of that has changed. I will tell you. It's gotten better in recent years because when it was primarily old white men, they were looking at it and going like, well, mothers, sacred mothers, mothers are the greatest. My mother was the greatest. You know, and they, their fathers were like my father. My father went to work every day. I didn't. My mother did all the heavy lifting of parenting. My dad kept the lights on and, and he was there to discipline us every now and again and go out back and play catch and things like that. Taught me how to fish. But is he the person who, on a day to day basis, what happened at school? Are you okay? And your friend got in a fight with you? Oh my gosh. That must have felt. That was my mom. That was all my mom. And that was okay. That was their respective roles. So a lot of the former bench, that's how they viewed society. That's how they viewed again, they're humans. These are people like judges are just people. Like there's a school of thought that says, you know, what do you call a lawyer with a 50 IQ? Your honor? Because I make per year about 30 times what a judge makes. So if I'm an intelligent lawyer, unless I'm incredibly deeply committed to the furtherance of justice, which not that many people are that deeply committed to that, that they would give up a 30x pay increase, you're not getting the best and brightest people in the world on the bench. No offense to the judges I appear in front of, I'm sorry guys, but the truth is you're not getting the best and brightest. You're getting people that kind of want to move the meat through the machine. They want a 9 to 5 job, they want guaranteed healthcare. They Want all the things that come with being a judge. So I think it is very easy to think that the way it was 30 years ago is the way it is. I don't think that's the case anymore. But there are certain basic realities. You know, like if. If early on in a child's life, a child spends a tremendous amount of time with mom, mom is going to be very resistant to dad having a big role in the case. Parties, divorce. By the way, a lot of divorcing men don't spend a lot of time at home before they're getting divorced.
- [65:22]
Mike
Why?
- [65:22]
James Sexton
Because they're unhappy. So they don't go home. They just stay at work later or they go out to the bar after work and they don't go home. So they don't end up spending much time with the kids. But it's not that they don't love their kids. It's that they just don't want to be with this person they're unhappy with, and it's unhappy with them. They don't want their children to be exposed to, like, the passive aggressive relationship between mom and dad, so they stay out of the house longer. And what happens when they get divorced? He gets weaponized against them? Well, he was never home. He never helped the kids with the homework. And the guy says, well, wait, give me a chance. Like, yeah, I didn't go home. I didn't want to go home. It was tense at home. We didn't really like each other very much. But now we're getting divorced. And I don't just want to be the fun parent. I want to do the heavy lifting. I want 50% of the time, I want to do the fun part. And I also want to do the part where I make sure the homework gets done and that they eat their broccoli and brush their teeth. And I understand when women go, well, he's never done that before, right? But when would he have had opportunity to do it before? So again, it's a complex thing. And anytime someone says the system is rigged, you know, that's such an easy way to claim defeat rather than fight. Any kind of a battle is just go, oh, well. It's just the game's rigged, so I'm not even gonna play.
- [66:35]
Francis
And James, I'm curious, what happens when people come in and sit down with you? What percentage, broadly speaking, would you say of people who are. I mean, it sounds like the way you've presented it is kind of the vast majority of people get married with good intentions of staying together. And then it doesn't work out because they probably didn't do the things that they did initially to make it work. Right. So there's none of this, like, planning and manipulation or whatever. But by the time they get to a divorce.
- [67:02]
James Sexton
Yeah.
- [67:03]
Francis
Are people in a different place now and they're kind of like, f you or I'm gonna make you pay for the XYZ sometimes?
- [67:11]
James Sexton
Yeah. I mean, I would say I get a number of varieties. So I get what I would call the tire kickers, which are the people who come in and say, I'm not ready to do anything yet, but I can smell that things aren't going right. And I'd like to just know what my rights and obligations potentially are. I love those people. I prefer those people. I think it's really good for a person to come in when they're having some problems and they say, you know, I want to understand, like, what. What will it look like if this goes in that direction?
- [67:39]
Francis
Why do you love them?
- [67:40]
James Sexton
Because I think they're being proactive, and I think they're asking a question they probably should have asked before they got married, which is, what legally is going to happen when I sign a marriage and what effect does it have on my rights and obligations? Like, most people have absolutely no idea what they did legally when they got married. It's the most legally significant thing you're going to do other than dying. And you didn't even get a pamphlet. You didn't get anything that explained to you what it was legally that you opted out of the title system. Like, that's amazing. Like, if you buy your wife a Rolex watch, you bought yourself one half of a Rolex watch. Like, you're one person in the eyes of the law, but no one ever explains that to you. We're just talking about what cake you're gonna have. Have. So I think that it's valuable for someone to come in and say, I'm thinking about this direction, or I'm afraid my spouse is thinking that we're heading in this direction. What could it look like? And then they can make informed decisions about how hard they want to steer out or into that. Right.
- [68:35]
Francis
Because hopefully one of those possibilities is to work harder on the relationship 100%.
- [68:39]
James Sexton
And nothing I would ever say to someone in that setting would ever be to hasten the demise of their marriage. It would always be, you know, you're here for information, and I want to share that information with you. I want you to understand your potential rights and obligations, what paths you might take, whether you Go to a mediator, an arbitrator, or go through litigation. And I'm also going to use that as an opportunity to say, look, are you in individual counseling of some kind where you can sort of process these things? Are you and your spouse, have you ever tried speaking to someone together? Have you ever thought about talking together with a counselor or clergyman or someone who might be able to help you navigate the challenges that you're having? It's totally okay to have challenges in a relationship. People have challenges all the time in relationships. I even have people who come in and say, that said, I want a divorce. I caught him cheating. I intercepted a text message came up on my iPad that was supposed to go to his iPhone because we had the same imessage logged in. I mean, I owe Steve Jobs a tremendous debt of gratitude. He has. The integration of Apple devices has created more people finding out about their spouse's affairs than anything else in the world. But they come in and they say, look, I want a divorce. I just found this out. And if I immediately said, great, we'll file, I'll file it right now, I would be, I think, doing a very irresponsible thing. What I often say is, okay, if we want to file for divorce, we can file today, we can file tomorrow, we can file next week. I'm not retiring, don't worry. But let's just take a breath. Let's talk about what your paths might be, rights and obligations. And then let's see. Because there are lots and lots of people, they don't talk about it very often. There's lots of people that have issues of infidelity that happen in a marriage, and they make it through it. They move through it. They figure out a way. They forgive, they forget. Sometimes the forgiving is in the forgetting. Sometimes they forgive, but they don't forget. But they try to make some changes and so it doesn't happen again. So I try to give them a very honest assessment of things. So that's one type of person who comes in. There are the. And again, sometimes it's just, hey, things aren't great. I see some storm clouds coming. I want to know my rights and obligations. Sometimes it's the storm is here, I caught them cheating, or I'm cheating and I just got caught. Okay, that's a little more serious. But again, doesn't necessarily mean it's over. But it's good that it's fragile. We can agree it's fragile. So let's talk about what your rights and obligations might be. Sometimes people come in, they've been served with papers. You know, their spouse is moving forward with a divorce. Okay, let's talk about you've been served with papers. Here's what you have to do legally to defend on that. And here's the paths that we might take from here. So it's very rare that someone comes in and it's like a professional hit. You know, like, they're like, I've been planning this for six months. I've got. Here's the bank statements. Here's that every once in a while, someone does come in, and they're very organized to the point where it begs the question, like, wow, how long? I mean, I.
- [71:16]
Francis
Are those more women or men?
- [71:18]
James Sexton
More women.
- [71:18]
Francis
Yeah. Of course women do this.
- [71:20]
James Sexton
That's why I said women are more tactical in their thinking, and they're more patient in some ways. I mean, their prefrontal cortex develops way before ours does, so it could be a function of that. But, yeah, I mean, I've had women. I had a woman come in last week who her husband has been cheating for about eight months, and she has had full access to his messages and texts and emails for that entire time. And she's just been tracking it in real time. And she's just like, Every lie, she's tracking it. And she gave me this whole timeline, and I'm just looking at it, and I had two thoughts. One was, this guy has no idea. He has no idea that he's completely exposed. Two other people's infidelity is hilarious. Like, there's just nothing funnier than reading someone's messages to their. Because we all think we're so interesting and sexy and fascinating, but it's just completely goofy. All the, like, you know, like, oh, baby, I missed you so bad. Like, when you read, like, I'll tell you this, we have, like, dramatic readings of it. Sometimes at lunchtime in my office, like, in the conference room, we'll all get together and we'll, like, you know, we'll have. One of the female staff members will read the female part, and one of them will read the male part, and we're like, baby, when I was inside you last night, it was the greatest feeling ever. You know, like, we're just reading it out loud, going, do these people have any idea? But ultimately, you know, she. What I thought was scarier is that she has managed to just continue to act like nothing's wrong for six months with this guy.
- [72:47]
Francis
I couldn't do that.
- [72:47]
James Sexton
I could. You couldn't do. I couldn't do it for A day? No, I'd be like, whoa, six months. Like. And I mean explicitly explicit stuff. Which, by the way, I will tell you, as a divorce lawyer, you end up having to see a lot of naked pictures of people, and it's never people you'd want to see naked pictures of. It's like being in a nude beach. It's never people there that you'd want to see naked.
- [73:06]
Mike
But, James, this is a question I really wanted to ask because I don't think we talk about divorce. Do people regret divorce? Do people look back? Have you ever seen that? Where people go, you know, what she was, or he was the love of my life. And yeah, I. You know, it was the heat of the moment. I said what I said we did what we did, but actually we kind of threw it away.
- [73:33]
James Sexton
I think what you're describing is people regretting the demise of a relationship. I think divorce is burying something that's dead most of the time. And it's not, man, I regret that we buried that. It's, I regret that it died. You know, I always tell people, I don't make it rain. I sell umbrellas. I think that there are a lot of people that say, you know, we could have done better. We could have done different. You know, I'm a divorced man myself. I've been divorced for 20 years from the mother of my kids and a very friendly divorce. She's a lovely, lovely human being. One of my favorite human beings in the world. She's been remarried for 15 years. Our oldest son just got married a couple of months ago, and we had a wonderful time, all of us at the wedding, her family, my family, all of us together. And I have to say, there are many times where she and I, even though she's very happily married, will say, like, man, we really screwed that up. We screwed it up. You know, if sheer power of will could make two people love each other forever, we probably would have. But we just got a lot of things wrong. And then sometimes you're so far from center that you just kind of go, yeah, it was the right thing to do. And I think our divorce was the right thing to do. I think that her very happy marriage, you know, is proof of that. I think our sons are very well adjusted, happy young men who had a great relationship with both of their parents. And she and I have had a great co parenting relationship. We both moved on to have really fulfilling relationships. But is there something very sad about it that it's like, oh, we probably could have done better? Yeah, of course. But we didn't know that at the time. And I don't think anybody takes glee in the demise of a relationship. I think most people, when they. When they marry, they have good intentions, you know, but things fall apart, the sinner cannot hold. You know, it's the nature of things. And, you know, one of the things. There's a line. One of my favorite poems is a poem by Joseph Brodsky. It's called a song. He wrote it when his wife died. And the refrain of the poem is, I wish you were here, dear. I wish you were here. And one of the lines is, I wish you were here, dear. I wish you were here. I wish I knew no astronomy when the stars appear here. Because I think that there's something very magical about the stars. Until you learn astrology and then astronomy, and then you're like, oh, it's actually a dead light that's hitting us now. I think that all of us, if we look back on our relationships that weren't successful or even our relationships that are successful, we look at it and we go, I could have done better. I could have done. There's almost nothing I've done in my life that I don't look at and go, oh, I could have done better. You know, the first three years of your child's life, I bet there's some things that you go, I wish I'd been a little more patient when that happened, or, I wish I'd handled that differently. And I think that's a sign of a mature human being to say, you know, oh, I could have done better, and I wish I had done better. But we did what we did. You know, we made the choices that we made. I think that the hard thing to do, and therefore the right thing to do, is while you're in the relationship, constantly subject yourself to that vigilance rather than later look back and go, what could I have done to keep this together while you're in it? What can I do to keep this strong? What can I do to help this person feel loved and seen? What do I need from this? Because I think the most dangerous. I will tell you in 25 years of practicing divorce law and seeing very candid versions of people, I think the most dangerous lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves. I think we constantly lie to ourselves about what we need and what we want and what will make us happy and what won't. And I think that if we could be more honest with ourselves, it would be the starting point of being more honest with our partner.
- [77:14]
Mike
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- [78:32]
Francis
It's, it's a really, really interesting insight into human nature. And I, I suppose the question I wanted to ask is do you think sometimes divorce is the easy option? And maybe also do people then try to go for a divorce and they discover actually isn't that easy at all? It might, it might be the conclusion of their problems, but actually it's very painful and traumatic and especially terrible for kids.
- [78:59]
James Sexton
Yeah. I mean, I think you're always trading one set of problems for another. If you're unhappily married, you have one set of problems, but you don't have another. If you're divorced, you have one set of problems, but you don't have another. If you're single, one set of problems. Not another married, one set, not another. So I think life's about picking the set of problems you're interested in having and then moving forward with that set of problems and trying to live your life within that set of problems.
- [79:21]
Mike
Right.
- [79:23]
James Sexton
I think that sometimes the process of divorce is something that reminds people what they mean to each other. So I have seen a lot of divorces that start and then stop. And I don't find that that surprising. I mean, I find when you're in the midst of death, you know, or illness, you're the most acutely aware of the value of life and good health. You know, I think, you know, when you get over being sick, you find yourself going, oh, I'm going to take better Care of myself. And then you forget. Yeah. And then very promptly you go back to like, eh, whatever, you know, because that's human nature. But I do think that sometimes we have to come right up to the edge of losing something to see the value that it has in our life. Sometimes physically separating from someone is something that makes you feel their absence in a real way. So I think that's a piece of it.
- [80:13]
Francis
It.
- [80:15]
James Sexton
I do think that there are people that never recover from their divorce. I think that there are people who. The wound of it and the process of it. Because divorce can be incredibly ugly. I mean, it's. It's intimacy weaponized. Like, if anybody knows your soft targets, it's your wife. Like, you know, to, you know, personally, I think to love anything is insane. Like, it's insane. It's just not rational to love anything. Because to love anything is to accept the inevitability of losing it. Like, you get a dog. Greatest thing in the world, having a dog, you're going to lose that dog. Like, that dog's going to die before you. Most likely. They have a really short lifespan. Personally, I think it's worth having, you know. But you are, when you decide you're gonna love that stupid dog, you have decided you are gonna open yourself up to the inevitability of that pain. So I think there's a tremendous amount of bravery involved in loving anyone or anything. Because to love anything is to say, okay, I'm gonna accept the pain of losing this because you will lose your wife. You'll lose her to death, or you'll lose her to divorce. I hope you lose her to death. What a bizarre thing, right? Like, in what world do you say as a courtesy, I hope your marriage ends in death? But I do, I hope your marriage ends in death. Because the other option is it ends in divorce. So I hope it ends in death. So there is something about saying, okay, I'm going to fully accept the risk of this. And some of that risk is that if you let this person see authentically into who you are and what you're afraid of and what really hurts you and what your soft points are, they can weaponize that against you if they want to. Like, we all know, anyone who's in a relationship, even like the two of you are in a relationship with each other, I guarantee you each have a sentence in your head that you could say to the other one that you know would make them, like, go home that night crying. Like, we. Anyone you're close with and know and care about, you Know what they're insecure about, you know what they're afraid of, you know what they're ashamed of. So you have in your head, you've got it in the chamber there. You've got a thing that you go, you know, if I ever heard, I would say this to the person. And. And by the way, you probably would never want to say it to that person, because when you love someone, you wouldn't want to hurt them. Even if they hurt you, you wouldn't want to hurt them like that. You know, like. But I guarantee, you know the thing you could say to your wife, and your wife knows the thing that she could say to you that would reduce you to just absolute tears. That's the risk. But you have to take that risk if you're gonna have a relationship. That's why I think to love something is brave. It's insane, but it's brave. Because you're saying, I'm gonna expose the possibility of being hurt by you. But because of that risk, divorce is brutal. It's just. It can be brutal. Because even the friendliest divorce is a shift of this fundamental relationship, this foundational relationship. And it feels like everything is on the line. Like where you live, when you see your children, your basic finances, the person who you thought was your person and you were theirs, like, all of that is falling apart. It's what drew me to being a divorce lawyer. I was a psychology major as an undergraduate, and I wanted very much to maybe be a therapist. And. And then I realized therapists have to listen more than they talk. And that wasn't my strength. But I realized that there is something incredible about the opportunity, because a divorce. The barn is burned down, and now I can see the moon. Everything's fallen apart. And now what? And to be part of the architecture of a person's next chapter. To me, even after 25 years, it's still the most humbling, amazing, beautiful thing to be part of, to help be part of the architecture of someone rebuilding a life when it feels like everything is lost, everything's at risk.
- [84:22]
Francis
I mean, your point about loving is so true because, I mean, children are the best example of this because you bring a child into the world who you love more than anything that you've ever loved. But obviously, I remember speaking to a very good friend of mine after having a child and said, I've got some fears now that I didn't know were possible at.
- [84:43]
James Sexton
Oh, yeah. And not even that. Like, your heart is walking around, right?
- [84:46]
Francis
Exactly.
- [84:47]
James Sexton
Like it's just walking around. And like everything is, is putting it at risk, right? And, and, and like you can handle it yourself. Like I could handle my pain, like, but my kids pain. Like, oh, like the, the, the, the, the, the terror that comes with that. But it also creates these opportunities to like, you know, I mean, again, like the, the, you know, I remember my sons are adults now, but I remember my now 28 year old, he's a lawyer too. When he was like five maybe he had terrible pneumonia and he was so sick, he had 103 or 104 fever. We kept calling the pediatrician and they kept saying, okay, if it goes up to 105, you gotta get him to the hospital. And he was laying in my lap and I was the most scared I've ever been in my life, life. Like I had never felt terror like that. And I was 22 when he was born, so I was probably like 27, 28. And he was sweating and cold and like kind of like so feverish that he was out of it. And, and he kept sort of kind of going in and out of consciousness. And I remember having this big ridiculous smile on my face and going, it's okay, it's okay, buddy. You're okay. You're okay. Don't worry, don't be scared. It's okay, it's okay. And inside I was screaming, I was just screaming inside, like, I can't handle this. I'm not ready for this. I'm not qualified. Like, I want my fucking mom. Like, I don't know what's, like, this is bad. Like, I don't know what to do. Like, I'm terrified he's gonna die. Oh my God, is he gonna die? But I was like, okay, no, you don't get to do that. Like you, you need to be, you need to be. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. And now it's what, 20 something years later? He survived. He's fine. I can still feel that feeling. That's the terror that comes with real love. Like, that's the terror that only loving something more than you've ever loved yourself. Like, to me, it's worth it. To me it's the greatest thing because the love and the pride and the joy, like the, you know, that same seven year old, you know, I sat with a hundred people when he got married a couple of months ago and watched a beautiful young woman who he went to law school with stand there in front of all these people say these vows. And they wrote their own vows. And she was like, you're the strongest man I know. You're the bravest man. You make me feel so safe. And I was weeping because I thought, like, we did it. Like, we did it. This is what we wanted to do. We wanted to create a man like that. And we did. We did. We found, we created one that a brilliant woman, she's a lawyer to like, goes, yep, that's my guy. That's the one I want. And what an incredible thing. Now, if you want that, you've got to have that terrifying moment. You've got to have all those things and all the other terrifying moments that I'm sure are soon to come, you know, or will come down the road. So, yeah, I think love is the greatest thing in the world, but I think it is an absolutely insane, terrifying thing.
- [87:47]
Francis
Yeah, it's the best. I was gonna ask, as someone who's watched thousands and thousands of people not not only watch, but participated in the process of them getting divorced and often acrimonious circumstances, how did you feel watching your son get married?
- [88:03]
James Sexton
I felt, I think the same way anybody else does. I felt I'm cheering for them. I felt choked up by it. I felt an abundance of optimism that's probably totally misplaced. You know, they have as good a shot at happiness as anybody. And I've been pilloried. Matt Walsh gave me a whole ration of crap for this because I said that marriage is like the lottery. You're probably not gonna win, but if you win, what you win is so good that it's worth buying a ticket. Now, he harped on the fact that you can't do anything to improve your chances of winning the lottery, but you can do things to improve your chances of staying married. That wasn't my point. My point was you're probably not going to win statistically, but that if you win, it's like winning the lottery. So I look at my son as he was getting married and I thought, there is a 50 plus percent chance that this will end in divorce. But I hope it doesn't, because if it doesn't, the value it will add to his life will be phenomenal. And if it does end in divorce, I hope it ends in the way that his mother and I's marriage ended, which is with love and with respect for each other and with care for the children that may come of that marriage. And again, I think happily ever after can mean happily ever after separately. Divorce doesn't have to be a failure. Like, things can end and they can end with love and with dignity and with respect. We could stop viewing divorce as failure, and we could start viewing it, viewing love and romantic love, like chapters in a long book. And maybe you have people you dated, and those are some chapters, and then you find your one true love, and then you live out the rest of your story with that person. I hope that's what happens for you. I hope that's what happens for my son. I hope that's what happens for every married person I know who's happily married. But it may be that sometimes marriages need to end, and when they end, that there will be some other love, some other chapter that's waiting for you that you wouldn't have got to if you hadn't been through this dark chapter or difficult chapter or a chapter that was bright and then ended in some negative way. It's a unique and rare thing, the kind of acrimony, like when I. I don't go to a lot of parties, but, you know, when. When I do go to a party and people say, oh, what do you do for a living? And so I'm a divorce lawyer, they go, oh, my God, you must have stories. And if I said to them, yes, you know, there was this couple, and they fell in love, and then they gradually, you know, learned that the Venn diagram of things they had in common is getting smaller. And they grew apart emotionally. And then they decided that it would be good for the two of them to potentially end the relationship. So they parted amicably, divided their assets, and they both spent time with the children in different races. The person would go like, well, that's the most boring, ridiculous story ever. That's not interesting at all. They want to hear. And then he took a chainsaw and he cut the car in half. And he said, you can pick which half you want. That's the story. Which. True story, by the way. That's what people want to hear. The people who talk about their divorce are usually people who went through a really ugly, traumatic divorce. My divorce is one of the least interesting things about me and one of the least interesting things about my existence. But people who've been through a really ugly divorce, it scars them, and it becomes fundamental to their identity, and it becomes something they talk about. Just like, you know, people don't talk about the prenup that got upheld. They talk about the prenup that got set aside. You know, so people tend to talk about. People don't talk about all the planes that flew and landed safely. They talk about the one that crashed. But thankfully, that's the Minard, you know,
- [91:47]
Mike
what you were talking about through a lot of this, it really reminded me actually, of, of one of my teaching day. Of my teaching days. Because you're talking about hope. I remember when I was teaching year three, which in the UK is seven and eight year olds, and we used to do this thing called philosophy for kids. So for half an hour, 40 minutes once a week, we do philosophy, basic philosophy with the kids.
- [92:08]
James Sexton
God, I love the uk.
- [92:10]
Mike
And I remember I sat down with the kids, seven, eight years old, and the question was, I put on the board, would you rather own a dog and have it die or not own a dog and never experience. And have it die, but never experience what it's like to own a dog? Put your hands up. Every single kid in the room put their hand up and goes, I want to own a dog.
- [92:38]
James Sexton
Of course, of course.
- [92:40]
Mike
It's something that's so deep within us, it's the hope. Hope. And, you know, and you'd ask the kid, and they, they might not be able to articulate it because deep down we all know that the most special thing, the thing that we all desire above everything else is love.
- [92:56]
James Sexton
Yeah.
- [92:56]
Mike
And connection.
- [92:57]
James Sexton
Yeah.
- [92:58]
Mike
And if you deny that and you say you're not going to get involved or you don't want to get married or all of these things, what you're denying yourself is the shot.
- [93:05]
James Sexton
Yeah.
- [93:06]
Mike
And that's all any of us have, it's the shot.
- [93:08]
James Sexton
Well, and that's, you know, I believe that marriage is the triumph of faith over reason. I think it really is a faith, it's an act of faith. It's an act of saying, I believe in the possibility over reason, over logic, over statistics. That the connection that I feel for this person, that my life will have value or deeper value because of this. And I think proof denies faith. Like, there's really no way to prove that a love is going to last. There's no formula. Like, you just have to have faith. It's an act of faith. And I'm a person who. I think that our lives would be very empty if we didn't have faith in some things. And I think faith in love, like, love is all around us. Love is everywhere. Like people say to me all the time, well, you're a divorce lawyer. Do you believe in love? And I always think it's such a funny thing. Do I believe in gravity? Gravity exists whether I believe in it or not. Like, love is everywhere. It's all around me. I feel it, I experience it all the time. And my life would be poorer for it. It's the only thing, like, I think every single thing we do, we do to find love, feel love, feel worthy of love. Like everything is tied to love. And I think that, you know, love is. It's all around us. I think love is in some ways, like, the greatest insight into God for any of us. Because, you know, Jesus said, you know, the kingdom of God is within you and all around you. Well, I think love is within you and all around you. And the question is, how much of it will you open yourself to? I don't think you can let yourself be completely open to all of it. I think that we have to do it properly and with depth. We have to connect to another person and say, okay, I'm going to commit to connecting to you in this deep and profound way. It's why I think pair bonds really work. And I think maybe that's why we were designed the way we were designed physically. You know, what's wise? My life is born of the connection of a man and a woman. It has to be a metaphor for something. It has to be. Has to have some meaning. I have faith in that. So I genuinely, you know, everybody harps on the statistic that roughly 56% of marriages end in divorce. But the more interesting statistic to me is that 87% of people who get divorced are remarried within five years of their divorce. That's an insane number. That means you've tried, failed catastrophically, the wheels came off, and 87% within five years go, all right, let's give it another shot. And I think, to me, that's not a statistic of how stupid people are. I think that's a statistic of how deeply we need and want this. And I think that's something worth fighting for. It's something brave. It's the hard thing to do. So it's probably the right thing to do.
- [95:57]
Francis
What a great way to end our brilliant conversation. James, been absolute pleasure, man. It was so much fun having you on.
- [96:03]
James Sexton
Absolutely.
- [96:03]
Francis
We're going to go to substack, where our audience are going to get to ask you their questions. But before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
- [96:12]
Mike
Before James answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our substack. The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this. What's the funniest story you've had as a divorce lawyer?
- [96:24]
Francis
Do you think it's fair that someone poor can marry someone rich, have A two year marriage then claim a large
- [96:29]
Mike
chunk because they can divorce reveals who people really are. What's the biggest surprise you've seen in human behavior during that process?
- [96:38]
Francis
What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
- [96:47]
James Sexton
I think we're not. I mean, I know it's very popular to just, you know, crap all over social media these days, but we're not talking about the antagonistic effect that social media is having on relationships, on marriages in particular. I think that there's a chapter in my book called if we were going to invent an infidelity generating machine, it would be called Facebook. I think you could amend that now to say Meta Instagram. But I think we're not talking about the fact that that again, not to sound like Jaron Lanier, but I think we need to give a really serious look at what impact social media is having on our perception of our relationships, our perceptions of each other and as romantic prospects, our satisfaction with our sex lives. I think it's having a profoundly negative impact and we're not looking at it because we're busy looking at the effect on the individual, not on the couple.
- [97:42]
Francis
Apple. The only thing I would say about that, and obviously that is a thing that people do say a lot, and I, I think there's a lot of truth to it, is it's also about the way you use it. And I think we should also remember that because I can tell you, I agree. I, I'm someone who, like, I was never an Instagram person. It just isn't my medium. But because of, you know, what we do and blah, blah, I'm on it. All I see on my Instagram, literally all I see is really cool parenting stuff.
- [98:10]
James Sexton
Yeah.
- [98:10]
Francis
That makes me more connected to my wife. And it's like, oh, oh, we're not the only people that are struggling with this stupid thing that this person's managed to make funny.
- [98:19]
James Sexton
So you've got an algorithm that's, that's figured out, you know, what's gonna resonate with you in a positive way.
- [98:24]
Francis
And I imagine it's also because, like, when I see something I don't like, I'm like, don't show me more of this.
- [98:29]
James Sexton
Right, right. So I think what you're talking about is having an active relationship with it. So when I was in graduate school at NYU, my mentor and his research assistant was Neil Postman, Dr. Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Public Discourse in the Age of Television, the Surrender of Culture to Technology, a number of other books before he passed away. And one of the things that Neil used to say all the time is that there is a difference between watching a program on television and watching television, because watching television was you just sat back and let it feed you TikTok, your YouTube algorithm, whatever that might be. Whereas watching a program so that what you're describing is someone having an active relationship with their social media and their algorithm. So I don't wanna see more of that. Meaning I don't wanna be around that. I'm not gonna, like, stop showing me women in bikinis. I don't need to see that. Like, if I hang around a barbershop long enough, I'm gonna think about getting a haircut. So don't do it. And oh, yes, I want more of this because they. That feeds good things within me.
- [99:30]
Mike
Great.
- [99:30]
James Sexton
You're describing a person with discipline. I think the majority of people probably lack that level of discipline. And so they're getting carried in directions that, again, I don't know that they would be. When we apply technology to an efficient system, you magnify the efficiency. And when you apply technology to an inefficient system, you magnify the inefficiency. I think the same thing is true when you apply social media to a functional relationship where the person is committed to the relationship, you can amplify the efficiency and the commitment. When you apply it to someone who's having challenges in their commitment and in their focus on the relationship, it can amplify the lack of focus or the distractions from the relationship, and it can amplify the antagonistic things to that relationship. So I think, again, teaching people to curate their use of social media differently once they're married could be a very useful thing. But again, we don't have, like, premarital classes. We don't, you know, you want to get a driver's license, you got to take a little test, you got to do a road test. You get married, let's go get married. There's no waiting period. Just go out and marry. 50 bucks Elvis will do it for you in Vegas. But maybe we should be, you know, people on the right in particular. There's a lot of people talking about how we should get rid of no fault divorce, how there should be more barriers to exit. And I've always felt that that's got it completely backwards. That's like saying, you know, oh, there's a lot of people with broken bones in hospitals. We should just close all the hospitals, because then people wouldn't get so many broken bones. Like, I think you're mixing it up. I think we should have barriers to entry. I think it should be a little harder to get married. Like, if you want to get married in the Catholic Church, you go to Pre Cana. You have to go and you learn about marriage, you learn about contraception, you learn about, you know, there's usually Catholic happily married couples that will talk to you about, hey, here's our Sid. The men will be put in one room, and the guy will say, hey, listen, you have to learn to do this with your wife and that with your wife.
- [101:22]
Mike
And.
- [101:22]
James Sexton
And the women will say, hey, listen, men are like this, and you gotta watch out. And there's a lot of that. There's none of that outside of the religious context. I mean, that happens in the Jewish rabbinical context. There's, you know, people will take time to say, hey, men, this is what you need to learn about your wife. Women, this is what you need to learn about your husband and being a wife and how deal with a husband. You don't have anything like that in a secular context in society. So maybe something like that would be useful. That's the thing. Maybe we're not saying, is that premarital education, barriers to entry might be a good idea.
- [101:51]
Francis
Well, it sort of sounds like pre relationship education, really, because all of that stuff's gonna be useful for.
- [101:58]
James Sexton
For any relationship.
- [101:58]
Francis
For any relationship.
- [101:59]
Mike
Yeah.
- [102:00]
James Sexton
Which is interesting because, you know, if you ask me, how much use did I have for, like, you know, algebra or, like, how to divide fractions? It wasn't a lot.
- [102:14]
Francis
No.
- [102:15]
James Sexton
But if you gave me some education in life, like how to talk to women or how to navigate conflict within the context of a romantic relationship, because you can't win an argument with your spouse. It's not possible. It's not possible. If you lose, you lost. And if you win, you lost because you've upset your spouse, you've made them feel like a loser, that's not helpful. So you can't win an argument with your spouse. Someone could have taught you that in fifth grade. Someone could have taught you that we could do a better job of teaching people these life skills, these real things, but we don't. I mean, maybe it may explain the popularity of my work to some degree, is that we're consuming so much. I've always wondered, I'm like, why do tens of millions of people, are they interested in what a divorce lawyer has to say about love and relationships? But I think it may be, for some people, the first real education that they're Getting on how to facilitate the demise of a happy relationship. And you can reverse engineer from that. Something about how to keep us together.
- [103:15]
Mike
You know, I'll finish with this. It's so funny. The stories that you're telling just remind me of when I. Back to my former career. I remember there was a little boy, he was 11 years old, and he got in an argument with a girl. She started it, and she said something nasty to him, and he went, well, you're fat. And then she burst into tears. All her friends swarmed around. It exploded everything. And I literally had to remove him from the room because it kicked off. I had to get somebody else to come and take care of the girls. The boys were like, oh. And I had to take him outside. And he looked at me, went, what did I do?
- [103:56]
James Sexton
What did I do?
- [103:57]
Mike
What did I do? I said, jaden, something you're gonna need to know. And I'm saying it to you not as a teacher. I'm saying it to you as one man to someone who will be a man one day.
- [104:08]
James Sexton
Man to future man, man, don't ever
- [104:11]
Mike
make a comment or make fun of a woman's weight. And he went, yeah, but she said. I go, it doesn't matter. You will never win this.
- [104:17]
James Sexton
Yeah.
- [104:17]
Mike
And I'm telling you right now, if you learn one thing from me, learn this. Yeah. Never make fun of a woman's weight. Even if you're right, you'll always be in the wrong.
- [104:26]
James Sexton
I'm willing to bet that that lesson stuck. And I'm telling you right now, it's a lesson that, like, any man should probably learn fairly early in life.
- [104:35]
Mike
Life.
- [104:35]
James Sexton
Like, and. And it. It's also useful in the. In the gender context to realize that, like, there are things you're not going to be allowed to say that a woman might get away with saying. Like, if she called you fat, it would probably be okay. But you calling her fat is going to. You're the villain. I guarantee it in this story. You will be the villain no matter what vile thing she said to you before. So, yeah, I mean, these are lessons that we all know this stuff is true, but where's the context where we're gonna say it out loud to each other? And I don't think the place to learn it is when you've already unpinned the grenade. I mean, he learned it the hard way. That's kind of what I'm trying to do is just say to people, if you're in my office, it's already too late. I'm trying to get you out of my office. I'm trying to steer you in the direction that the thought of divorce is just something that fleetingly passes your brain when your spouse does something particularly boneheaded. But the rest of the time it's something you would never consider. So I hope to put myself out of a job. I suspect I probably won't.
- [105:37]
Francis
It's been great having you on.
- [105:38]
James Sexton
It's been blast. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
- [105:39]
Francis
Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk, where James is going to answer your questions. Sitting before you is a married man who's only ever been with his wife and Francis, the forever fornicator. As a divorced man, who of the two, do you envy the most?
- [106:09]
Mike
Don't forget to click the link in the description of this episode to grab the special CyberGhost VPN discount. It's completely risk free, so check it out today.