Divorce Expert: Slippage Is Tearing Marriages Apart! If Kids Are Your Priority You’ll Divorce!
James Sexton (guest), Steven Bartlett (host), Narrator, Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of The Diary of a CEO, featuring James Sexton and Steven Bartlett, Divorce Expert: Slippage Is Tearing Marriages Apart! If Kids Are Your Priority You’ll Divorce! explores divorce Lawyer Reveals How Slippage Quietly Destroys Modern Marriages And Families James Sexton, a veteran high‑net‑worth divorce lawyer and former hospice volunteer, explains why most marriages fail not from dramatic betrayal but from unnoticed ‘slippage’—a gradual loss of attention to the self, the partner, and the relationship. He argues that marriage is an inherently dangerous legal construct largely unrelated to love, while having children is an even riskier, poorly understood commitment with massive emotional and financial stakes.
Divorce Lawyer Reveals How Slippage Quietly Destroys Modern Marriages And Families
James Sexton, a veteran high‑net‑worth divorce lawyer and former hospice volunteer, explains why most marriages fail not from dramatic betrayal but from unnoticed ‘slippage’—a gradual loss of attention to the self, the partner, and the relationship. He argues that marriage is an inherently dangerous legal construct largely unrelated to love, while having children is an even riskier, poorly understood commitment with massive emotional and financial stakes.
Drawing on thousands of divorces and years spent with the dying, he connects relationship breakdowns to our wider denial of endings, death, and uncertainty, and to the way social media and cultural myths sell us stylized fantasies of love, sex, weddings, and parenting. Sexton contends that obsession with children, money conflicts, unspoken sexual dissatisfaction, and the constant comparison culture are pushing couples into his office.
He offers a counter‑approach: radical honesty, proactive communication, conscious acceptance of impermanence, and “paying attention to the you, the me, and the we” as the core practices that keep love alive—even if you never legally marry. Ultimately, he sees life and love as unwinnable but deeply worthwhile games, where the hard thing and the right thing are usually the same.
Key Takeaways
Slippage, not sudden betrayal, is the main killer of marriages.
Sexton defines slippage as the accumulation of tiny, unaddressed neglects—missing small moments, not ‘watering the plant,’ failing to check when you’ve ‘lost the plot. ...
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Avoiding hard conversations guarantees bigger pain later.
Sexton’s core life thesis is that the hard thing and the right thing are usually the same. ...
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We are disastrously unprepared for endings—both divorce and death.
Having grown up with a mother who repeatedly ‘had six months to live’ and later spent years as a hospice volunteer, Sexton argues that Western culture hides death and divorce as if not speaking of them will prevent them. ...
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Marriage is a dangerous legal product with a terrible failure rate.
Sexton distinguishes between love, weddings, and the legal contract of marriage. ...
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Children are often weaponized—and child worship quietly destroys couples.
Having a child with someone, Sexton says, is far riskier than marrying them. ...
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Sex matters enormously, but couples sabotage it with ‘greatest hits’ routines and silence.
In a long‑term relationship, partners gradually optimize for efficiency—only doing what worked before—until sex becomes a rigid, predictable ‘setlist. ...
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Comparison culture and performative perfection corrode real relationships.
From wedding-industrial excess to #blessed Instagram couples and overly curated parenting content, Sexton argues that we compare our messy ‘gag reel’ to everyone else’s highlight reel. ...
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Notable Quotes
“Every single marriage ends in death or divorce, but it ends.”
— James Sexton
“The hard thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing.”
— James Sexton
“We travel very, very far to find a joy and a wisdom that’s inside all of us.”
— James Sexton
“You’re about to do something incredibly dangerous that fails so much of the time, and I think it has almost nothing to do with love.”
— James Sexton
“If you say the greatest thing you ever did was have children, that’s the ideology of a virus or a cancer cell—growth for the sake of growth.”
— James Sexton
Questions Answered in This Episode
You argue that making children the center of your identity pushes couples toward divorce. How can parents practically recalibrate that balance without feeling like they’re betraying their kids or becoming ‘selfish’?
James Sexton, a veteran high‑net‑worth divorce lawyer and former hospice volunteer, explains why most marriages fail not from dramatic betrayal but from unnoticed ‘slippage’—a gradual loss of attention to the self, the partner, and the relationship. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In your Frankfurt story, you reframed an unwanted disruption into one of your best life memories. How can someone in the middle of a devastating divorce actually apply that perspective when their ‘flight’ has just been canceled?
Drawing on thousands of divorces and years spent with the dying, he connects relationship breakdowns to our wider denial of endings, death, and uncertainty, and to the way social media and cultural myths sell us stylized fantasies of love, sex, weddings, and parenting. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You’ve seen thousands of divorces and one seemingly magical 28‑year marriage. If you had to reverse‑engineer that couple into a ‘protocol,’ what concrete behaviors or habits should other couples adopt or avoid?
He offers a counter‑approach: radical honesty, proactive communication, conscious acceptance of impermanence, and “paying attention to the you, the me, and the we” as the core practices that keep love alive—even if you never legally marry. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You’re critical of how social media and porn shape our expectations of sex and relationships, yet you also use media to share your ideas. Where do you personally draw the ethical line between helpful realism and content that fuels comparison and dissatisfaction?
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If lawmakers gave you 10 minutes to redesign one part of marriage or divorce law to reduce suffering—whether around prenups, child support, or custody—what specific legal change would you advocate for first, and why?
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Transcript Preview
Every single marriage ends in death or divorce, but it ends. But the majority of them end because of slippage.
And what does slippage mean?
Slippage is... James Sexton is back. The world's leading divorce lawyer.
With over two decades of experience, he offers practical, no-nonsense advice for maintaining healthy relationships.
We live in a society that presumes marriage is a good idea. You're about to do something incredibly dangerous that fails so much of the time, and I think it has almost nothing to do with love. But if you get married, here's what I will tell you. Have you talked about a prenup? Getting married without one is a fairly risky activity. But the truth is, is having a child with someone is the most risky activity in relationships. There's so much stuff a person can do to torture you if they have a kid with you. And what I'll tell you is, the people who are obsessed with their children stop paying attention to their partner, which leads you right to my office.
Okay. So, if you were to give me one piece of advice to prevent me and my partner ever ending up in your consultation room?
If there's a core message to my approach to relationships, it is... That'd be the only advice I'd ever give to anybody.
James, if you think about the divorces you've seen in court, was there ever a case that broke your heart?
Yeah. It was a case that I won that I should've lost. I remember looking at the judge and thinking like, "You're letting this happen. She's gonna lose 'cause she's poor and she can't afford a lawyer, and he's gonna win because he can afford a lawyer that knows how to put a document into evidence," and there's something really wrong about that.
This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like this show and you like what we do here and you wanna support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is, if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. James, our last conversation, I think, did almost 10 million downloads and views across platforms. And I can't imagine the amount of messages you get on a daily, weekly, monthly basis from people that are interested in the subject of divorce, but also the sort of interconnected subjects of love and, and marriage and all of these things. When people contact you, what do they typically say?
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