The Matt Walsh Show - The Realities Of Love, Marriage & Divorce | Matt Walsh Interviews James J. Sexton

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

PDS Debt: PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://PDSDebt.com/Walsh   James J. Sexton Esq., prominent divorce lawyer and author, joins Matt Walsh to chat about love, marriage, and divorce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know, we've created these ridiculous tropes of like the wife who's like, oh, he's such an idiot to the husband. And the husband who's like, oh, I married the most loathsome harpy ever to castrate a man. And this is somehow cute. This is somehow funny, you know. And it's not. It's not. It's a recipe for disaster.

I'm sitting with James Sexton, who's a divorce lawyer, author, someone who speaks publicly and frequently about marriage and family-related issues. James, wonderful to have you. Thanks for sitting down with us. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you. So let me give a little bit of background for the audience. I first became aware of you.

I think this was maybe a year ago now. Several months ago. You were on a podcast with, I guess, some guys in the red pill space. And you had some criticisms for me, which we'll get to. And then I responded in kind of a snippy way, I think. And then we went back and forth on Twitter and we realized that, oh, it's fine. And then I saw you on iced coffee hour, a show that I've also been on. And I thought the conversation you had on that show was really, really interesting.

You get a lot of great insights. And I'll admit that at first I thought, you know, being a divorce lawyer, we would be much farther apart on most of these kinds of issues. But I found that I agreed with probably 90% of what you said. I'll take that. And even the 10% that I didn't agree, it wasn't unreasonable. You know, so I was somewhat surprised by that. I guess I'll start by asking just, what made you decide to start speaking so publicly about these kinds of issues? You know, I think being a divorce lawyer, you get to see something that most people don't get to see, like this very candid view of what happens when love falls apart.

when people who used to love each other and know each other with like the depth that only married people do, almost like what happens when you weaponize intimacy? And by the time people come to my office, it's so far along. Like it's so broken. And it's almost like someone who's gained 800 pounds and now says, okay, I want to lose weight. Like they're at the bottom of this mountain, you know, and it's so hard to even imagine getting up there. Whereas if they just, if they just, maintained their weight, like that's so much easier. And so I really found myself just thinking about how, as a divorce lawyer, you have this very unique insight into, you know, the dissolution of what was someone's most profound relationship. And I think that you get to see it in this

really honest way because you can't really lie to your, I mean, you could lie to your divorce lawyer, but it'd be stupid. It's like lying to your doctor, you know, our only jobs to protect you. And there's attorney-client privilege attached. So, I don't know. I just felt like I had a unique perspective that came by virtue of my experience. And I thought, you know, I get paid to talk and I like to talk. And I thought this would just be a labor of love is that I would write the books and speak about the books. And it kind of, you know, it caught on more than I ever thought it would. And obviously I want to get into all of these related issues.

But I mentioned the first time I saw you was on this podcast. Yeah. with, I think guys that would identify themselves as red pill. 100%. Yeah, Rolo Tamasi would call himself, I think, the godfather of the red pill. Right. He's a group of those guys. Do you consider yourself as part of that scene?

No, I don't, and I've been outspoken about that. I have a lot of respect for those guys. I think they're asking interesting questions. I've said pretty vocally that for guys who talk a lot about not really caring too much about what women think, they talk about it pretty obsessively. And I don't really know that, you know, a person who worships an idol and a person who destroys an idolaters. I think Nietzsche said that. So I tend to think that I think each of these spaces has something to contribute to the discussion.

You know, I've been a big fan of yours for a long time, and there were times where I've, you know, listened to you talk about divorce lawyers and you've talked about us as like leeches and bloods. And I never kind of took that personally because I thought, But, you know, he doesn't necessarily know what the job is. Like, I imagine from someone who's, A, not divorced, never needed a divorce lawyer, hopefully never would need a divorce lawyer, and who's never been a divorce lawyer, that you would have this understandable image that were, like, predatory in some way, that we're hoping marriages end. But that's like saying, like, an oncologist is hoping people get cancer.

Like, no, this is a problem. This is a real thing, and it requires solutions. we don't need as divorce lawyers to stoke the flames of situations. So, you know, I think to tie back to the red pill space into that discussion, I'm very comfortable talking to like any number of people who may share or not share my point of view, but who have interesting questions that they can ask about marriage. Because it's something I don't claim to know everything about, you know. I'm a divorced person myself.

I'm very blessed that my ex-wife and I have had a wonderful. relationship. We divorced when our kids were five and seven, and now our sons are both adults, 24 and 27. And we've managed to have a great relationship. She and I as people who love our children in common. She's been remarried for many years. I've been in a relationship for many years, and we've done a really good job. I think it's the best second place we could be. If you can't keep your marriage together, there's a lot to be said for figuring out a way to part with a lot of love. But I think the red pill space is a space that is asking interesting questions about, you know, why do we do the things we do as couples? What is wrong with the divorced system and the

marriage system at present? How does it disproportionately affect men versus women? And those are good questions to ask. I probably have described divorce lawyers as leeches and bloods. I think specifically you said leeches and blood suckers. I didn't take it personally, but. In fairness, though, to both of us, I'd probably describe people in media the same way, even though I'm in media. So there's exceptions to every rule, I suppose. Staying on the red pill for just a moment. Sure. There's been kind of, and they're not the only factors here, but there's been kind of this backlash against marriage in recent years. Now, we know on the left that the left has been, my view,

opposed to the institution of marriage or wanting to sort of redefine it out of existence, basically. On the right, generally it used to be while we're standing for the institution of marriage, it seems like in recent years you have people who, I don't know if they call themselves on the right or not, but they're certainly not on the left, who now have taken a very dim view of marriage to an extent that seems new to me anyway in the last several years. What do you make of that? Why do you think that that, have you noticed that too? and why do you think that's happening? Yeah, I've definitely noticed that too. I think it's happening for a variety of reasons. But, you know, one of the things that I think characterizes you in your perspective,

right, is you recognizing the importance of basic definitions, like what is a woman, what is a man, right? So when we're talking about marriage, you have to make a huge distinction, I think, between the legal institution of marriage, which is governed by the legislature, which is politics, which is it changes the way the wind blows. It changes with the administration's changes. Like, that is a different thing. There's a set of rules right now governing your relationship with your wife. And in five years, it could be a completely different set of rules. But you signed up to take that ride that wherever the legislature takes it, you're going along for that ride. That's weird. There's not a lot of things in our culture that are like that. Like when you get a driver's license,

They couldn't say, well, by the way, we've changed the rules. And if you have a driver's license, every year that you have it, you now have to pay the following tax for it. Like you go, well, wait a minute. When I signed up for the driver's license, that wasn't a thing. Well, marriage, the rules of spousal maintenance, child support, the rules that govern fault versus no fault, the rules that govern equitable distribution of property, they are subject to massive change. Usually tied the political circumstances. Like, there's rulings that were just passed in New York that now changed the domestic relations law to say that if you fail to provide gender. affirming care to your child, that this is by definition proof that you're not an appropriate

custodial parent. Now, that's changed with the judicial zeitgeist, right? But you've signed up when you legally marry for that. Now, look, you and I both, you know, are people who have a Catholic background. So, you know, I wouldn't identify as Catholic anymore necessarily, but I went to Catholic school my whole life. So when I talk about marriage, you know, am I talking about the legal status of marriage? Am I talking about the sacrament of marriage? Because a lot of times when I hear people in the conservative space talking about marriage, they're talking about the religious institution of marriage. They're talking about the spiritual concept of marriage. They're talking about the commitment that marriage represents. But they're also talking about it from a religious perspective

as a covenant from God. And so that's a very different thing to be talking about than the legal institution of marriage. Because I know a lot of conservatives who are rightly critical of the government and rightly critical of saying, you know, I don't know who should make the rules, but it's definitely not the people who work at the DMV. It's definitely not Kamala Harris. It's definitely not Chuck Schumer. You know, and yet they're quick to say, oh, you should go get married. Definitely go get married. Submit yourself to the jurisdiction of these people when it comes to the most fundamental things in your life. Your marriage, your proper. your relationship with your children.

Those are big things. So I think what you're seeing are people arguing about a term, but they're arguing about different things a lot of the time. Like the left is saying everybody should be allowed to get married. We want everyone to be able to marry. There shouldn't be any rules on marriage to some degree. You should be able to marry two, three people if you wanted to, right? Because it's not too far of a jump to get to those things.

And then the right, you have people saying, oh, marriage is an institution, it's amazing, it's wonderful, it's the foundation, it's the bedrock. I mean, I've listened to the advice that you give to young people, which I don't think is bad advice to say, hey, you know, you're never going to be certain that this is the person you should marry. So find someone you like, you have similar values, you care about each other, and make a commitment and move forward in life together. It's a beautiful sentiment, you know, and that's a worthwhile sentiment. But I think the red pill space is somewhere kind of weirdly between that and this sort of neo, I don't know what you'd call it.

It's like not quite conservative, but it's also like trying to tear down the institution of marriage, but at the same time, it's not really, you know, fully rejecting the concept of pair bonds. So I don't completely understand that perspective, but I do think we have a very conflicted and most. like it crosses party lines, people's interest in or aversion to marriage. Yeah, I think you're definitely right that we are. We often are talking about different things, which makes the conversation confused and often fruitless. I would say, and I know that people in the red pill space would probably take exception to this, but from my perspective, it seems like they take a view very similar to the lefts in that. that they're kind of anti the institution. But what makes them not the left is that they are

approaching it from a what seems to be pretty anti-woman view. And I use that term very cautiously because calling anyone anti-woman or anti-man, of course, something the left does all the time. I thought I was getting to hear you say the word misogynist. I was going to like a heart attack. I don't know what's going to happen there. But I wouldn't say misogynist. Just out of principle, I refuse to use that term. You could argue that anti-woman is basically a, Seems like a synonym. Cynum. Sorry.

And I know they would say, well, that's not true at all. It's just, and maybe what I'm hearing is just the problem is who I'm hearing it from. And I'm getting a lot of this from my comment section stuff. Yeah. But most of what I get, 90% of what I hear from that crowd when they're criticizing institution of marriage is focused on women and the problems with women and that women are not, are not, are not, you just can't trust women enough to marry them. Part of that is their audience, though. I think that, you know, they're definitely, like Rolla Tomasi is a great example. Rolo wrote a series of books, The Rational Mail, that I think are brilliant books.

They're very, very well-reasoned. He's an excellent writer. I always really enjoyed his writing, and I think his perspective, although I don't agree with every piece of it, you cannot argue that it's not well-reasoned. It really is. But the majority of his content online, which is eagerly consumed primarily by young men, is not as academic as his writing. It's not as because I think it's much more popular

to sort of get on and talk about the issues with women and 3-0-4s and all these sort of terms that are used to sort of popularize that conversation and dumb it down a little bit to make it a little more entertaining. I don't think that it has to be that way. I think that some of these people in that space may not have much of a point of view

or may not have really thought about these things. in any depth, and it really is just born of a sort of annoyance at what they see as benefits women receive, many of which I think are undeniable, that there are tremendous, you know, like we had in the United States what was called the maternal presumption until about the 1980s, and that was a presumption that children would go to the custody of the mother no matter what. Unless you could prove she was an unfit mother, they automatically went to the mother. Now, you know, again, is there something to that? Sure, under your skin is under your sovereignty.

And, you know, when a woman births a child, feeds a child, like, she certainly has a bond. And anyone has ever seen a child, and their mother knows that there's a very special bond there. But to suggest that automatically a woman is a superior custodial parent to a father, like, that's, you know, that... I don't know how you could say that's not misandrous, you know. So I think that there are issues with this, and they're identifying those issues. And they're giving them some oxygen. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Too far south is north.

that you know that has to be part of the discussion it can't be the whole discussion well and it's certainly true that that men suffer all kinds of unfair disadvantages in the system i have i take no issue with that at all that does need to be talked about what i one of the things i take issue with is when when the argument seems to be not just that women have unfair advantages yes let's talk about that but that somehow one of the major problems for the institution of marriage these days is like the quality of women is is is is too low you can't marry them and I do hear that a lot and the thing is even that I think is partially true that but but the other part that we're leaving out is that the quality of men is also right is it the quality of people right now people are

we live in a culture that does not exactly encourage virtue well and it encourages a form of like individualism above all else, which is antagonistic to marriage. Like, marriage is about, parenting is about, my will is not the most important thing. I am not the son around which everything rotates now. Like, I'm going to make this person my person, and I'm going to tie my destiny to theirs. I'm going to make, you know, my heart is walking around. You know, when you have kids, like, you realize that, you know, I remember my grandmother saying to me when my son, who's now 27, when he was,

you know, little, little. And I just said to her like, God, I never thought I could love something as much as I love this kid. And she was like, yeah, your heart's walking around. You know, and to do that, you have to have some defined sense of self, but not such a defined, rigid sense of self, that self is the only thing. We've done such self-esteem work over the last 15 years that what do we esteem other than the self anymore? What do we serve other than the self anymore? And so, yeah, marriage definitely doesn't fit into that equation. But maybe marriage is a solution to that equation. Maybe marriage is a way for people to sort of say, hey, I'm not the most important thing. And that maybe if I make this other person a real priority,

and they do the same for me. And we have this beautiful symbiosis where we see each other's blind spots and we're committed to each other, hard times and easy times. Maybe that is a solution to some of the problems that we're in. But, you know, again, I mean, where I think I bump into a lot of issues is there's a lot of discourse about, you know, why women commence more divorces than men. And there's a lot of discourse about the impact of no-fault divorce. And these are all things that, I think, get thrown into this dialogue and weaponized in ways that aren't honest and aren't effective. Because they're used by people on, you know, let's say the red pill space or, you know, whatever we want to call it, to say, well, oh, you can't marry women, because, look, women commenced divorce actions. And 73% of divorces are

commenced by women. So that means women are coming into the casino, making all the money that they can and then cashing their chips out 73%. Why does that, that statistic is true, isn't it? It is. Yeah, yeah. So how do you, how is that not a sort of indictment on the way that women approach marriage? Facts all come with points of view, you know, and here's the thing that maybe a divorce lawyer sees that other people don't see. Who commences a divorce action is not always, I would even say not often an indicator of who wanted to end the marriage. It just means who filed the paperwork. So if a woman marries a man and she realizes, hey, I've cashed out everything I can for this guy and now I want to bounce on the relationship, I'm filing a divorce action. You're right. If 73% of divorces were

commenced by women under those circumstances, that's a strong argument. 50% would be a strong argument. The reality is much more frequently than that, I see a guy who runs off with his secretary, stops paying any expenses related to the residence. He's been the breadwinner of the family for so many years, and he's not going to just set up like a franchise. Like he's leaving this wife and two kids, and a man who leaves his wife for his mistress just leaves a job opening. So now he's going to go to the mistress,

and he's going to start going to have a family with her now, but he's not going to take care of his responsibilities towards the family he already has. What does that woman do? She comes into my office and she says, help. You know, the mortgage isn't being paid. He changed the utilities to my name. I don't have a job. or I have a job as a teacher part-time because I've been raising our children.

What do I do? And I have to say to her, you have to file for divorce. And she says, well, I don't want a divorce. I'm not the one who wanted a divorce. I want to figure out a way to reconcile. I want to go to counseling. I want to work it out. I'll forgive him for the transgression if we could just figure it out for our kids.

But the problem is, you know, you can't force someone to stay married to. You can't force someone to come back home and pay the bills unless you file the divorce action. So we file divorce actions all the time for people who do not want to get divorced, but who are in a position. I can't just go to court without an action and say, Judge, can you issue an order? You know, I have to have an underlying action, and the action is an action for divorce. So that's why that statistic is so wildly misleading. Now, again, I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of examples of women taking the advantages that the system gives to them. financially, or when it comes to custody, and weaponizing that against men. But you cannot just look

at that statistic and say, oh, that's proof that women are cashing out of marriages. I cannot tell you how many clients, how many women in a 25-year career, just in my office, I have seen who do not want to commence a divorce action. They want to figure it out. They want to reconcile. They want to go to mediation if they are going to split up. They want to be friendly and figure it out. But the only way to get a judge involved in temporary orders in place is by filing something. How often do you think, because the hypothetical scenario you just laid out there, seems like a pretty clear good guy versus bad guy scenario. Yeah.

Of course, I guess it's pretty common. Pretty common. And if we were to, this is a real life scenario and we were to go talk to the man, he might say something like, well, yeah, I did move out of the house. but for 10 years before that, she was, whatever. She was emotionally withdrawn. Sure. It was a dead marriage.

Sure. Not that that would justify what he did, but. They would say that. So I guess my question is, in your experience, how often in a broken marriage, is there a clear this guy or this woman is wrong and this one's right? Or is it always just a jumble of both sides are wrong? You know, I often say that the truth is at the bottom of a bottomless pit when it comes to marriage. because I feel like if you say, it's one of the reasons why no fault caught on,

because fault-based divorce got everybody really caught up, especially the lawyers, in proving whose fault it was that you were going to get divorced. And it really was exactly the discussion. I mean, sometimes you have the perfect villain and the perfect, you know, victim, but a lot of the time there's complexity to it. You know, it's, well, he's sleeping with this person, right, but that's because, you know, you weren't sleeping with him. Well, I wasn't sleeping with him because he never talks to me.

Well, I don't talk to you because all you do is fight when we talk. And it's like you kind of go, all right, well, you're right. Like, none of the things you guys did were the solution. Like, the solution was not stop talking to him completely. And then it wasn't stopped sleeping with him. And then it wasn't stop, you know, so you should sleep at somebody else. Like, there were ways to solve this, you know, that didn't involve letting it metastasize in the way that it has. But, you know, I do think something.

Sometimes it's not that nuanced. I mean, you know, I've said before that there's 10 commandments in the Bible. And two of them are don't sleep with people other than your spouse. I mean, thou shalt not kill got one. But don't covet your neighbor's wife and don't commit adultery. It's like God was saying, like, don't steal, don't bear false witness against your neighbor. Don't sleep with someone you're not married to. Seriously, don't sleep with someone you're not married to.

And I think this shows you how long this has been a problem, you know, a real problem. in societies, all kinds of societies, infidelity, adultery, our inability or unwillingness to control our sexual desires, you know. And sometimes you see pretty clear examples of that in divorces where people are just, you know, running around like they weren't married. You're seeing it more in the modern culture where there's really not a, you know, people aren't like put up as heroes for being fidelity to their marriage and being dedicated to their kids. It's not really as sexy of a thing, you know, as, you know, like, yeah, I moved on. I had to find who I truly was. And again, there's a gender imbalance there, too. A man has an affair, he's a lying scumback.

A woman has an affair, it's the guy's fault most of the time. Well, you know, he pushed her into the arms of another man. She had to figure out who she was. You know, she had to find comfort. She's human, she deserves comfort. If I dared in court to say, well, of course my client slept with his secretary, you know, he needed comfort. He's human. He was on a, he was an eat, pray, love kind of a journey. I'd be held in contempt. But, you know, in the modern time, this is an acceptable argument to make. It's certainly true that for men, infidelity can never be a journey. That's, no, ever. Only women can go on those kinds of journeys. Yeah. In a weird way, I guess I take, I take a weird sort of comfort in the idea that at least a large number of divorces, there's not a clear bad guy. Because then it feels like,

well, as kind of as you pointed out, even if one person in this whole storm had tried to do the right thing, it may have saved the whole thing. But I guess when I get people, people have become nervous. I think one of the reasons they don't want to get married in the first place is they worry that they'll be put in a situation where it could all go to hell totally outside of their control. And they might end up married to some sort of like sociopath without knowing it. And then you can have someone just rip everything away from you with no matter, no matter if you do everything perfectly. Yeah.

And everything they rip could rip from you in a divorce, it's really everything. Like it's the most fundamental things. Like it's when you get to see your children, it's. your finances in a real tangible way. Like, people get broken financially in a divorce, not just even the process of divorce is incredibly expensive, but just cutting everything in half and creating support obligations based on earning capacity. There's so many ways this can go wrong. So marrying someone is such an unbelievable act of faith and trust in the present you, but also the future you. Like, if you get married in your 20s,

you know, will 40-something-year-old you still be the same person or at least grow in similar ways? Like, will you grow in the same direction? Because people have, women and men have midlife crisis and have, you know, just fundamentally shift and change in sometimes really profound ways. And now your destiny is inextricably tied to this person's destiny. And more so, your children who you love more than. than yourself most of the time are tied to this person's destiny too. And this person now knows you better than anyone in the whole world. They know your weak spots. They know what gets to you. I mean, there's nothing more frightening than someone who you've trusted with everything coming at you in the other direction. How often do you think it is that you have a situation where either the man or the woman is just a total villain, a total sociopath? And the other,

other the people, you know, the other party involved really couldn't have done anything to prevent it all from going south. Like, do you think that's a, happens often? You know, those are two distinct questions. So one, I would say, is thankfully, it's infrequent that you have someone who just fundamentally, like, completely fooled a person, like a perfect sociopath, you know, like a malignant narcissist. Um, or who just was totally like a person and then just did this 180. That doesn't happen often. When it does, I think it's, I think more often people don't want to see what's in front of them. So people will come in and they'll say to me, like, I can't believe he's being so petty and vindictive. And I'll say,

well, you know, what was he like during the marriage to people? Well, he was petty and vindictive. I'm like, why would he be any different in the divorce? Like, you're divorcing the person you were married to. So if you're married to a person who's like reasonable, thoughtful, put the kids first, concedes the possibility of their own error, that person when you divorce them is very often exactly that same person. So you're going to have, so like I don't do as many straightforward, you know, reasonable divorces anymore, but that is the majority of divorce. The majority of divorces are people just saying, okay, one or both of us have decided this has to end and let's try to do it in a way that preserves our co-parenting relationship. You don't hear

about that. It's not interesting. Like, I don't get invited to party. but if I got invited to a party and somebody said, what do you do for a living? And I said, I'm a divorce lawyer. They go, oh, my God, you must have such stories. But they don't want the story of, yeah, there were these two people and then they grew apart and ultimately they decided the divorce,

but they've treated each other with respect. They don't want that. They want the one where I'm like, yeah, and then he took a chainsaw and he cut the bed in half. And he said, you can have this half. And that's the story they want to hear. Those are the people that talk about their divorce for the next 15 and 20 years.

Yeah, someone actually took a chainsaw, cut the bed in half. Yeah. You'd be amazed how many things I've had people come in and tell me that they got cut in half, that their spouse left as a symbol of the broken home, a cut in half, whatever. There's so many things.

So here's a broad question. Why do people get divorced? I feel like this is like, what is a woman? Because they don't want to be married anymore. No, why do people get divorced? I think there's a lot of reasons why people get divorced if I was going to take like a big answer for that. I guess on there, Donovan.

I would, yeah. What do you think is the main, what we often hear is that money, is the main reason people get divorced. Is that true in your experience? I don't think that's true at all. That's not true in my experience. I think money is a source of tension between people.

It gives people something to fight over. I will actually say now that I represent people primarily in the high net worth space or even ultra-high-net-worth space, like hundreds of millions of dollars, that the more money people have, the less incentive they have to be reasonable with each other because the money doesn't really mean anything anymore. So if they spend $2 million in council fees, they don't know. care. And if they got an extra million or two in the divorce, they don't really care. Because if you're getting $100 million, getting $102 million isn't going to change your quality of life that much. So I don't

think money conflict is really like the precipitating factor of people's divorces. More commonly, people say infidelity, infidelity, cheating. And cheating is absolutely present in a majority of the cases that come into a divorce lawyer's office in some form, whether it's an emotional affair whether it's a physical affair, whether it's a dalliance or like a long-term affair, like a full relationship, those are very commonly present. But I think it's actually overly simplistic to say that was the cause of the divorce because I think fundamentally marriages and because of disconnection. I think we fall in love very fast. Like love is an emotion and love is a verb. It's an action. So like the emotion of love, you feel very quickly. You feel attraction. You like this person. Everything

they say is funny. They brush past you and it sends a tingle through you. Like, we've all been there. But that's not a real foundation to build something on, you know. And if it causes you to stop seeing this person clearly and talking about important things like shared values, shared upbringing, like what is our worldview and what was it put together by? And, you know, what are our thoughts about faith or what the goal of life is or the meaning of life is? We don't have some commonality towards that. So I think what really happens is we fall out of love the way we go bankrupt, which is very slowly and then all at once. And divorce is what happens when you get to the all at once. But to say that the all, like the infidelity was the cause, no. The disconnections back earlier, that's when you could have steered out of this thing.

by trying to figure out a way to either reconnect or better stay connected. So you think the infidelity is what happens during the free fall, during the all at once? It's done by then, I think. It's done by then. I'm not saying, I've seen a lot of people come back from affairs. That's not something people like to talk about publicly, you know, because in the sort of, again, current climate, current zeitgeist, like you don't, you know, it's not cool to, like, forgive your spouse for an affair. But a lot of couples do work through things like that. They say, yeah, I did some. something really stupid and I shouldn't have and I got distracted. I lost the plot of the story we're writing together and I'm sorry it won't happen again. Like we shouldn't disconnect. Like we should figure out a way to work through this together for the benefit of our children and for the

benefit of each other, you know, and people move on. They go to, you know, they go to counseling or they work with a rabbi or a priest or whoever they're going to work with to like reconnect in real ways. But, you know, it's very easy. Like wouldn't it be great if there's just one thing you could blame everything on. So that's what happens sometimes, is he has an affair, she has an affair. And then that becomes, well, we got divorced because he had an affair. Your marriage had so many problems with it. Like his affair was one of them, but it showed up way after some of these other things.

And your experience, is it men or women that are more likely to have an affair? That's changed a lot in recent years. I've been doing this 25 years, so I've seen a lot of trends in that time. It used to be mostly men having affairs that were the sort of, you know, the precipitating factor of the marriage ending. But I would say in the last five, ten years, a lot more women having, you know, having affairs a lot more. Do they have affairs differently? Is it a different sort of thing? You know, I've been asked that before. I don't really know that I could say that it's that different. I think all affairs are kind of equally ridiculous. I mean, when you see them as a divorce lawyer, you see

them differently. Like, we, we have, like, the text messages that got revealed, you know, and, like, and when you read this stuff, you just kind of look like, we're so ridiculous, like, as a species. We're just so silly. Like, we, we think we're being sexy or we think and it's just preposterous when you read this stuff. But, I mean, I think women, women tend to, in my experience, in my office, the affair is like, okay, I found a soft place to land. Like, I'm leaving, and I've got the next one lined up. Whereas men, a lot of times it's just they, they're being idiots. They're not thinking clearly.

They're just, you know, it's more sexual in nature. It's less about, like, I've had a lot of, because, you know, I represent people who've been cheated on and I represent people who've done the cheating. Like, I represent perpetrators of domestic violence or represent victims of domestic violence. Like, I represent my client. And you very often don't know what's really going on until you've already been retained and then you're in. You know, you're in this case. So you're kind of stuck with your client. And I will say that, you know, I've had a lot of clients that, you know, you spend time with these people and you kind of get it. Like I've had clients who come in and say, yeah, like I had this affair and she found out about it, usually because the iPad, like the I message thing. You know, the kids have an iPad, then you have your iPhone and you don't realize your I message is hooked to your iPad. Now the kid starts seeing text messages from the secret girlfriend. Like, Very common. I feel like Apple was probably responsible for more divorces than they realize. Facebook, too, Instagram, meta. It's really a big tech companies have not been great for marriage.

So these are not evil geniuses having these affairs apparently, that they don't realize? They're just people. They're just people. They're just flawed people. But I'd tell you, I've had a lot of clients in my office who, particularly men, who had affairs. And they're, like, legitimately heartbroken. I mean, they're sitting across me saying, like, this had nothing to do with my wife. And they don't realize how crazy that sounds, you know? Like, I do, because I'm going to have to argue to a judge, so I'm very mindful of how something sounds. But you'll say, what do you mean?

It had nothing to do with your wife. And they're like, I wasn't even thinking about my wife. And I go, well, that's the problem, is you should have been. But they really are sincere when they say, but I really love my wife. I love the family we have together. I love the history we have. I love our children. I love her parents. But I just, we don't have that connection anymore that we had, like a romantic or sexual connection. And, you know, again, I'm not a marriage counselor. I'm not a therapist. But, like, sex is the glue. I mean, you know, what's the difference between a roommate and a spouse, you know? Like, you have a romantic and sexual connection to this person.

And if that's gone completely out of the marriage or it used to be 90% of your relationship and now it's 1%. Like, that's not healthy. That's not a good idea. Like it's not necessarily a human, you know, a human needs not being met there. So I'm not saying the answer is go have an affair. I don't think that's the answer at all. I can tell you from ringside seats, that's actually the worst way to approach that. but acknowledging it's a problem, I think, could be a good start. Yeah, I mean, you say that society we don't like to talk about the possibility of forgiveness after an affair, which is true. I'd say we even less do we like to talk about

what you can do to help affair-proof your marriage. Yeah. What you can do to sort of prevent your spouse from having an affair because if we talk about that, then it sounds like, well, you're victim blaming. Right. So I guess we've already sort of covered this, but what is it, I find having, as a married man myself, the idea of having an affair, I honestly find it mysterious.

Like, I'm not, and I'm sure everybody says that, but it, not only because I love my wife and I would never do that, but also, even on top of that, it's just, this is the thing that ruins everyone's life. You see just what an absolute, how it just lays to waste lives. Everyone involved. Everybody involved. And it's like, it's like, it's. There's nothing in the world less appealing than that.

And yet people do it. It's very common. So what is it that? Well, I think that that's a testament to how deep our desire for connection and romantic and sexual connection is. And I think when you talk to people that have successful marriages, the majority of the time, they still, you know, find, you know, find. Like time to make sure that they're exciting to each other, that they're loving to each other, that they, you know, that they pay attention. You know, a lot of it's about just paying attention.

That talking about, you know, what you need from each other in an honest way, having difficult conversations when you have to, you know, neither dwelling in what's wrong in the relationship nor denying it all the time. Like, I think, you know, look, you're married. you have six kids. Like right now, you're at the stage in life where you guys are just trying to like manage this like massive, you're running a child care center together basically. And just find in the midst of that, you know, some affection and connection and love for each other in some way. Like that's, you know, again, is it sex? Is it attention? Is it compliments? Is it praise?

Like when you talk to men who are happily, successfully married, they'll very often say like, yeah, I make a point of like telling my wife how beautiful she still is and how I would still pick her out of it. Even just now when you were describing your marriage, you're like, well, I wouldn't do that because I'm crazy about my wife and I've got a really great wife. Like, okay, well, you're already, I'm sure you tell her that. You know, I'm sure, you know, the cynical, jaded, you know, Matt Walsh, when he's alone with his wife, is very honest about how lucky he is and how blessed he feels and how, you know, how much he admires the mother she is. Like, these are all, what does it cost to do that, to say that to your spouse? And I think if,

And what does it take for a wife? And again, I've never been a wife. But like, what does it take to make your husband feel smart or sexy? You know, we've created these ridiculous tropes of like the wife who's like, oh, he's such an idiot to the husband. And the husband who's like, oh, I married the most loathsome harpy ever to castrate a man. And this is somehow cute. This is somehow funny. And it's not. It's not. It's a recipe for disaster. Like, talk to. to married people who are happily married. And this is what I said on one of the shows I was on that caught your ire and made your show, which I was, as a fan, stoked when I was mentioned by you. But I said marriage is like the lottery. You're probably not going to win. But if you win, what you win is so good that it's worth buying a ticket. Now, you rightfully and fairly criticized that because, A, the lottery's out of my control, whereas marriage isn't out of my control. It's not completely out of my control. There's parts of it that they're out of my control. And of course, the chances of winning a lottery are infinitesimally smaller than the chances of a

successful marriage. What I meant is that it's so good. It's the jackpot. Like 50% approximately of marriages end in divorce. And you've got to assume there's another at least 10, 20% that are unhappy, but staying together either for economic reasons or because of the kids. That's bad. It's bad numbers. It really is. It doesn't mean you shouldn't get married, but it's bad numbers, you know, it means you should take this seriously. My son, who's 27, got engaged a couple of weeks ago to his longtime girlfriend, and I am cheering for them. Like, I'm glad he's getting married. I think that it is a really, really beautiful thing to do. And if it were, my parents were married for over 50 years until my mom passed away. And their lives were better for the fact

that they were together and loved each other really well. But, you know, is it, like, take it seriously. Take it really seriously. Don't think that this is just a simple thing. Like, oh, yeah, we're madly in love with each other. We like each other now. We've picked each other out of the eight billion people in the world. So all we've got to do now is just sort of ride this thing and it'll be fine. No, no. Like, you have to be vigilant and protect this thing. If you're struggling with collections, medical bills, credit cards, or personal loans, you need to check out PDS debt. PDS debt is an one-stop shop to guide you on your journey to freedom from debt. There's no one-size-fits-all solution to becoming debt-free, which is why PDS debt offers multiple programs and solutions

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Just real quickly, and I ask this because I don't know, you mentioned the 50% divorce statistic. And it seems like it's really difficult to get actual statistics on this. And is the 50% accurate from your- Yeah, 50%. I mean, it's the reason why I'm sticky with this is that when they talk about the divorce rate being over 50%, they're including people who are married multiple times. And when you're married more than once, like second time, third time, the statistics get worse each one. So the divorce rate in subsequent marriages is higher than the divorce rate for first time married people. So when you put all of those together in one category, it skews it upwards. But some of this is just a bunch of people really bad at marriage who keep getting married over and over.

I've done, I had one guy I did four out of his five divorces and three of his prenups. And like, he just kept getting married, you know. And I wanted to say to him, like, I appreciate the sort of annuity that's coming with this, but you're just bad at being married. don't be married. Like, you're not good at it, you know. But again, he kept trying. It's the triumph of faith over reason, I guess. But I think the statistics are tricky. The other problem is, too, is the people who stay married, but legally separate, you know, like a guy goes out for milk and never comes back, and they don't actually divorce. Because the statistics are compiled based on what's called the Certificate of Disolution of Marriage, which is you file with the state

when you finalize a divorce. There's a lot of people that even don't go about getting divorced. They just split. They just move out and that's it. And then there's people that stay together and are pretty miserable, but they never get divorced. So the lowest that the statistic is ever quoted as being for first-time marriage failure is like 43%, which is still really bad. To put it in perspective, Toyota had a car that had like a 0.0001% of the cars. There was a problem with the brake line. They recalled all the cars.

And they said it's going to cost us millions. millions of dollars, but that is too high of a risk. Like, think about this, even if it's 40%, that's a giant number of people with a giant amount of misery. Like, it's a really profound thing to get divorced. I think that's, yeah, even 40%, obviously, is way, way, way too high. The only, uh, the stipulation I always like to make is that, let's say the divorce rate is 40%. It doesn't follow necessarily that your individual risk of getting divorced is 40%. Absolutely. Because there are things that you can do that we've already talked about. There's a ton of things you can do. And just the fact that you ask the question, what can I do to not get divorced or not be in a place

where divorce is anything other than a fleeting thought when I'm angry at my spouse in the moment? And there's plenty you can do. But that's where I've had issue with. with some of the comments you've made publicly about no-fault divorce. Because no-fault divorce feels to me, the criticism of no-fault divorce, feels to me like you're saying we should create barriers to exit. And I think there should be barriers to entry. Because once you're in this situation where one or both of you are out, I don't know how forcing people to stay in that situation or making it more expensive or protracted to get out of the situation that you're in is helpful. But I think there is a logic to saying, hey, this causes a tremendous amount of

pain the way we're doing it right now. There's like a huge fail rate on this technology of marriage, right, this legal status of marriage. So why don't we make like, you know, with guns, people are, oh, we should have a waiting period of X number of days. Well, why don't know a waiting period about getting married? Why don't you have to take a test? with this other person. Why don't you have to sit down? Like, you know, as Catholic, you have to do Precena, you know, and you have to, and what part of Precena is not just talking to a priest, it's talking to married couples. It's talking to, you know, he put the men in a room with a husband and he talks honestly about, yeah, we've been married 25 years and we're in this religious, you know, Catholic marriage, and here's how we maintain it and here's how it's strong, you know, and the women, you know, talk to the women. And then there's, you know, the men maybe talk to the way, like it's a really, there's some education, pre-marital education. You get a learner's person. You get a learner's person. You get a learner's person. before you're allowed to get a driver's license. You have to take a test, then you have to get your learner's permit, then you have to drive for a little while, and they have to take a road test. That's a driver's license. Like this is marriage, nothing. 20 bucks in Nevada and Elvis will marry you.

And it's a legal status. What do you think should be, I was going to mention, as you already did, in the Catholic Church, that's exactly the system that's put in place. I guess you could call it, I don't know if I'd call it a barrier to, entry, but it is, it's a longer entry. You have to walk, you know, you have to complete, it's not so much barriers put in the way, but it's... It's a checklist. It's, it's, it's, I mean, nothing great is ever achieved without having to struggle a little bit, right? And why not make it that, you know, you want this thing, you want all that comes with it? Like, great, you got to do a couple things. You got to learn a little bit about each other. How do you think

that this could, that could work outside of a religious institution? I don't know. You know, I think marriage for the majority of people is not a religious sacrament. I think for the majority of people, it's cultural. And that's the disagreement, you know, you had with Joe Rogan and that I think a lot of people would have when it comes to issues like same-sex marriages. They would say, well, marriage is about a commitment and it's about validating the legitimacy of a relationship. You know, if someone says, oh, this is my girlfriend. It's like, well, she could have been your girlfriend for like a week. It's not serious. Whereas you say, oh, this is my wife. It's like, okay, whoa, that's his wife. Like, that's a big thing. That's a status. Even though someone's your girlfriend for 10 years or someone's your wife for 10 minutes, there may be disparity in how well, you know, this person or how invested in you this person is.

Especially when marriage is so easy to achieve that you can just literally go anybody, you know, and just get married. So I think what does it look like? I don't know. It could be as simple as just encouraging people who successfully are married to, you know, be available to or talk to or have, I mean, I don't know that you can see, I mean, in the current situation, it's, you can't tell anybody to do anything without getting pilloried for it. So I don't really know that if you put any barrier, see, I don't use barrier as a bad thing. I think that, you know, I see a barrier as like something they'll be overcome. It's a hurdle. It's an obstacle. And it's something to be, find a way to climb past or get around. And so this is a challenge, like, accept that challenge. And I,

I just don't know what the formula, the recipe is. I'd like to think that some of the people that are very publicly talking about the virtue of marriage, the value of marriage, like a lot of Jordan Peterson's current work when he talks about marriage, I think is very, very well done. Because he's talking about both the privilege and the challenge and the call to action and the duty and all the things that come with, you know, marriage. And instead of just, we spend so much time, like, talking about the cake and talking about the dress. And it's just another thing for your Instagram profile. It's just another opportunity to performatively, you know, talk about yourself. Like, we've made, we've made this idea that is about joining yourself to another person

so you can create life and sustain life. And we've made it about me, me, me, me. And I don't know how do you do that? How do you turn something that's supposed to be so selfless into something that's even more selfish than being alone? What do you think are the major cultural misconceptions about romance and relationships that have contributed to the decline of marriage? I'll give you one of mine and then I'll hear yours. And there's a lot to choose from. We've already talked about some of them. I think, and I've talked before about this idea

popularized, though not invented, of course, by a lot of the Disney movies that my generation grew up on. But this idea that you got to find your soulmate. You find your soulmate, and then you marry your soulmate, and then you'll be happily ever after. And, you know, the problem with that idea is that it gives you this notion there's one person out there of the $8 billion

who was destined for you and the stars and you have to find that person and if you find them, then everything's going to be fine, it's going to work out. But then it's course like, well, you might end up marrying someone

who's not that one person of $8 billion. And then what happens when you get married and then you actually meet your real soulmate? So what I like to say is that, you know, a soulmate is not someone, you make your soulmate through marriage. You, it's in the act of saying, I do, that you're choosing, you're selecting them and saying to them,

you are my soulmate because I chose you. Right. You are the one because I chose you. It's not, I didn't choose you because you're the one. You're the one because I chose you. And I think when you look at it that way, you're taking more control over your relationship. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that's a, you know, I actually think that a slight variant of that really preserves what is most beautiful in those Disney concepts. Because I would argue that that person is your soulmate then, like, that they are exactly the wonderful, perfect, flawed person they're supposed to be. And they see you as the wonderful, perfect, flawed person that you are. And you're their person. And they're going to commit to you, warts and all. They're going to take the best parts of you and the worst parts of you, and they're going to love you. Like, again, love you as a feeling and love you as a verb. And I think that's like the most beautiful thing. I think is the problem with like the Disney version of romance or why I would call like the rom-com. Like I think rom-coms is like porn for women, you know, and it really is this idea that you'll find

this one and then it'll just stay perfect. It'll start perfect or it'll start with like a little wacky, zany. Oh, it's not going to work out. And then it'll be perfect. And then once it's perfect, it's perfect forever. And only in Titanic did that actually happen because he dies. Like if he'd stayed alive. In six months, she'd have been like, all right, enough painting with the French girls. What are you doing? Come on. Like, like, get a job. You got to get it together. Like, the truth is, the Disney films and all the things, they all end with, like, the kiss and the crescendo of the music, and that it doesn't show you, like, the day-to-day life that is challenging, because the world's coming at you all the time. And kids are amazing, and they solidify your bond, but they're

also super antagonistic to your bond. You can't, you know, just like do whatever you want as a couple anymore. You can't, you know, have sex every time you want to. You can't go on dates as often as you'd like to. You're committed to these kids. And you might have the best plans in the world of what you're going to do. And then one of them gets a vomiting virus. And you're like, all right, that's it. I guess we're not doing that. But again, that can be a beautiful imperfection if we hold it in the right esteem. I think you're absolutely right that we have created this idea of a soulmate, that you're going to meet this person and they're going to be the best friend, best roommate, best conversationalist, best lover, best co-parent, best travel companion, all of it.

And if they get any of it wrong ever, you found the wrong one. You picked the wrong one. The right one might be out there somewhere and it might just be your secretary or it might just be your tennis instructor. And that, to me, that feels really, really unfair to do to people. but we continue to shove it down everybody's throats because it makes for great films, great content. I think you want to believe, you know, but I don't think it's that far of a jump. Like, you know, what you described is not unromantic of a sentiment to say, like, I don't think so. I think it's a very beautiful sentiment because it's acknowledging our imperfection, like the inevitability of our disappointing each other at some point if we're going to be so closely

tied together, but that we're not going to give up. Like, we're not going to give up on each other. We're not going to give up on this, this thing we're building together. And that's a beautiful, beautiful sentiment that is worthy of esteem. Talking about cultural trends. One of the, one of the big ones, of course, is people are getting married a lot later. Significantly later, I think the age of first marriage now for men is 30. 30s. Yeah. It's in the early 30s. Early 30s. And, you know, you go back 100 years. It was probably 10 years younger than that. Totally. So do you think that that is your experience in your profession?

Is that a positive development? Are people less or more likely to get divorced when they get married later? Does it have no effect? I don't know the numbers on that. What I can say is my, from where I'm sitting, you know, from practicing in the court system and exclusively doing, you know, hundreds if not thousands of divorces now. I think the later in life people get married, the more defined sense of self they have, and the more challenging it is for them to unify that self with another person. But when people marry younger,

they're still in that transition stage where they haven't really built who they are yet. and so it presents a different unique kind of challenges. Now, again, like, I think there's a change in when people have children, too. You know, people used to just get married and you'd have kids. Like, if you didn't, I remember my grandmother's saying, because my then wife and I, you know, we were married for like two months and she got pregnant with our son. And I remember, like, people would do the math, you know, they would be looking, I'd be seeing them say, oh, when did you get married?

And when does she do? And I, you know, we've been engaged for two years. But I remember my grandmother's saying to me like, oh, when she was growing up, she was like, if you weren't pregnant within six months of getting married, people want to know why you weren't sleeping together. And you didn't wait until you had like the perfect conditions for the baby to arrive. You were like, yeah, we'll figure it out. Like, we'll figure it out. And that was part of what built the bond between the two of you was overcoming that adversity together and that challenge together. You know, we had nothing when we met each other and now we've built the things that we have. So I think that there is something. lost in getting married later in life, both that you don't have as many opportunities to grow together and endure together through challenging times. And also because you have such a defined sense of self that becomes more and more solidified, a routine that's more and more solidified. You've probably, in the current culture, had a lot more sexual partners prior to marrying. So you're going to be doing a lot of comparing in terms of like your sexual satisfaction.

And there's been a lot of research on that. So I think that these are all factors that play into it. But again, we don't look at it in an honest agenda-free way. Like everybody kind of brings their own, they look at the same set of data and go, oh, this proves that men suck. Oh, no, it proves that you should never get married. No, it proves you should get married much younger. Like, and they're just taking the same data set and just all extrapolating from it whatever point they want to make. Like, their prejudgment of what the outcome should be, they find data in that. pool to support it. But I don't think it's an honest enterprise. Well, you know my spiel on this if you

listen to the show about getting married young. Yes. I probably talk about it quite frequently. Yes. But what you just said there about not having not having your own, for me, one of the big things is when you get married young, you don't have your own stuff yet. Like you don't have, when I got married to my wife, we didn't have, you know, I didn't, I had $5 or something in the bank account. I didn't have any property or anything. And so now there's not what I hear from a lot of married couples, but there's this tension of, this is my money, this is my stuff. And I don't, that's not something we really struggle with because I don't, everything that we have, we got together. And so for me to look at any of it, like for me to look at my house and say, well, this is my

house. It's just sort of absurd. Like, what do you mean? It's just mine. We all live here. Or the money in particular. Like, it's not just my money. But that's because you were at a completely different place. I mean, if you, by some, in some alternate universe, built the things you built today, and then you met your wife, you know, and you know and have said very clearly, like, you wouldn't be where you are. You wouldn't have done the things you did if it wasn't for her being part of your life. So that's amazing. And that's wondering. And there's a lot of people that would say, I wouldn't have all the wonderful things I have if it wasn't for my spouse. I wouldn't, you know, I say it about my ex-wife. To this day, we've been divorced for 15 years, and I still say everything I have, I wouldn't have

if it wasn't for her. She was with me during the hardest times, and she'll always be family to me. She'll always be someone who's important to me. She'll always, I'll always have her back because of that. We always will have a lot of love for each other because of that. But the truth is that, you know, if you had all the things you have now and then you met your wife and you're married for five or six years and then you're splitting up, is she entitled the half of all of it? Like, that's an interesting question. At what point do your successes become your own? I mean, that's the challenge, right? Like, you wouldn't have what you have if it wasn't for your wife. Well, your wife wouldn't be who she is if it wasn't for her dad. So, and her dad wouldn't be who she is.

or who he is if it wasn't for his father. So does her grandfather, should you give him like half your stuff if he needed it? Like, yes, there's value to family. Of course. Like, you owe her parents a certain debt of gratitude and respect and you want to be there for them. You've joined our families together. But do you owe them what you've built because they helped build her and she helped build you? Like, how far out does this succession chain go? And how much do you owe? And again, reasonable minds could disagree. reasonable minds could say, no, no, the minute you marry somebody, everything should be equal. But I guess what's baffling to me as a divorce lawyer is no one explains this rule set to you before you get married. Nobody explains to you that conundrum, that question of like when does it become ours as opposed to, you know, what if you had the opposite spouse?

What if everything you accomplished you accomplished in spite of this person? What if this person said to you, you know what, man, no one cares what your point of view is? Like, get a job, man. Get out to Home Depot and get a job. Like, this sitting in your car talking to yourself is weird, and it's never going anywhere. And then it does go somewhere. Do you owe her half? Did you succeed because of her in spite of her? And then the question becomes, what do you owe? And by the way, who's the one to decide? The legislature? People that work at the DMV, they're going to get to decide how much I owe someone and how what we built is a we versus a me? Like, that's, True, that's why I was talking about prenups. I like prenups. Because prenups is a couple saying we know better than the government. We know better than the government. We know our rules.

Like, we have a right to our rules. Listen, you want to wear a mask for the next five years? Cool. You have the right to. If you want to in your home with your family, yeah, man, that's your right. And we all have the right to make rules that match up with our specific view. So why can't a couple that's decided they're going to join their lives and build family together? Why can't they make the rule set that they're agreeing to at the beginning of this thing?

And then they play the whole thing out with that rule set in mind. I like that idea. I think there's a lot of autonomy and agency. And it's like a libertarian thing to do to say, hey, you know, we're not going to let the government decide what we owe each other. We're going to decide what we owe each other now. advance. What's um my most prize you learn we don't have a pre-up and uh I wouldn't have gotten one and I've been generally opposed to them. Um and the reason I want to get your take on this I guess for me whatever I'm not as worried about the exit plan because um I don't go into a marriage

planning to leave it you know this is we we do make a lifelong commitment, and I realize that 40% of people don't follow that commitment, but when I say I do, you know, sickness and health till death to his part, that either means something to you or it doesn't. And so my challenge is, if I'm saying that, if I'm saying till death do I part, I promise you. And yet we've already had a conversation, but if we break up, here's what we're going to do, then I don't know how both of those can exist at the same time, because I clearly am not quite, I didn't quite believe it when I said till death does part, because I do see this other possibility.

That's fair. That's a fair comment. But what I'll say is this, all marriages end. They end in death or divorce, but they all end. Your marriage will end, I promise. I hope it ends in death. That's a weird thing to say to someone. Like, I hope that ends in death.

But I hope your marriage ends in death. I hope you stay together and it's till death do us part. But you will part. You will do, your marriage will end. Marriage is end. They end in death or divorce. But the pre-nup doesn't come in. But a pre-nup does not, look, I think the reality is there is a rule set governing your marriage.

There is. Whether you like it or not, there's a rule set that governs your marriage. And there are legal protections in place for you and for your wife and for your children. You didn't write them. You don't even necessarily know what they are. You don't really care because you're happily married. And you're like, it doesn't matter. I don't care what those rules are.

I'm never going to play that game. So I don't care what those rules are. But look, the truth is the statistics for marriage are quite grim. And I don't think if you and your wife had agreed on a rule set at the beginning of the marriage, that it would have doomed your marriage. I don't think that you're staying married to your wife or she's staying married to you because you know it would be financially disadvantageous for the two of you to split up. I don't think it enters into your mind.

And I actually think there's value in. having your spouse know that, you know what? Like, like, you've built success and you built it alongside your wife and your marriage. Okay. If she left tomorrow, she'll be fine. The law protects her. She's going to get a whole bunch of lovely assets and, you know, she's going to be able to have a good life. She's not leaving, though. And that must feel good because that tells you that she's not leaving because she's not cashing out. She's staying. She's like, no, I'll stick with this guy, right? I mean, that to me is part of the value of something like a prenupt. agreement because what you're saying is, look, you shouldn't stay with me because you're afraid of

getting divorced from me. You should stay with me because you want to be married to me. Your life is better because we're married to each other. My life is better because we're married to each other. So I don't think that pretending that there is not a possibility that your spouse or partner could fail in or abandon their commitment to you and having some rule set in place for if God forbid that happens. Like, I hope you don't ever die young, but I hope you have life insurance. You've got six kids. Like, so you have it.

And it's not committing yourself to the fact you're going to die soon or young or that you need. But you have it just in case. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that just in case. I don't think that that, I don't act more reckless because I have life insurance. I don't go skydiving because I've got insurance or who cares. Like, you don't go skydiving because you don't want to go skydiving. You don't want to risk your life. Your life's too much fun.

or you love it too much. Yeah, I think the argument for a pre-up that I could personally find potentially compelling, although I still wouldn't want one for myself. It's too late anyway, right? But I guess this is a question of, does the pre-up disincentivized divorce more than not having one? Because that's the other concern

that I know people on my side of this discussion have about pre-up is that are you, in some ways, not just acknowledging the possibility, but also in some ways incentivizing divorce or making it sort of easier as an escape hatch. Yeah. Or, but you could also make the argument, I have heard some people make the argument that, well, actually having the pre-nup is a disincentive for divorce in some circumstances. What do you think?

You know, I think one of the places where you and I have an overlapping logic is we both like reality. I just like living in reality. like to know what the rules are. I like to know, I think there's value in living in reality, like being honest about what's really going on. And I just think knowing the rules that govern this incredibly important, if not the most important relationship in your life, knowing what those rules are and not letting it be subject to change by judges who are elected in a popularity contest, like letting them decide what governs your marriage in the event

it was to split up? Like, that seems just insane to me. And I, yeah, is it make it easier to divorce? It does. It does. It will make a lot less money for me. If people went out and had pre-ups, when I do a divorce and someone's got a pre-nup, I'm not making very much money on that divorce. I might make $5, $10,000 on that divorce. but a litigated divorce, $25,000 retainer. I've had clients who paid me $2, $3 million in counsel fees for their case. Because that's what divorces are insanely expensive, insanely expensive. I'm $750 an hour, and I'm nowhere near the most expensive person in New York.

Like, I have colleagues who are $1,800, $1,800 an hour. And, you know, great lawyers. But, like, to say that, yeah, will it make it easier to divorce? I guess it would. It would make it less expensive. to divorce. It would make it less expensive in terms of the council fees. But if the only thing that is keeping you from getting divorced is that, well, it would be kind of difficult. I don't know what what does that say about your commitment to your marriage? Like, I don't think you're not getting

divorced because it's, you know, really expensive and kind of awful to go through a divorce. You're hopefully married because your life is better. You made a commitment. You take that commitment seriously. And ultimately, you believe your life is better, you know, because of that marriage and because of your commitment to it. So I just don't think that, I think the pros outweigh the cons. I think the ways it could improve how people feel about a marriage and how they feel in the marriage outweigh the, I don't know, if there's a temptation to get divorced because it's easy to get divorced, like what does that say about the quality of the marriage? It certainly doesn't say anything great about the marriage. The last thing,

I think I'll say about this. I'll let you have the last word on a pre-nop. If you get to a point, I totally agree with you, if you get to a point where the only thing keeping you from getting divorced is how miserable the process will be, then you're in rough shape. Then you're in a dire situation in your marriage. That's like red alert. The ship... You played a clip from, in your show, a couple months back, you played a clip from some either former adult film star or some music. I don't remember what it was. It was a woman. And she was talking about how, like, ladies like get divorced. It's like, come on.

Like if what, because you don't want to do the paperwork? Right. Oh yeah. And you were like mocking the fact that you were like, yeah, that's what's keeping people from getting divorced is the paperwork. Like it, and this is your commitment to your marriage is like, well, you know, I'm not committed to the marriage, but I don't want to do any paperwork. Like this is how shallow you're at this person. That's why if you, right, if you get to that point, very bad situation. All right. but if that's all you have,

if that's like the last line of defense, there are much better reasons to stay in a marriage, much better reasons. Much better. But if you get up to that line and that stops you, and maybe you don't want to live there. Now, if you're living on that line for 50 years of a marriage, that's a miserable time.

But maybe it stops you and you turn back around and you find a better reason to stay married. look a little bit like, you know, as a Christian myself, you don't want your, the thing that drives you in life shouldn't be the fear of hell. Like that shouldn't be, it should be more love of God and desire to be with God in eternity. But if you get to a point where the fear of hell is what stops you for, if that's like the last line of defense and that stops you from committing whatever terrible sin, then it's better than not having that fear. And then maybe that'll stop you. you'll turn back around and you'll find a better motivation.

I look at that sort of the same in marriage. So I've never gotten close to that line where that's the thing that stops me. But maybe it's better to have it than not. I don't disagree that there is some additional incentive. But I believe, you know, act as if you had faith and faith will be given to you. I think that when you have, like faith, my feeling toward faith is that the questioning is part of having faith. Like, part of having faith is not being certain and giving those questions over to God or saying, like, you know, I don't know what I believe. Like, and I want to be wrong.

Like, I want the part of me that doesn't believe to be wrong. Like, I want to believe that it's wrong. And I think the same thing can be said for marriage. Like, there's a part of anyone that goes, like, what would my life have been if I hadn't tied myself to this person? Or what would my life be like if I, if I didn't, wasn't responsible for anyone right now? If I had all the beautiful things that I have in life that my spouse helped build with me and incentivized it. But if I had all of them, but I didn't have this person. And I think, you know, sometimes, ideally the answer is it would be empty because it doesn't mean as much.

Like, I want this person more than I want anything. But I do think that sometimes, like, it's worth, you know, remember. the way you scale priorities is by looking at what is the cost of a thing. So I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I just think that all a pre-up is doing at its core is taking an existing rule set that applies to your marriage. And instead of having the government make it and change it whenever it feels like it, it's a rule set that you and your spouse have come up with. And I like that. I tend to prefer things that the invested parties put together more than government institutions and politicians. Let me ask you a sort of a wrap up here.

Just to make it more specific, what do you think, we'll start with women. We've talked about in general what spouses can do to keep their marriages, to avoid having to visit you. Yeah. So what could a, what should women do specifically? Sex. Sex. Yeah, it's just sex. Yeah, no, I hate to say it, but I think that's a huge piece. I, I, the most common thing I hear from men is that their wife stopped sleeping with them, stopped being intimate with them, playful with them in a sexual way. Like, there is a tremendous, you know, amount of before marriage, women are very much. more so than ever, encouraged to be objects of desire and to use their sexuality to entice a partner. And then there is a equal, if not heavier opposite encouragement about like, you don't owe your spouse sex. You're right. You don't. You don't owe your spouse sex. They don't owe you compliments or a kind word.

Like you don't really owe each other any of that. But why did you get? married. Like if you, this isn't about what you owe each other. This is about what gives this other person joy and inspires the best in them and vice versa. And how can we do that? Because that same cycle of misery that people experience that lands in my office, which is, you know, like, well, why should we, why should I, why should I, why should I, you know, he was working all the time this week. Well, you know, she said, why should I, you don't want to come home when I come home all she does is complains to me. That cycle of misery, it can also go the other way. Like, just be kind to your spouse, be, you know, be sweet to your spouse, be sensual to your spouse, always lovely things

that you were to each other when you were dating, when it wasn't like locked in and now, well, this is my person. I don't have to tend to this anymore. You know, that's like saying, like, oh, well, this is my house. I don't have to take care of it anymore. I bought it already. Okay, well, yeah, you bought it. You invested in it. It's yours. Like, treat it with respect and love and, like, treat it, like, always be closing. You know, like, you should always be trying to, like, close the deal with your wife. Like, you're playing above the wrist. You're. You're playing above the you know, she is too. Like, you're both lucky to have each other. So why wouldn't you treat each other like that? Like, why wouldn't you treat each other like, I've got this thing and it was

loaned to me. It's not mine. I don't own it. It was alone from God. It was alone from the universe. And I get to continue every day to like have this person's affection and attention. And I want to treat them with that same affection and attention. So for men, a lot of them at sex. Yeah, they love, you know, this is why prostitution is such a thing. It's why infidelity is such a thing. Sex is important. It's important to women, too, but it is very important to men. And women, in my experience, it's not that different. It's just attention and affection. You know, it's attention and affection. It's, it's, I'm trying to think of a cleaned up way to tell a story from my book, but there's a story in my book about when I was talking to a female client of mine,

and I said to her, was there a moment where you knew your marriage was over? And she's talking about how there was a type of granola that she liked to put in her yogurt for breakfast. And it was only, like, sold at this one store. And she said, our husband used to always just get it for. Like, just when it would just about be empty the bag, it would just be a full bag. And she's like, it always made me feel loved. Like it always made me feel appreciated that I didn't have to ask him and that he didn't even ask for like credit for it. Like, oh, did you see? I got your granola. Like it was just this thing he did. It was just like bringing in the trash or something. It was like something he did as just a sign. And she said one day the granola ran out. And she was like, I thought, well, maybe he's busy.

He didn't notice or whatever. And then she sort of like left the bag in there, the empty bag. And they never replaced it. And she said, I thought to myself, is this thing like on its way out? And I remember finding that story like quite sad because I thought, well, you know, like there are those little things that we do for each other that somehow you just stop doing, you know, and they're really the thing that is so special and so important. And I said to her, is there anything you did for him? And she, she kind of blurted out an explicit act that she used to do with him pretty frequently and how she'd stopped. And I spit out my coffee across the courthouse waiting room. So that stopped right around the time of the granola? There was a, yeah. Yeah, well, and she said, like, I, she said, you know, we used to, like, have a very physical relationship. And then, you know, like, we had the kids and we didn't have as much time. And, you know, she's like, we used to like sometimes in the morning before he'd go off to work, I would just, like, have a little fun thing with him. And she said, you know, and then it got to the point where I was like, well, you know, we'll do it tonight

when the kids are, you know, and then we'll both enjoy it and we'll both have fun. So, and then, you know, sometimes, like, we'd be tired and it wouldn't happen or whatever. And she's like, I don't know why I stopped. Like, I don't know why I didn't just, she's like, it's like, take like five minutes in the morning and he'd be in a great mood all day and he'd be texted me like, oh, this morning was so hot. It was so great. And she was like, yeah, that was my granola, I guess. Like, that was what I, it was something that made him feel special. It made him feel valued. It made him feel like I was committed to him. And so, like, what if it's that simple? Like, what if it's that simple? What if it's just leaving your wife a note before you leave for work that

says, I married the prettiest girl in the world? See you later. Like, what if it's just that? Like, yeah, there's no product you have to buy. Like advertisers will never jump all over it because it's like not a thing, a course you can take. What if it's just pay attention, just be kind to this person, treat them with love. Like, treat them like you're cheering for them. You know, what if it's that simple? I don't know.

I think it might be. From what I see, from the seat I'm in, watching these people just crush each other in courtrooms and tear apart their lives and the lives of their children? Like, what if it's just granola? What if it's just little acts of kindness? There's a YouTube video I saw years ago, and I can't remember who the guy was. But I think about it sometimes before I was even married, but the guy I was talking about, and I was never sure, it resonates with me a lot. And I don't know, I guess it resonates with marriages generally. But he was talking about the same. issue. What can women do? What can men do and what can women do to prevent the divorce?

And one thing you said is that for women, you know, sex was the first thing you said. The second thing was taking your husband's goals and dreams seriously. Yeah. Taking him seriously and taking his goals in life seriously. And cheering for him. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, cheering for him. Like, I think A lot of men I know who are in happy marriages, and there's not a lot of them, but the ones that I know that are in happy marriages, like when you watch their wife watching them when they're talking, it's like she's looking at him like just the most brilliant stuff is coming out of his mouth. And there's just this sense of like, wow, like she's like cheering for this guy. Like she believes in him. you know, and that makes a man stand taller, you know. I think when you talk to men who've had affairs,

which I've had a lot of conversations, men have had affairs, a lot of them say, like, I've had a couple clients who didn't even actually have sex with the person who they were having an affair with. They just solved some problems for them. I had a client who, he had three women who he was, like, just helping them with, like, things, financial things or, like, helping them figure out some problem that they had. And I was like, what? You really weren't sleeping with this person? And he was like, no, I never, you know. He's like, I just wanted to feel like a hero.

Like, I wanted to feel like, he's like there's something about to like a heterosexual man, like the feeling of a woman being like, you're my hero. Like, look at that. Like, look at you. Like, come on. Why do you think we like to open the pickle jar? You know, it's like, and they just like, oh! And we're like, we did this.

You know, like, it's a real thing. So why, like, maybe this is just part of being human. is that like maybe men we just like that. We like to feel like we're a big, strong man. And so, okay, so humor me. You know, humor me. Throw me a bone with that. Like, why not, what's that cost? Like, what does it really cost to praise me when I open the pickle jar? What is it cost to tell your spouse they're beautiful or that they're funny or that they're smart or that they're a great mom or that whatever? Just that you're happy that you pick them, that you'd still pick them. You know, if you're still in a room with a bunch of people, they're still the one you'd pick. Like,

What does it cost nothing? Cost nothing. And the dividends, I think, that can pay, anyone would acknowledge anyone. It's why when you say to someone, even the most unhappily married couple, tell me about when you met, they just soften completely. You ever go to a dinner party and like, there's a couple that's like maybe they got in a fight on the drive over. There's an iciness between them. If you just go like, oh, tell me the story, how the two of you met? The whole thing, their whole demeanor changes because it takes them back to that time when they were, seeing each other with the eyes of someone who like, I'm cheering for you and you're cheering for me and we're in this thing.

So the last question. Do you have any, do you have hope for the institution of marriage in the future? Do you have hope that eventually you'll be out of a job or at least? I hope I'll retire. Yeah, before you have. I don't have as much work to do. Yeah. I'd love to be out of a job.

I'd find something else to do. I do have hope for the future of marriage. I do. I think that, you know, the statistic I always talk about, that people don't quote as often, is that approximately 50 to 56% of marriages end in divorce, but 86% of people are remarried within three years of their divorce. So think about what that says. That tells you people that did this thing and saw it go down in some version of flames, sign back up for it. 86% within three years. That tells you everything you need to know about how much we want this kind of specific relationship. This man and woman bond as a pair, two of us together.

Like that's how big this is. So I have a lot of faith in the possibility of it being better. Like one of the things I admire in my sons in their 20s, like their generation, is the way they came up with things like Uber is by going, well, why can't we do it different? like why can't we you know like traditions are important but traditions are also pure pressure exerted by dead people so like why not ask questions and say well why do we do it that way and very often there'll be a good answer but sometimes the answer is i don't know i just because that's how my grandfather did it and that's how his grandfather did it and it's like okay but they lived in a different world they didn't have you know

the entire of human civilization's knowledge in their hand you know that they could press a couple buttons and listen to every song that was ever written. Like, things have changed. So maybe there are ways for us to, as a society, like, do it better. Like, I think there are because it's important enough. But we got to find a way to, like, get people to buy in. I mean, this is something that I genuinely believe, whatever party lines you belong to, whatever you think.

Like, I just think this is something we can all find some commonality in. Like, it really is the desire to make marriage work. I just can't imagine anybody openly admitting that they're anti-good marriages, you know, or the proliferation of good marriages. I think there's a lot of people that are subterfuging, you know, the conditions that make for good marriages. But I don't think there's a lot of people that would say, like, oh, yeah, I'm really trying to screw up marriages out there. Like, I don't make it rain. I'd sell the umbrella.

but I'd love it if I went out of business. Well, we'll end on that hopeful note. We don't do that a lot around these parts, but I think that's important. It's more like a Michael Knowles thing. Yeah, it is. It is. He's more the cheerful one. But James Sexton really appreciate the company. Absolutely a pleasure.