Divorce Lawyer Reveals Harsh Truths About Love & Marriage - James Sexton

Why are so many marriages failing today?

It's a, it's the, that's the billion-dollar question, I think, you know? And, and I think, I think there's a simple answer and then I think there's a complicated answer. I think the simple answer is people disconnect, and, and I think that's the simple answer. But drilling down into that, why do they disconnect, you know? That's the bigger thing. People say to me all the time, you know, like, "Oh, we're splitting up because he's sleeping with his secretary," or, "We're splitting up because she spends all my money and she's, you know, impossible and she's dishonest with me about things." And really, you know, that's the marriage killer, right? That final nail in the coffin. But when you sit down with people and you talk to them about how did they get to that point, you know, where sleeping with your secretary was anything but a remote thought that might cross your mind, you know, when you saw her by the copier, or, you know, when, when being dishonest about the finances in the family was just something that you, "Oh, I would never do that," like when did we get there that, that suddenly that was on the table? That's the more interesting question. And, and, and in my experience of 23 years of, of being on the end of it, you know, being in the... people are in my office, it's done now, the thing is dead, you know? It's like I'm the guy burying it. When, when you talk to those people, you hear about a lot of small disconnections that led them to the final disconnection. So I think the answer is disconnection, and the question of how do people disconnect is very slowly and then all at once.

It's interesting to think how important communication is, that if that begins to break down and if you start to have small secrets and, "Ah, god, if I say this to her, she's just gonna chew my ear off again. I don't wanna have a fight tonight," which causes you to hold things back, which causes her to feel disconnected, which causes her to hold things back, which da-da-da-da-da-da...

So, so many of your past guests, if you distill what they have to say about how to live your life to, like, the, the, the key concept, it's actually the same as what I would say, which is the hard thing to do and the right thing to do are almost always the same thing. Almost always. So David Goggins will tell you, you know, yeah, the hard thing to do is to go out and run a bunch and do a million push-ups. Or Jocko will tell you, you know, the hard thing to do is to just get up and get after it. But it's the right thing to do, you know, trading what you want now for what you want most. Look, none of us wants to have an uncomfortable conversation with our romantic partner. When we're with our romantic partner, we wanna have fun, we wanna have sex, we wanna have closeness and warmth and all the good stuff, right? But look, you know, you, you can't have chocolate cake all the time, you know? Like, it's... what makes chocolate cake so special is that you have it on special occasions. So you really have to, to treat your relationship with the kind of respect it deserves, and the respect it deserves is, is the respect to not always do what feels good in the relationship but sometimes do what's necessary in the relationship. You know, you wouldn't parent your children, you know, or, or if you did parent your children, irresponsibly. You know, Jordan Peterson would pummel you if you said, "Well, anytime my child's unhappy with something, I stop doing the thing." Okay, well, then you're a terrible parent. So, realistically, what you have to do is say, "Okay, I know we don't wanna do this right now, but we gotta do this right now." And sometimes having those challenging conversations with your partner early on, you know, early on in the problem when it's just still a little smoke and not a fire, that's really, I think, when we have to have the, the foresight and the strategy and the thoughtfulness to do it. And look, that's something that, you know, in, in traditional gender roles, you know, a man is a hero because he takes on the task that other people don't wanna do. He's selfless, you know, he's heroic, he steps up. He's scared, but he does it anyway, you know? It's... if, if you're not scared, it's not brave. It's only brave if you're scared. So yeah, I don't wanna ruin this lovely day I would like to have with my romantic partner. But you know what? I want a long-term, strong, happy relationship with this person, so I have to have the strength to say no or the strength to say, "Yeah, what you did was not okay," and we have to talk about why that's not okay and how we're not gonna do it again. And, and I'd like to think that our romantic partners will be intelligent enough to see our desire to walk into conflict of that kind as a sign of how seriously we take the relationship, and maybe we need to remind our partner of that. You know, maybe we need to remind the woman in our life that, "Hey, listen, I love you enough to disagree with you. I love you enough to tell you the truth." You know? I'd rather have an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable lie. And I think most women would too in their romantic relationship.