The Divorce Expert: Slippage Is Tearing Marriages Apart! If Kids Are Your Top Priority & You Spot This You’ll Divorce In 1-3 Years!

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And with most episodes under five minutes long, staying informed has never been easier. Listen and subscribe to Thoughts on the Market, wherever you get your podcasts. Every single marriage ends in death or divorce. It ends, but the majority of them end because of slippage.

And what does slippage mean? Slippage is... James Acton 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 at the time. And I think it has almost nothing to do with love.

But if you get married, there'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 to get 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 want 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, 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 have lost. I remember looking at the judge and thinking, like, if letting this happen, she's going to lose because she's poor, and she can't afford a lawyer, and he's going to win because he can't afford a lawyer that knows how to put a document into evidence. And there's something really wrong about that. James, our 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 marriage and all of these things.

When people contact you, what do they typically say? You're absolutely right. I mean, the number of people that contacted me after our conversation exponentially increased. It also very much broadened the palette of things people contacted me about.

So a lot of my prior work, a lot of my writing prior to our first conversation was very much tied to just relationship issues, divorce-related issues. So I get a lot of messages from people saying, I'm going through a terrible divorce. I'm dealing with this situation. You know, even though you can't represent me because I'm in a different state or a different country, could you give me some general advice?

So people would reach out with very specific to my career topics. I got a lot of people talking to me about the conversation we had about our dogs and about loss and about the nature of, you know, aging and endings and whether it's the ending of a marriage or the ending of a dog's life or our own lives and how the loss of our pets, you know, brings us more sharply into focus about the mortality of everything around us. So, yeah, I mostly get people saying, oh, you gave voice to something that I felt and it was meaningful to me to do that. And I try to write people back and just say, you know, very briefly, like I'm so glad that something in my perspective resonated with you.

If there was one message that you could give to everyone that messages you, so one single message, it was a broadcast message, and you had to send it to everybody that's messaged you about all of these interconnected subjects, but you could only say a couple of sentences and you think it's the couple of sentences that would most serve all of them in one go, regardless of what their issues are, because it's a fundamental message about love and marriage and divorce and all these things. What would that message be? I mean, I've always said that I think the core truth I've learned in my life is that the hard thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing. So I would often challenge anybody who reaches out to me about anything that they're struggling with, I would say to them that what is the hard thing to do in this situation, because that's probably the right thing to do.

The other thing I would say is that although I really appreciate that someone would reach out to me in the hopes that I could give them some answer, I pretty strongly believe that the only zen you find on mountaintops is the zen you brought up there. And so I think a lot of the truth we know, when we hear someone say it out loud, it resonates in a way, but it's because we knew it was true. We already knew it was true. Maybe that person gave voice to it.

When you said the thing about zen on mountaintops, can you say that again? What did you mean? Yeah, I mean, you can also parse it as the only wisdom we find on mountaintops is the wisdom that we brought up there. There's all of these sort of zen parables of the monk who, like in Batman Begins, in his flip-flops and robe, sort of wanders up the mountain through the coal, trying to find the zen master at the top of the mountain who has the wisdom that he can then share with him.

And very often, that wisdom is inside of all of us. That wisdom is something that, whether we want to call it our gut, whether you want to call it your soul, whatever you want to call it, that the wisdom is inside of you. And that we want, I think, sometimes to have other people validate it for us or say it out loud, because perhaps we're not as articulate about it, but to have someone give voice to it, it gives us the ability to go, okay, okay, so it's not just me. I think that's what I mean when I say the wisdom we find on mountaintops.

I think we travel very, very far to find a joy and a wisdom that's inside all of us. On that point, as you were talking about it, the reason I was so piqued by it is I've got so many friends over the years who have been struggling in relationships and in their life and in their marriages who have thought that the answer to all of those problems was to basically get on a plane and move country or city to go somewhere else. And so when you were saying that, I was thinking, I was thinking back to a conversation that happened with my friend many years ago where he said, you're not going to Spain. Wherever you go, there you are.

So I had a friend who was a hairdresser, and I remember once talking to him while he was cutting my hair, and we got on the topic of, because both of us are someone that people talk to. People talk to me about their problems and their relationships as a function of my work as a borse lawyer, and people sit with their hairstylist and they'll talk to me with women. We'll talk for a long period of time about the things that are stressing them out and upsetting them. And what he said to me is, a lot of women in particular come in and they say, I want to cut it all off.

I want to cut it all off. I want to cut it very short. I want to cut it very different. I want to just a whole thing.

And he said, you know, there was a time early in his career where he would give them what they were asking for. So if they came in with super long hair and they said, I want a little short very bob cut, you know, he would do it. And then he would get a call from them a few days or weeks later going, oh my God, can you fix it? Like, what do we do?

And he said, what he started to figure out is what they're really saying is a very human thing, which is, I don't want to be me anymore. Like, I don't want to be me anymore. Like, I can't do it. Like, it's all too heavy right now.

Like, can I stop being me? Can I look different than me? Because maybe if I look different than me, I'll feel different than me. And maybe I'll do things differently than the way I've been doing them.

And I think that's so human, you know, to say. And that's the same thing about, okay, I'm just going to move. I'm going to move. I'm just as guilty of this as anyone.

When I've had a really stressful, difficult week, carrying all of my clients' chaos and stress, and there's just bombs falling from the sky constantly in my line of work. I go, that's it. I quit. I'm done.

I'm done. I'm just going to do media stuff. I'm just going to write books. I'm not practicing law anymore.

I'm never set the courtroom again. Mic drop. I'm out. And the reality is, I'm tired.

I'm just tired. Or, okay, if it's true that I'm in a place where I'm transitioning it, then just cut back. You don't have to cut all your hair off. And I said to him, my friend is a hairdresser.

So now what do you do? You try to talk them out of it. And he said, no. He said, I kind of play a trick.

He's like, I do something a little different, but not so different. And then I play up in my reaction to it. Like, oh, I love it like this. Look at how it's so nice.

I didn't take as much as you said, but I think this is real. And he said, and very often they're thrilled. Like, they just go, oh, yeah, this is great. Because it was symbolic.

Like, it was a symbolic thing for them. That, no, I'm going to do something different. And I'm going to look a little different when I look in the mirror. And when I look in the mirror, it's going to remind me to be different.

But that's inside of you. Like, I mean, for me, we wake up every single day and decide to be who we are or to continue being who we are. And one of the reasons why this is always so present in my mind is because as a divorce lawyer, people have this very clear image of who they are and what their life's going to be. And very intentionally, they went and put on the white dress and the tuxedo and took the thousand.

They were like, this is the path. This is the path. I'm taking this path. And this is who I am.

I'm Bob's wife. Or I'm Jen's husband. And I'm going to be a mom or I'm going to be a dad. I mean, this is what I'm going to do.

And then it blows up. Whether it's five years later, 10 years later, 20 years later, when kids go off to college, whatever it might be. And then what they're really struggling with is, wait, who am I? Who am I now?

Like, the barn's burned down. What do I do? Like, I'm not Bob's wife, then what am I? You know, I'm Bob's ex-wife.

That's a terrible thing to be. I don't want to be defined by what I'm not anymore and used to be. You know, so what do I, who am I now? And, you know, watching people over the course of their divorce navigate that is one of the most inspirational things in the world because people are so much stronger and more resilient than they give themselves credit for when they're in the crisis of it.

Was there ever a particular case that you think about that broke your heart? You're going to try to make me cry again, Stephen. It's still unfair. No, it's interesting because I didn't, our conversation last time is so interesting because we spoke so matter of fact about the subject of love and marriage.

And then for me to also learn at the same time that you are a deeply emotional person. What is the one case? I had a few. I mean, one of them I wrote about in my book, which was I represented, it was a case that I won that I should have lost.

I represented a pimp. That's what he did for a living. And he owned a variety of illegal businesses. He's in prison for a long time now.

But at the time, he had very brutally abused a woman who he had children with. And we went to, there was a family court proceeding. And the lawyer on the other side of the case, the lawyer who represented his co-parent, his victim, if you will, was very inexperienced. She was an assigned lawyer.

So I was privately paid, as I am. And she was assigned by the state. So she was getting, I think, at the time $25 an hour, something like that, versus my $750 an hour. And she was quite new as a lawyer.

She was right out of school. She wasn't quite sure of what to do and how to do it. And I was fairly experienced. It was a perfect storm of like the worst factors of the system.

It was someone who could afford a very good lawyer against someone who couldn't afford a good lawyer and therefore got an inexperienced lawyer that wasn't terribly sure of themselves in a courtroom. And a judge who was very impatient, who just was in a bad mood that day. I don't know what he had for breakfast or what it was. But he was an older judge.

He'd been on the bench for probably too long. He retired a few years later. The key piece of evidence they had was a photograph of the way that my client, of this woman's face after my client had allegedly beat her up quite badly. And getting a photograph into evidence is very easy.

But it requires a very specific phrasing. So what you say is, I'd like this to be marked for identification. You mark the photo. And then you hand it to the witness.

You hand it to the court officer. Hand it to the witness. And you say, I'm showing you what's been marked as petitioners won for identification. Do you recognize that?

Yes. What do you recognize it to be? It's a photograph. Does that photograph fairly and accurately depict your face after he beat you up?

Or does it accurately reflect your face on the date you've been discussing? Yes. Your Honor, I'd like it put into evidence. That's it.

It's easy. Does it fairly and accurately depict? For whatever reason, most likely lack of experience, opposing counsel, I guess, didn't know how to get a photograph into evidence. Now, normally in that situation, a judge will be helpful.

Like they will just jump in and say, ma'am, is this fairly? But this judge was just not in the mood. And opposing counsel said, I'd like this to be marked. And then she said, to give him to the witness, and she said, what is that a photo of?

So I did my job. I said, objection. She's asking about the contents of a document, not an evidence, which is my job. Judge said, sustained.

Which means my objection is correct. So she said, okay, I'm sorry, who took this photo? And she said, I don't know who took it. She says, okay, well, what is it a photo of?

So again, objection. Asking about the contents of a document, not an evidence. And I could see opposing counsel getting blustered because she didn't know the words. And my internal dialogue at that moment was, just say it.

Just say it right. Just say it fairly inaccurately depicted. Just say it. And I remember looking at the judge and thinking, you're letting this happen.

You're letting this happen. Don't let this happen. Like, she's poor. She's poor.

That's why she's going to lose. She's going to lose because she's poor. And she can't afford a lawyer. And he's going to win because he can't afford a lawyer that knows how to put a document to evidence.

And there's something really wrong about that. And the judge just let her drown. And she asked three or four more questions that were the wrong questions. And then she just said, I don't know.

I don't know what to say. I'm sorry. And then she just sat down. And the case got dismissed.

And we walked out. And as we walked out, my client patted me on the back. And he said, you know, a good lawyer is better than 20 stick-up men. And I remember thinking, this is not a good day.

It's not a good day. And that case, that was a long time ago. And it still stayed with me because it was, I did my job. And I, you know, I represent my client, but I also represent the system.

And I don't always believe in my client, but I have to believe in the system. And I have to believe that I am not, it's not my right to judge people's cases. The judge is right. Like, I believe in this system.

I believe in the adversarial system. But watching someone lose, who shouldn't lose, and winning when you know you shouldn't win does not feel good in this line of work. Would you take that case again? Exact same case, exact same person, exact same scenario.

You're asked to do it again tomorrow. Same opposition lawyer. I would, yeah. Well, first of all, it's many years later and I still know that lawyer.

She's actually become a really good one. And I'm really proud of that. If she was equally inexperienced, the same woman, the same circumstances, the same victim. You know, if I knew it was going to go that way, I probably, I would turn it down.

I mean, I turned down a lot of cases. I don't actually know if today I would represent him anymore. It's a hard question for me to answer. See, I think you don't always, you don't know in the consultation.

And like, it's not like this guy came into my office and said, yeah, I beat this woman terribly. Would you represent me? Like, that's very different. No one's ever done that in my office.

Like, he came in and he said, yeah, she's accusing me of all these horrible things. I didn't do any of it. But you knew he did. Oh my God, I think I knew he did.

Yeah, the more I got to know him. I mean, in a consultation, you don't know. Like, in a job interview, you don't know what kind of employee somebody's going to be. You know, sitting across from someone in a one hour consultation, most of the time I'm talking, telling them about their rights and obligations and how the legal process works.

Like, I don't really get to know them. But throughout the process, I started to figure out, like, yeah, this guy did this. You said you turned down a lot of cases these days. What are the kind of cases that you would absolutely turn down irrespective of remuneration?

I turn down cases where I feel like the person, I mean, a lot of times I turn down cases that I don't think they need me. Like, I don't think you need to bring a gun to a knife fight. Like, I think if you can do it with a scalpel, don't use a chainsaw. And I'm a chainsaw.

So, like, don't, you don't need me. And so I'm very honest with people about you don't need me. I'm not the right tool for the task. But there are a lot of cases I turn down that I think people are using, they want to weaponize the legal system to punish their ex for their transgressions real and perceived.

Like, they want to, their spouse was cheating on them and they want to just litigate them into submission. They want to force them to spend a million dollars in council fees by making ridiculous motions and by minimizing, you know, their access to the kids and making them fight for every single hour of visitation they get with the kids. Like, I'm not interested in being a weapon that's used for that purpose. Usually sometimes your job is to get custody of kids, which means that you're basically taking children away from a parent.

You can look at it that way. It's a hard way to say it. Yeah, I'm jokingly said that before because when my kids were living, and they would have those like, you know, bring your dad to school day and, you know, it was like, oh, this is my dad, he's a firefighter and this is my dad, he's a doctor, and I always felt like my sons were like, this is my dad, he's the reason why your firefighter dad only sees you on alternate weekends, you know, and that felt a little strange, you know, and there were times where actually my kids were in school with people whose divorces I'd handled, you know, their parents. But yeah, I think I do have a tremendous impact on people's access to their children, both positive and negative.

Like, I help people get access to children that's being withheld from them. I help people address parental alienation and negative gatekeeping, the kinds of things that are really becoming much more insidious and prevalent in our culture, where people are using children essentially as weapons against their ex who they're mad at. I mean, look, breakups on any level are difficult, you know, and there's usually hurt feelings and anger in a breakup, and I don't think that's abnormal. Like, I think you lose someone, whether it's to death or whether it's to divorce or just to split up, there's some anger, you know, there's resentment.

Why don't you love me? Why don't you love me the way I love you? Why don't you want to be with me anymore? What does it say about me?

Does this mean I'm a bad person because you don't want to be with me anymore? Like, these are really universal themes. Like, there's almost no one in the world, in any culture, that if you go to them breakups, that they don't go, you know, they get it. My friend's going through a breakup at the moment.

He's been with his partner for many, many years, and when he sent me the voice note explaining, like, we've been together eight years, we've kind of broken up four times, but he's been broken up with, so he's a sort of victim, per se. Which is a better one to be. Really? Oh, yeah.

You want someone to break up with you? Oh, I mean, well, here's what I'll say, because I have something of a PhD in this one. I have to say, when someone has been broken up with, there's a tremendous amount, unless it was by some patently awful behavior, you know, like they got caught with the girlfriend or the boyfriend, red-handed, like, no one's going to be much sympathy. But if someone dumps you, like, it's not me, it's you, like, they just dump you, there's a tremendous amount of sympathy.

Like, if I called you and I said, dude, I just got broken up with you, like, oh, mate, come on, man, let's go out, that's tough, man, we've all been there, like, don't say, you know, what happened? But when you break up with someone, there's only so much sympathy people will give you, because, you know, when we broke up, if you're so upset about it, what did you do it for them? Whereas sometimes, you know, you're just the one who called it. Like, it's not, it wasn't a happy relationship.

It wasn't like, you're sad that it had to end, you know? Like, I didn't want to break up. I wanted the relationship to stay good, and it didn't. So one of us has to be the grown-up and say, okay, this thing's over now.

But I think that person actually sometimes deserves, you know, just as much sympathy as someone who got dumped, because they're both someone who's experiencing a loss of sorts, even if it's a loss that, you know, I mean, it's a terrible metaphor. But if someone said to you, I have lung cancer, you'd go, oh, my God, that's horrible, like, are you okay? If someone said, well, I was a smoker for 50 years and I got lung cancer, it's not like, well, what did you think? I mean, of course you're still going to go, oh, my God, it's scary, it's not like you deserve it.

I mean, yes, is it shocking? It's not as shocking if you've been smoking for 50 years, but it's still quite sad and it's still a journey this person's going to have to go through. So it's the same thing. It's like, I just went through a breakup.

Well, who decided to break up with who before I tell you if I feel bad for you or not? I don't think that's a fair way to approach a breakup. A lot of people want to own it. They want to say that they broke up with them, right?

Because that's very popular. Well, there's something empowering, though. Yeah, it was my decision. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or are they like, well, I'm glad they did, because I'll tell you the truth, I was about to. I was about to break up with that person. Yeah, that's very common. I think that's a pride thing, though, because, you know, there's something about the rejection of, you know, a great example of this for me, which is very, it's always vexed to me professionally.

So a lot of people, I've handled a lot of divorces where someone breaks up with a heterosexual marriage because they are coming out as gay or lesbian, okay? So they end the relationship. So in a heterosexual example, man and a woman are married to each other for a period of time, and the man says, I'm ending things with you because I'm gay. I've realized that I'm gay, and I'd like to live my life as a gay man.

My thinking, as someone who's never had that happen to me, my thinking, and perhaps it's naive, like my experience has taught me that maybe I'm just strange, which I kind of knew, but this is another example of it. Now, if a woman broke up with me and said, I'm breaking up with you because I'd like another man better than you, that's very hard to swallow. It's like, I want one like you, but better than you. Whereas if she said, I'm leaving you because I'd like to go be with a woman now, it's like, well, I mean, I don't have that.

Like, I can't give you that. It's not like I want someone who's a better dancer, I want someone who's funnier. I want someone who has different hearts than you. And okay, I mean, that feels a little less like you're not rejecting me necessarily, you're rejecting my entire sort of gender.

You're basically saying this isn't who I want. The opposite actually happens. Those are some of the most brutal and vitriolic, awful divorces you could possibly imagine, and that actually gotten worse over the span of my career. Because over the 25 year span of my career, when I started, when someone said, okay, my husband is leaving because he's gay and now he's going to live as a gay man, it was actually okay to then say, yeah, he's a pervert and a horrible human being.

Because there was just such a widespread homophobia at the time. I mean, you know, Will and Grace, like, Will couldn't even kiss his boyfriend on TV. He couldn't even have a boyfriend. It was like, so, you know, young, young people today have no idea how in my lifetime that has changed so much.

Not to say there's still homophobia, not that there's still not heteronormativity, but the reality has changed tremendously. It boots on the ground reality. Now, if your spouse leaves you for, if I was married and my spouse left me for a woman, and I'm upset about it, I'm opening myself to an accusation of being homophobic. And the truth is, like, no, whoever she's leaving me for, it's really upsetting.

Or whoever she's been sleeping with, male, female, anything, it's upsetting, because they're with another person. So I think there is, in that phenomenon of people's breakups, the sense of like, well, I was going to break up with them anyway, is like a pride thing. I think there is a tremendous amount of stuff that we carry around when it comes to those breakups. I've always wondered what heartbreak actually is.

Because I've been thinking, okay, it's like you mentioned about rejection. Is it a blow to our self-esteem? Is it the loss of a future that we had built in our head? Yes, yes.

If you can understand what it is, I was thinking, how do I get my friend advice on it? Then I know what the advice should be, what the support should be. Because if it's a loss of this future, then I'll say this. If it's his self-esteem, okay, I'll boost his self-esteem.

So I think it's all of those things. But I think it's an ending. And I think that endings are hard. I think that saying to, what I always try to do when I have friends going through a breakup, and even with clients, is that every beginning is born of some other beginning's end.

So we talked about this the last time we sat down together, where I said that, you know, I only got Kaba because Buster died. Which is your dog's. Yeah, my dog had passed away 13, 14 years ago, and my dog is now 13 years old. And I only got one because the other died.

And I love both of those dogs so much. But if I'm being honest, I guess I have to say I'm glad that I lost Buster so that I could have Kaba. That sounds terrible. Because I don't mean it like, oh, I'm glad that he died.

But that ending was part of life. And it made room for the beginning of the next thing. And what I always try to focus my clients on is that this relationship is ending. And there has to be honoring that, mourning that, feeling that, seeing it as the transition that it is, grieving the loss of it, but also realizing that every ending is the beginning of the next thing.

And there has to be an ending for the next thing to come and for the next beginning to happen. And I have now watched that cycle for thousands of clients over a span of 25 years, where their life is ending. I was this person's husband. I was this person's wife.

I was a dad who lived with his kids full time, that had them every Thanksgiving, not every other Thanksgiving, that I had them every Christmas Eve, not alternate years, even years there with me and odd years there with her. Like, what are you talking about? Like, this is who I am, who I'm dying. Like, who I am is dying.

And I don't know who I'll be next. And when you're in that, when it's your first divorce, it's not mine, but it's yours, you know, it's very hard to see. Like, just like when someone dies, you know, when Buster died. I said it last time.

I said I will never do this again. I'll never let my heart be broken like this again. I'll never open myself up like this again, ever, never. This is the worst pain.

Why would I ever do this? Loving anything is stupid. It's insane. You're opening yourself up to the inevitability of loss.

And yet, Kabo was such a joy. And now, I'm near the end of that. And what do you do? Well, I like to believe that now, I'm not saying that's not going to be as painful when it happens.

It will be. But I no longer believe the world is ending. Like, I understand that, like, the beauty of who he is was born of the emptiness that had to be created by the loss of Buster. Like, I understand that now.

And so, like I said, will I do it again? There's going to be a period of time where I'll say, no way. And same thing with love. Like, people get divorced.

I had a client last week say to me, they're right kind of in the middle of their divorce. And I said, you know, 86% of people are remarried within five years of their divorce. And they said, oh, I am never doing that. Are you kidding?

I am never doing this again. And every time I say that, I laugh because I think to myself, I'm like, you're so wrong. And I get it. Like, you don't see it right now.

Like, right now, I know you think that's true. Like, but you will love again. And you will, when you love again, like, you will feel it. And you will be in it.

And you will go, oh, and this one's perfect. This is great. Like, I've done divorces for people that spent a million dollars in council fees and went through absolute hell. And when they're about to get married, I go, you know, we should do your prenup so that you don't ever have to do that again.

Like, I'll do it for free if you want. Like, let's just do it. And they go, no, no, no. This, this is real.

This is real. And I sit there and I think like, oh my God, you've just, you've learned nothing at all. That was real too until it wasn't. Like, but this is, you know, perhaps, you know, love is a delusion brought on by inadequate lighting.

I don't know. But there's, there's something in us that, you know, feels that pain. And then there's something in us that forgets that pain. And I think that that, you know, that's a good thing.

That's a good cycle. I think life is a game you can't win. And so you play it to the utmost. If you love anything, it's insane because you are accepting that you're going to lose it.

It's a quote you said. You think life is a game you can't win? Yeah, I don't think there's any winning. You die.

Like, that's the only truth. The only, you know, every story, you know, starts the same. You were born. Like, every Wikipedia page starts the same.

They were born. And every Wikipedia page will end exactly the same. They died. That's it.

You can't win, meaning if you pursue money, like, your money will eventually be useless. The things you accumulate with it will be useless. Every car you own, someone else will either own it someday or it'll get to the scrap junkyard someday or it'll give it to someone. Like, all your material possessions will be utterly meaningless.

Like, we all went through this when the COVID lockdowns first started. Everybody was like, you know, I've got all this money and I've got all these travel vouchers. And they're like, yeah, you can't go anywhere now. And it's like, oh, okay.

Well, you know, you start to see limitations. Have the power go out in your house sometime. And it'll remind you that, oh, wait, yeah, like everything I have, I just have like this much of a grip on it. All you got to do is just take that away and it's gone and that's it, you know?

And it's the same thing with our health. It's the same thing with, you know, everything, like everything is totally fine and wonderful and then you have a terrible splitting headache. And then the only thing that matters is that headache, you know? And then that headache goes away.

And for like a day, you go, I don't have a headache anymore. But did you wake up today and go, I don't have a headache. Oh, and the power's on. Isn't that great?

You know, and I don't have cancer. Isn't that good? You know? No, you don't.

You walk around going, like, why are my page views where they're at? Or what happened with this? And why did that person be so nasty to me? Like, we get caught up in all this stuff.

When in fact, the only thing that, you know, again, if you keep, you know, Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher said, like, keep death and everything horrible in your line of sight, sort of memento mori, because nothing will bother you that much if you have that there. So I think life is a game that, look, we're playing it. We're doing our thing. Love is like, all relationships end.

Every single marriage ends. And death or divorce, it ends. Every relationship ends. Your child, you will hopefully pre-decease your child, but your child will die someday.

That's the nature of it. So we have created a culture where we really try not to talk about that. We really try to just keep that out of our gaze. Let's not talk about it.

Our only depictions of death are preposterous. They're like the person in the deathbed being like, I love you all. And then just beautiful, you know, beautifully died. It doesn't look like that.

If you ever spend time with people who are on their deathbed. I was a hospice volunteer for many, many years. I spent a lot of time with people who were dying, actively dying. And I have to tell you, like, you hang out with someone who's like, it's not pretty.

It doesn't smell good. It doesn't sound good. But it's real. It's natural.

It's okay. It's where it's all going. And the reason why I say this is not to be morbid. It's that we're doing ourselves a tremendous disservice by not acknowledging this.

Because I can tell you how many families, when I was a hospice volunteer, when their family member, their loved one would die, would say to me, it's not that they died. It's that they died terribly. They died without dignity. And I would say to them, they died like everyone dies.

Like, it's okay. Just because it wasn't like on TV where you, you know, like sort of fade out and say a few final words and then fade out. Like, no one, very few, if anyone dies that way, that's not how it works. So we're not doing anyone.

Like, this is the part I don't understand is that we don't want to talk about divorce. You know, we don't want to talk about death. We don't want to talk about endings because I think there's something in our brain that says, if we talk about it, we're going to make it happen. And if we don't talk about it, we'll prevent it from happening.

And that seems to me insane because these are things that are absolutely inevitable when it comes to death and highly likely when it comes to divorce. So why not bring them back into the discourse? And I'll tell you the truth. I think one of the reasons why my conversations have become something people are interested in is because I think we're all fascinated by this, but we don't want to talk about it over dinner conversation.

And we don't want to, you know, but we know it's important. Something in us knows. You know, this is important. Like, this is something that needs to be talked about and thought about.

You did your thesis. Your master's thesis on a subject of death titled on metaphor and mortality, the semantics of death and dying. Why would you write your thesis on a subject of death? Well, it was a different life.

So this is before I went to law school. I got out of college with a degree in psychology and I decided I wanted to, I was a hospice volunteer. Why? I have to ask my therapist that question.

I can give you the answer. So I, when I was quite young, I think I was about six or seven years old, my mother was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer called leomyosarcoma. It's a soft tissue sarcoma and it's very rare. I was way too young to understand what was going on.

I just, I remember my mother crying, the sound of my mother crying in the bathroom and running the sink so I wouldn't hear her crying, but I knew she was crying. I didn't really understand what death was. Like I understood that my gerbil had died, but I grew up Catholic. So I remember like you got to go to heaven and that sounded pretty good because it was a really nice place apparently.

And I remember hearing my mother talking on the phone to her sister and talking about the fact that she had six months. And I remember my sister who's six years older than me explaining to me that mom was sick and she wasn't going to get better. And I remember being so young that I didn't really understand what that meant, but it was scary and everyone was very upset. And then my mom didn't die.

What had happened is, depending on how you looked at it, whether it was a miracle or it was science, and that is that the tumors had encapsulated itself, meaning that the immune system had essentially closed up around it so it didn't metastasize or spread in any way. They went in, they did surgery, Memorial Sloan Cancer Center, and she was fine. She was well. And then five or six years later, it came back.

And again, I got told, your mom has six months to live. at that point i was like old enough to understand what that meant and i was terrified by it i was saddened by it and once again she had surgery she had all kinds of procedures and things that had to happen to deal with it but once again she just miraculously sort of ducked the bullet and she made it and three years later it came back again and then they said you know your mom has six months to live and i remember by that point thinking yeah you don't know how many times we've had this conversation like i don't believe you anymore like and it's okay like i'm not afraid because i'm not like it's not gonna happen i know that something's gonna happen it'll work out and it did once again she had surgery again she had seven surgeries over the course of my into my 20s and every single time the prognosis was bad and every single time they kind of took more pieces of her unfortunately because the type of cancer this is sometimes gets into other organs and so they had to take you know they had to take her ovaries forced her into menopause in her 30s and they had to take they had to change her the way her to do a bowel resection they do all kinds of awful things and uh and it changed her it was a painful life for my mom it was very hard and i remember though from a very young age being forced to think about death being forced to sort of see death as something that was just there and that it was part of things and that there was no way around it and it it just became familiar it became sort of this person in our home you know this possibility that was always there and i remember every time i would get the call that my mom's cancer had come back there would be some part of me that thought oh is this the phone call like is this the one where this time she's gonna die like is this the one and most of the time it wasn't and 10 10 years ago um once again she had a recurrence she was supposed to have a very complex surgery my dad and i sat in the waiting room my parents were married for 50 years and uh we sat in the waiting room it was supposed to be an eight hour surgery because it was very complicated and the doctor came into the waiting room a half an hour into the surgery and said you know we opened her up it's like a bomb went off there's nothing we can do we're gonna close her up put her on hospice and um she passed away eight years ago after you know she's on hospice for over a year um and she died with us all around her and there was something about the reality that we had been able to talk about death for so long that there was a tremendous peace there like there was a tremendous sense of well this was gonna happen you know this is part of our life you know that this is what was going to happen and she had a tremendous peace about her because it had been part of her life for so long so when i was in my late teens i think my mom had three or four rounds of this this cancer thing i just remember thinking i have to confront this i have to spend time around death you know again i'm strange you know i was afraid of spiders i didn't like spiders when i was a kid so when i went off to college i bought a tarantula and i put it in a glass terrarium next to my bed so that every morning i would wake up and there was just this giant spider sitting there next to me and i'm not afraid of spiders anymore and it got rid of that very quickly and so i thought you know this is something that's been around me all the time and it's something i'm not quite at peace with so i'm going to confront it and i went and did a hospice volunteer training and i remember i you know it was a weird thing for like a 20 year old to do i just got out of college i was 21 and uh i think i was the only person under 60 who was in this volunteer training hospice training hospice volunteer training i would recommend to anyone because they do things like they make you write your eulogy your own eulogy yeah yeah they make you write your own eulogy like and it can either be if you died right now what would the eulogy be um or if you died in your idealized future what would it be um they make you write your own obituary like they make you confront the reality of thinking about death and thinking about your own death and death of the people around you and then after you've been through the training they assign you families and i intended initially just to do it as sort of a part-time thing in the summer after i graduated college i was working as a waiter and i had a lot of time during the day because at night i was i was waiting tables and um i got assigned to a bunch of families one at a time and i loved it it was the most it was the most it was the most life-changing thing i've ever done like it uh there's something about when you're a hospice volunteer and you're just brought into a home and you're just there to be of service like just if they want to talk we'll talk if you want me to help do the dishes so you can hang out with your loved one that's great i'll do that like i did yard work and a lot of times like people because caring for someone who's terminally ill in your home is hard and like things like i want to run out to the store and get a few things myself like that's hard you don't leave this person alone so a lot of times i was just there to sort of be relief just to sit with someone and um and every time i would walk out of a hospice home i felt like i don't know i felt like a zen monk i felt like like i could hear the rain it just felt like i'm alive like i'm like that's not happening to me yet like i'm not there yet like that's not that's not someone i love in that bed like i love this person i want to be there for them here of service but that's not my father that's not my brother that's not me it will be someday and one day it was one day it was my mother but it wasn't me and i have to tell you is something about going through that experience when you're in your 20s when you're so self-centered you're supposed to be you're kind of supposed to be self-centered you're supposed to say like what am i gonna do with this life what i'm gonna do with these hands but there is something about at that stage in life to be told whatever you do with these hands whatever you do with all this that's where it's going to end that's where it's going to end best case scenario best case scenario it's going to be in your own home with your family around you worst case scenario it's going to be on the street somewhere prematurely you know so i was fascinated with death and i i decided i was going to graduate school and i was going to study thanatology i was going to study death and dying but there really aren't any programs in that so i went to new york university's department culture and communication and i found um neil postman dr postman who was going to be my because nyu back then and still it gives you a lot of opportunities to kind of create your own curriculum as long as it's something serious you know academically serious as long as you put together like an amalgam of classes from different disciplines they'll let you put together something very individualized and so i put together a study about the cultural approaches we have to death and dying and my master's degree thesis was called the semantics of mortality or sorry metaphor and mortality the semantics of death and dying and was published in a journal called etc which is the journal of general semantics and what i did is i studied the words we use to talk about death and what they reflect on how we think about death so like you know i remember when i was a kid and our dog when i was a child had to be um had to be euthanized i remember the doctor saying we're gonna put him to sleep and i remember thinking no you're not he's gonna die he's not going to sleep like i'm gonna go to sleep later like he's not gonna sleep he's gonna go to death like why are you calling it that and i understood why obviously it's an adult like it's a primitive culture someone it's an eternal sleep it looks like i mean you're asleep you look like your dad you know i've held a mirror and so you're like all right and i will i understand where these are like doctors i explored doctors talking about we lost the patient like wait what you don't know where he is like no you know what we said no we lost the battle the battle against death you're definitely gonna lose that battle like that's death's record is amazing that always wins like so you're setting it up for that battle like that's a that's a bad battle which is fascinating to me because it is the only certainty we have and we act as if we are certain it's something bad when in fact absolutely no one can say with certainty what it is and what happens except that it's inevitable having spoken to people in their final days weeks and months and final minutes i'm really compelled to understand what i can learn from them about how i should be living my life based on the types of things they then say to you focus on prioritize yeah that is true like you can learn a tremendous amount from that and here's what i will tell you i learned they don't talk about death like you go through this hospice training where they're they're very much preparing you to talk with people about their fear about their death or their imminence of their death and all people really want to talk about is their grandkids their kids their wife their husband what they did for a living and what they liked about it like most of the time people talk about like the things that made them happy like i spent a lot of time just listening to people tell me about tell me happy stories about their life tell me moments that and it made a lot of sense to me it made a lot of sense to me like if i said to you right now like what are five moments in your life where you just felt loved and happy like you could stop and close your eyes and there'd be like and what comfort it would be like to have those and every once in a while like when you're in that moment you go i'm in one of those right now like i'm gonna remember this moment you know and but most of the time you don't like most of the time it just happens and then you look back and you go god remember that kiss you know i remember that you know that meal i remember that and you don't see it when it's happening and that for me is what i really learned from doing hospice work was that like all these people wanted to tell me about was you know when they were alive like really alive not laying in a bed dying like they want to talk about like yeah i did this or i saw that and you know i learned it in my mom's passing i remember my last day with my mom before she became so ill that she was not mobile and not not really functional to have a discussion with i just remember we just sat there and i told her about like how great my sons were doing her grandchildren how great they were doing and i talked about how happy i was and like just how great life is and how great i feel i just remember like she just was i remember thinking like oh that's what i would want like i would want to know that like yeah you did it like you did great like look at all this stuff that's here because of you you know and to me like that that's what hospice work very much taught me was it taught me that um no one's really going to care that much about you know some of the stuff that seems so fucking important like it's just not that important like like the people talked about their kids they talked about the grandkids they talked about you know the love of their life or if they if they had survived that love and they you know they talked about how like oh maybe you know maybe i'm gonna get to see them again you know and and it's very funny because i remember i remember talking to someone a few years ago and saying something about oh you know i wish my mom had been alive to see me do you know this thing and they said oh i i you know i bet she's seeing it like i bet she's seeing it from you know because this person was religious and everything you know i don't believe that but i really hope i'm wrong like i really hope i'm wrong that would be amazing that'd be wonderful it'd be beautiful you know so i think hospice for me the reason why i got into the hospice work the reason why my research interest became death related um was that i just think life is better when you have those things in front of you when you when you remind yourself of the inevitability of endings we're just the imagination of ourselves those words that you said so we're just the imagination of ourselves there's nothing to be afraid of everything's connected we're just in one state of being now and then we'll be in a different state of being there's probably a benevolent force out there that was something that came to me as a function of of um of my experiences with psychedelics very early in my life is um was that realization was the realization that everything is connected and that there is some benevolent something underneath all of it and that there's nothing to be afraid of and i think some of that was a function of course of growing up in an environment where you couldn't deny death where it was sort of always present and perhaps that was on my mind at that stage in my life when i had those profound experiences but um that stayed with me that's never gone away that's been very um very much a part of my view of things that that um that perhaps we are just one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively and that we we are just you know i heard what was it pete holmes the comedian recently talking about how you know people say that like oh we came from nothing i don't believe in god i believe in nothing and you know he has this whole bit about it he's like really so like instead of believing in god which is something that you can't touch can't prove can't photograph and science can't prove or disprove you believe in nothing which is something you can't see touch feel science can't prove or disprove like so if you're nothing just spontaneously you know creates everything that's pretty impressive nothing it's anything so i think i think that i am very much a believer in the fact i like to believe whatever the name of it is whatever we want to call it having spent a lot of time with hospice patients and having thought a lot about death i i'd like to think that we you know we are drops of water and that when we die we return to the sea that we just merge with our creator again and i'm not i'm not really worried that jim stops existing like because i don't remember what i was before jim so i have no reason to think it was something terrible and i don't know what i'll be after i'm jim but i have no reason to think it's gonna be something terrible it could just as easily be it's gonna be something fantastic and then i'm gonna get there and go well why did i get here sooner you know and if there's a god they might be like yeah why are you guys so fixated i'm not getting here it's awesome you know like that temporary thing like there's a reason why as an organism you're supposed to just there's all these things that'll kill you like it's supposed to be that that happens sooner rather than later like that's it's a very uncomfortable thought like it's an uncomfortable thought that like this might be hell or this might be the part that we should be afraid of like this might be the part that's really hard like maybe what's before it and what's after it's really the easy part and what's happening here is what's challenging like when someone dies i've always thought to myself like when someone dies like the people who suffer are the living like the person who's passed they're gone now that's why i never believed in the death penalty because they're like we're gonna punish this person by they're gonna die like well my grandmother died i didn't like to think that it was a punishment like put them in a box feed them terrible food that that sounds like a punishment you know like you know make them watch bad tv i don't know something but death like death to me doesn't i don't like to think of death as punishment i i i'm enjoying this ride and i'm enjoying this body and i'm enjoying all of this but i'm not terrified of that i'm genuinely curious i'm genuinely curious and when the time comes i want to face it with open with you know clean hands and open heart where does acceptance play in dealing with an ending like how important is it to accept and when you meet your clients as a divorce lawyer now is part of the suffering the resistance to accept the situation yes even if it wasn't your fault because you know sometimes people can play this idea of acceptance with like you know justification i'm not saying justification i'm saying accept this is the situation you find yourself in yeah i think that's very very astute and very real i think there's a step before acceptance there's a number of steps before acceptance but the first one is acknowledgement like i think you have to acknowledge that something is happening before you can start because acceptance has to do with adjusting your emotional state and reaction to it changing the level of tension in your body about it you know like every time i've ever gone to the dentist you know there's this part of me it's like oh here comes oh god here comes and it's like i'm ready i'm bracing i'm bracing and i have to remind myself like wait stop don't do that it's not soften soften soften over and over soften it's one of the reasons i love brazilian jiu-jitsu because when you're a white belt in brazilian jiu-jitsu everything is like resisting everything you know trying to stop everything and and then you you start to learn like oh no no like soften like yield like just you know protect the neck move the hand okay go ahead like and there's something about that like not trying to resist the thing but trust what you're saying about trusting how natural something is but it's acknowledging first okay here is the reality of my situation this marriage is ending like there's a there's a zen parable or saying i heard many years ago which is if you don't learn to find joy in the snow you will have less joy in your life and precisely the same amount of snow reality is reality like i broke my favorite teacup i can be happy about that i can be angry about that i can be sad about that either way my teacup is gone it's gone that's it like and so i think that the acceptance piece first requires okay my life is finite is fine my marriage is not permanently gifted to me love is not permanently gifted it is loaned whether it's the life of my my life the love of my dog the love of my romantic partner the love of my children it is on loan to me it is not permanently gifted so that's just acknowledgement first then it's not pulling from that yielding from like it's about softening softening and realizing okay so now what do i do with this what do i do you know there's something about my therapist once said to me we were talking about um we're talking about like resisting change in life i was going through a transition in life and i was having a hard time with it and he said you know uh he said you're very curious he said you you try to like swim against the current and it's not going to work or you just let go and let yourself go with the current and that's not going to work so you try to like i'm going to be the ocean and that doesn't work he's like surf it's like surf he's like surfing is kind of the perfect balance like you're not trying to fight the wave you're trying to take it where it's going to take you but you're going to impose yourself on the process a little you're going to use technique patience you're going to use your body and you're going to try to just see because there's an element in surfing just like in jujitsu just like in so many things in life of like yielding but also maintaining an active role right and i think that is in the demise of relationship or the loss of someone because of death or again any transition any ending first it's about acknowledging the reality of what we had what we were you know what our health was whatever it might be and then saying okay and now this has changed and i can resist it i can yield to it i can accept that this is what's happening it is snowing my teacup is broken whatever it is and then you can see what's next because again we don't know what's next we don't know what that will lead to like some of the worst things some of the moments in my life where i went oh my god i'm never getting through this maybe some of the greatest moments in my life like just when the just when the caterpillar thought its life was ending it became a butterfly you know but it had the world had to end like imagine being the bird in the egg you know you've been warm and happy imagine being in the womb like you're warm you're happy everything's being shed to you it's like lovely you're just buoyant floating around and now if you're the bird you got to break through a shell and get into this cold weird world you don't know how your wings work yet or if you're a baby it's like all blood and screaming but you got to do that to get to the next thing and the next thing is beautiful like the bird only gets to fly because it broke through the egg and it only broke through the egg because it was brave enough to destroy the only world it's ever known and that's how i look at divorce in some ways the divorce is like this whole whether i'm the one ending it or my partner is the one ending it like something is ending what i never thought was going to end and it's done and now what i don't know i don't know what but i have no reason to think it's going to be horrifying it might be incredibly beautiful but it's it's the road ahead of me now and that to me there's something very beautiful about that level of acceptance but the lights are off the lights are off on that road it's a it's a road with no street lamps and that's what the uncertainty of that's scary right we humans are particularly bad with uncertainty i learned this when i studied um uber labs which is this laboratory they had at uber to figure out how to build the perfect taxi app and they discovered that much of the reason why we love uber is because it kills the uncertainty we used to have when we call the taxi on the phone and then we have to stand there for seven or maybe 17 minutes hoping that it was coming and it's the same analogy you might find if you go to an airport and it says flight is delayed now flight delayed is much worse than flight delayed two hours because i can work with that yeah flight delayed yeah with no certainty around how long i'm gonna be sitting in this airport yeah it's like mental torture and the truth is there is something i'm not look i'm not pollyanna about it like there is something terribly frustrating upsetting difficult about your flight being delayed your flight being canceled for example but i in frankfurt germany i had the i think it's the best meal of my entire life at a little tiny restaurant i only had that meal because i was flying back from poland and had a stop in frankfurt that was supposed to be for one hour and because of snow they canceled all the flights essentially to the united states and i was stuck in frankfurt for the night now i i certainly had a few moments of like are you kidding me like i have work i have this but then something in me went okay like you can be upset about this all you want man but i'm gonna make the flights happen and you can't walk home from frankfurt so what are you gonna do you've not been in frankfurt or see what happens and i walked around frankfurt and i found this amazing little restaurant and it was i think still to this day the best meal i've ever had in my life and i've gone back to frankfurt three times just to eat at that restaurant and the hotel that i found because i was like all right i need a room i need to get a room somewhere turned out became one of my favorite hotels and i stayed there several times so you know again if you said to me in advance jim would it be awful if you got stuck in frankfurt i'd be like oh my god that'd be so bad i have a quarter period tomorrow and i have this to do and i have that to do my life would have been so much poorer if i hadn't gotten stuck in frankfurt i had like four amazing trips and a bunch of amazing meals and all these incredible experiences because one time my flight got canceled because of snow and i tell you something i'm really really glad that flight got canceled i wasn't at the time at the time it's very frustrating i'd call my assistant and i'd be like all right you can't cancel all my stuff but the truth is you just don't know you won't know you won't know until you're sitting ideally in a bed and there's a hospital volunteer sitting next to you and you're telling them all about the amazing meal that you had in frankfurt that one time not you know my flight got delayed once you said earlier this conversation no one intends to end up in a consultation room and with a divorce lawyer but i wonder when you said that i thought you know i bet you met someone in your life that did intend to end up there are you someone that got married because they wanted the divorce yeah yeah i'm sure i i have met so i've met people because i'm in the high net worth and ultra high net worth space high net worth we define as like 10 to a few hundred million and ultra high net worth is like 500 million and up in in those spaces yeah there's a there's there certainly are people that get married to a wealthy person for what will be great financial benefit but a lot of them are not planning on cashing the chips out necessarily they see it as a possibility but they more often are like oh no i'd like to ride this ride as long as possible because the amount of money i'm going to have access to with this person is much greater than even if i divorce and take some of their things so um that that is certainly i would the overwhelming majority of people like 99.999 percent of my clients i have met in a 25 year career did not mean to get divorced they they move towards divorce and eventually many of them go oh yeah this i saw early on we were doomed but you know love is so intoxicating we fall in love so fast you know and we really do like have a tendency that in the early days like we tend to just be so forgiving of a person i mean thank god that passes to some degree could you imagine like that you know when you first are with your romantic partner like they brush up against you and it's like electric that feeling you know we couldn't what would we as a world get stuff done if we felt like that forever about our romantic partner 10 years into the relationship when your partner brushed up next to the sink you went like oh god you wouldn't get it done like you didn't get anything done you would be a very unproductive world so thankfully that fades and changes i hope it never goes completely away for any couple but it becomes manageable you start to see this person a little more clearly hopefully still with tremendous optimism what's the quickest marriage you've ever represented the quickest marriage and divorce marriage is 72 hours from marriage to divorce yes marriage to annulment in that situation but i've seen divorces that were 72 hours yeah it was one it was that they were drunk in one it was um i don't know how to put it it it was almost like a it was like a game of chicken that went too far like they were they just sort of started dating and one of them was like i bet you wouldn't get my name tattooed on you and they're like oh yeah and then they like you so i did an engagement ring and they went and got an engagement ring and they're like oh yeah i would you know would you marry and then they got married and then i think like they probably had a great night like that night was fine that might have been some mind-bending sex but then two days later they were like wait you know do you don't actually want to have kids oh because i do and like oh you're you know they realized they were just fundamentally incompatible people have you seen any patterns there with compatibility if a couple walks in they've been together for i guess when you look back at the types of people you've represented um is there a certain length of engagement and boyfriend girlfriend phase that is typically conducive with working or not working no i don't see that pattern i'm constantly i'm very fixated on pattern recognition so i'm constantly thinking i'm always looking at same religion different religions or religious versus non-religious or older and younger older man younger woman younger man older woman like what what permutation same culture different cultures same races different races like first generation to the us or you know both first generation or neither um i don't i don't see those patterns i really i if i did i'd be the first to say it you know i don't hesitate to say stuff but i i've not seen those patterns i i have found if i was to say there was any any pattern it it really is um i think substance use is probably the main thing like that if one or both people are big drinkers or drug users that's usually a good indication that the marriage is going to lead to divorce because substance use issues tend to get worse in either both people which causes all kinds of second-order effects or more commonly one person when they have kids or when they reach a slightly different stage in life scales back on alcohol or drug use and the other person has an unhealthy relationship with the substances and it gets further down and that's the direction that it goes in i had a treat my interest as well to relate to this as you said love is loaned and i i immediately thought of a friend who had brought me to a restaurant one day to basically tell me that him and his wife were being divorced and the way they described it was quite heartbreaking because it seemed like they had a good relationship it's kind of like they got busy with their jobs and a kid and they forgot to water the plant yeah so you know i can describe it because they're like good people they didn't really appear to argue at all they have this kid they're both ceos she's ceo he's a ceo and it's like they like raised the kid and forgot to walk into the relationship yeah i've i've always phrased that as they lost the plot like that they were because when you get married you're trying to write a story together and sometimes i think you lose the plot like you know when you're reading and like all of a sudden you stop and you go i don't really remember where i am in this like you gotta go back a few pages you know it's like oh okay i remember this part let me start there i think sometimes we lose the plot and i mean i think that happens in every relationship every long-term relationship i think sometimes you lose the plot like other things are going on at work or you have kids and kids require a tremendous amount of your bandwidth so i get it but i think if you lose the plot that's where it's like hard to it's again acknowledgement of it like awareness truth being honest and saying hey i feel like we lost the plot like i feel like there's you know we lost the plot how do we get back like but the problem is when you say to your partner hey i i feel like we kind of lost the plot rather than hearing that as hey this is really important to me you're really important to me yeah work's important kids important but you and me you and me that's really important like it's equally if not more important so i feel a certain way i feel like we've lost the plot and i'm not saying it's your fault i'm saying my mom's saying it's the kid's fault i don't know whose fault it is i don't really care but i don't want to lose the block because i care about you and this plot this story is important to me people don't hear it that way people hear it as we lost the plot what do you do about it like you know okay so i'll just ignore the kid what what what what do you want so i'm doing the best i can and that's like that's not the way to hear that i understand it's very human to hear it that way but i genuinely believe that that you know yeah it's like you forgot to water the plant like nobody meant to kill the plant but you killed the plant because you weren't thinking about the plant and by the way that's right there you walk past it every single day you just not once thought oh yeah i remember what the plant and so i think it's very easy in marriage in long-term relationships it's very easy to just forget that this is you're borrowing this you know this is not yours like this person's not yours this person is loaned to you and it's by the way it's the same with death like this person's loaned to you to be taken away by divorce or by death they could be taken every marriage will end in one of those two things after divorce for sure you've used this word slippage before yeah when does it happen and what does slippage mean i mean slippage is everyone understands slippage i think like it's not like you eat cake and the next day your suit doesn't fit like you just make lots of little choices and those little choices add up and all of a sudden your suit doesn't fit you go wait when did that happen you know and i think it's the same thing in relationships like we you know ernest hemingway said in um the sun also rises um i went bankrupt the same way anybody does very slowly and then all at once and i think that's how that's slippage like it's just little raindrops that eventually become the flood and i think that's what happens in relationships is you you start to with good intentions you're focused on other things maybe you start to go hey i got this like because when you were single finding the one was big that was big that was a big priority in your life and then you found them and then there's like a whole bunch of just high-fiving and celebration it's like oh it's so great i found the one you found you want the one too and found it it's me is this great and then you go all right i got that now what other stuff you know what other stuff can we do because now like i'm supercharged i got you you got me we're gonna do this thing and you go and what you do you make new life or you make careers you go amazing places like it's not enough it's not enough to just go we got each other and it's so fun let's just tuck in here and just stay together you know and i always laugh with friends by the way because i can always tell when someone's like in love because they put on a couple of pounds you know because they really do because they're just they just go like do i want to like get up and go to the gym or do you go sit on the couch and eat popcorn and watch something yeah let's do that you know it's just sort of like you know it's love weight it's like happy love weight i love when i see it on somebody like it looks good on everybody you know much better like if you believe me like if you look at photos of me from when i had an eight pack it was the most miserable time in my life because i'm at the gym just trying to beat the pain out of me you know so i i think it's very very normal that people in that headiness of that okay so when that fades and now we're like in a sustainable pattern of a relationship and you're focusing on other things little tiny things start to you know and you don't want to think of it you don't want to say like oh by the way call a foul here throwing a flag on that bike no you just sort of like oh no it's this little thing it's not a big thing worry about it and i think that's that is how the process begins and it leads right to my office something jordan peterson said something to me jack if you have my phone yeah i just wanted to play you this um 30 seconds of something he said here's something to understand about your marriage okay you are gonna have to listen to your wife 90 minutes a week okay and you might as well just get that through your thick skull now why if you listen to her enough you can make peace and you can play so there's a huge benefit if you don't listen to her that will accumulate and you'll listen to her in divorce court someone sent me that i don't think it was you someone sent me that so yeah i mean i think that's a piece of what i'm talking about for sure it feels a little like the advice last time i was on i was saying i found offensive which is happy wife happy life like i think there's this sense of like well what a man has to do is just sort of tolerate the like listen i don't think most men like don't want to listen to their wife for 90 because that that seems to me i know he's being hyperbolic i love jordan's work and i find him fascinating and i really enjoy him but when when someone says to me like well you have to listen to your wife for nine minutes like that feels like you're gonna sit there and be like you don't have to do this for you know there was a time where you couldn't wait to hear her but she was interesting interesting interesting And she was interested. But do you think the women that are listening to this right now that have husbands and boyfriends think their husband and boyfriend likes it when they say, hey, we need to talk about something? But see, when in your life has someone saying that to you been a precursor to something good?

Hey, we need to talk about something. Never. That's like, you know, is a siren a good siren? When is a siren ever good?

Like, there's certain phrases we really need to have a conversation. That is not a good entry point. And that's not because it means there's something wrong. But before you get to that, like how many women, you know, would say that, you know, in the interaction with their spouse, like they don't want like a let's have a 90 minutes in the penalty box where you have to listen to me talk to you.

Like, that seems terrible. You know, the thought of having to do that as like a practice sounds sort of like, all right, well, if I endure that for 90 minutes, the bonus is I get sex or something. Like, and that seems crazy to me. As a divorce lawyer, if you think about the divorces you've seen in court and you've sort of consulted on, et cetera, do you believe that if that couple had spent 19 minutes a week sat down, openly being honest with each other, they would end up in your consultation room?

I think if they'd made a practice like that as something deliberate, I mean, maybe it would make a difference. I think what's more important than the structure of a ritual and the time, I have a better practice than that. I have, so I have a chapter in the book called Hit Send Now where I talk about sharing with your partner kind of promptly when something has rattled you the wrong way without saying we need to talk. Like, just kidding.

And I suggest people do it via email so that it's like, you can say to your partner, like, hey, listen, I want you to reflect on this. Like, you don't have to answer right away. You don't have to be defensive. And also you can be careful about how you parse it because not everybody's very short-footed in their speech, right?

So sometimes people, if you just try to do it face-to-face, sometimes it's not going to come out clearly because you're writing. You can edit it and be careful. But I genuinely think sometimes people just need to check in in a relationship. And by the way, you have to, if you want that, you also have to be willing to accept that in your direction, right?

So I have a friend, I have a friend who read my book and he's a friend who actually then read my book. And he said that he and his wife go for a walk once a week. And they make a deliberate practice during that walk of sharing with each other one or two or three things that the person didn't do perfectly in their relationship that week. And they hear it with love.

Like they deliberately from the beginning going, we're hearing this with love. We're hearing this as a practice. It's a deliberate practice because our goal is to have a great relationship and keep it great. So we're going to hear it that way.

I'd rather not have resentment build up. And then they always finish that walk with three things that the person did that made them feel loved or feel good or what. And that's where you're ending on that positive note. And they said they've never had a week where they didn't come up with something.

That happy wife, happy life phrase, there must be a reason why it became cliche. Why it became popular. Well, it became popular because I think so many people were willing to accept the unbelievably ridiculous model of relationships that's led us to a 56% divorce rate and probably another 20 or 30% staying together unbelievably miserable but not wanting to give up half their stuff. So yeah, like misery loves company.

Like everybody is sitting around going like, well, listen, women are like that. You gotta spend 90 minutes with them. In reality, it is. I think in reality, it's happy husband and happy wife equals happy marriage.

But why did it come into culture that way around? Because I think there's a, well, I mean, my personal opinion on this is I think men are probably easier to please in some ways. Like, you know, I think men are either hungry or horny. So like either feed us or have sex with us.

And that's kind of, we're most of the time pretty happy. Like I don't, we're not, you know, like which curtains should we pick out for the house? Like we're not that caught up in it. I don't know a lot of guys caught up in that.

Like when it came to weddings, like most of the guys I know weren't when they were young men going like, what is my wedding going to be like? I can't, here's what I'm going to do. Like it was very like, is there a DJ or a band and what will the bar have? And that's kind of what they were into.

And everything else was like, cool, man, whatever you like. Like I'm excited to see you excited. That's what matters to me. So men are simple.

I think men are quite simple, yeah. And I think women, and by the way, this is not a criticism of men. It's not a criticism of women. And again, it's a generalization.

I understand that. But like women, I think, thank God, women are much more nuanced in my experience. Like they notice more sometimes or different things. Like I think men and women They're your co-parent.

They're your travel partner. Share a bathroom with them. Like you got like, this is a whole nother thing when you get married. The French have a saying that marriage turns a lover into a relative.

And the truth is like, not any of like, you're a lover. You have this sort of, you know, it's why affairs are so intoxicating and wonderful because you just get the best parts. You don't have to pick up this person's socks. You don't have to listen to the fight they got in with their cousin.

You don't have to be like, I don't have to spend 90 minutes with them. You can actually, you're just getting the good stuff, the passion, the sex, which again, you can have, we can do relationships however we decide we want to do them. That's what's cool about it is the two people in it is what matters. And I think even before social media, we were very much about, well, how is everybody else doing it?

Because I guess that's the right way to do it. And so yeah, happy wife, happy life. It was like, listen, just here, you know, like just make her happy because then she'll shut up and you can just watch football. Like in it, I mean, look, that never appealed to me.

That was never interesting to me. I think a lot of people absolutely buy into that model of relationships. What's more interesting to me than people who've just given up, right? People who just said like, yeah, I know the hard thing to do and the right thing to do with the same thing, but I'm just going to do the easy thing because it's like, eh.

What's more interesting to me is that I think sometimes people screw up their relationships with completely good intentions. And the example I give in my book about this is sex. I think most people who've been in a long-term relationship will say, yeah, you know, the sex has become kind of predictable. Like it's become kind of, it's not as novel, you know?

And I think that happens for the absolute best of intentions. And it would be really lovely if we just acknowledged that because here's why it happens, right? You get with a person, you're first dating, first time you get sexual with a person, you throw every trick you've got at that person, right? You do all the things that you think they're going to like to see, what are they going to like, right?

Do they like the same stuff that other people like or do they like something different or do they like the same things you like and you throw everything at it and you start, okay, they don't like that, okay, this they really like, oh, they make really nice noises when I do that, okay. And then what do you do? You start to get more efficient. Like, well, I know she doesn't like that so I'm not going to do that, but I know she likes that so I'm going to do that a whole lot, right?

And she does, I hope, the same thing. She does, like, he loves it when I do this and the sound that comes out of him you're thrilled with them because you do the greatest hits. Like, I went to see Springsteen and they were born to run. That's what I'm there to see.

Like, I love it. Do the greatest hits. But then if they do something different, there is some part of you that goes, what was that? Where did that come from?

We don't usually do that or we don't do it in that order. And by the way, sometimes that's exciting, right? Sometimes it's like, yeah, let's have sex in the laundry room. What?

We got a bed right over there. Yeah, we always do it in the laundry room. Like, I don't know. That's fun, right?

It's fun to do something different. Well, we get to a place where now when we do something different, we start to feel like we're going to have a conversation about it. Because it's like, well, why did you do that? That's strange.

Or sometimes people go, why did they do that different thing? Are they like, is it they're watching porn? Are they cheating on me? Where did they get that idea from?

Is that something that they want? Do they want to start doing that? Is that part of the greatest hits and I didn't realize it? Do they not like what I've been doing?

And we start to sabotage, again, with good intentions from day one. All you wanted was to make your partner happy and they wanted to make you happy and look what you did. You made a routine. So the only way out of that spiral is to talk about it.

Call it out. To say, hey, you know, it feels like things are kind of in, like we're in a, you know, is there anything I could do different or you might want different? And I think there's lots of ways to have that conversation. How do we not have that conversation?

What's the worst way to have that conversation? The worst way to have that conversation is to say, how come you don't do this anymore? You used to do it all the time. Or, you know, I never, why won't you ever let me this?

Or why don't you ever try that? That's the worst way to do it. Blame. Blame and also it's on you.

Yeah, why did you do it? Or also that it's like, because immediately the person's reaction to that is going to be, well, here's why. You know, because of this. Well, because you this.

You know, how come you never do this? Like it turns into that. And I think there's a million other ways to do it, all of which are better. The best one, in my opinion, but I'm a lawyer and I'm dishonest a lot of the time, is, you know, manipulation.

I think that there's very positive. I manipulate people's emotional state for a living, right? Like that's my job. It's to make the other side scared.

My client feel safe. The judge feel good about my client. Bad about the other side. So like I try to use my powers for good.

And I think here's a great way to use that power for good. I think if there's something going on in bed that you want to try or do, and you don't want to have the clinical conversation, you don't want to call an audible in the middle of sex and just start doing something different and have your partner go, what the heck was that? I think a great one is, oh my God, the dream I had about you last night. We just, you don't even want to know.

Wait, what? What was the dream? What was the dream? No, no, I don't even, I don't know.

It's because I had dairy before bed or something. I don't know. I had the dirtiest dream about you. You tell me what human being, male, female, gay, straight, anybody isn't going to go, oh, for real, what?

What was I doing? Like that? And then you can go, yeah, no, I mean, I don't know. It was in my brain, so I don't know.

Like, it seemed weird to me too. And then you can back out of it without it being a thing. Or you can go, I don't know, maybe. Because if the reaction is, oh yeah, is that something you'd want to do?

I'd be like, I don't know, maybe it is subconsciously. You want me to try some time. How many times do people end up in divorce court because the lights went out in the bedroom? I mean, how many would admit it?

Or how many is it really the case? Well, here's what I'll tell you. I would say a good, at least 80% of the people in my office infidelity was a piece of it. But that tells me that sex is a big piece.

You know, because most people who are in genuinely satisfying sexual relationships with their partner aren't looking at other sexual relationships. Some people are just addicted to sex though. And I say this because I've got some friends who people always think I'm like projecting. I'm like secretly talking about myself, but I'm actually not.

I've met a wide spectrum of individuals and their relationship with sex varies wildly. Some people I just think are going to cheat forever, regardless of who they're with, because they have some trauma related to the change of sex. And then some people are kind of, you know, don't have sex at all. So on the end where you've got that's almost sex addiction behavior.

I'm just wondering if, I guess that's the question there. The broader question is about how much is the likes going out in the bedroom? Does it relate to people ending up in door school? Well, I remember listening to your conversation with Dad and you asking him flat out, like, so how much of the motivation is sex?

Like, and I think his answer was that like a tremendous amount of evolutionary biology is tied to sex. Like a tremendous amount of our motivation is born of sex. It's about sex, food, and not becoming food. That's like our three primary motivators.

So I think sex is incredibly important. I also think sex is constantly thrown into our line of sight. So I think you can't discount that. I mean, I think sex is on social media, on like the amount of sex that is put in our face constantly now is shocking.

It's shocking. I mean, compare it. Your grandfather has not seen as many breasts in one lifetime as you'd see in one visit to Instagram. Like, I mean, there is just so much cleavage going on.

You just can't even... So I think fundamentally, like, of course it's being thrown in our lives. It's like advertising everywhere. It's surrounded.

We live in a sex-saturated environment. How long have you been a divorce lawyer? 25 years. So since that time, things like OnlyFans have emerged and pornography has become commonplace.

I imagine at the start of your career the term pornography probably wasn't used much in divorces. No, hardly ever. Is it used now? It's everywhere now.

It's everywhere. There's a lot of unique things that I've watched evolve in my career. The proliferation of revenge porn. The number of people that have concerns about audio, video, photographs of them.

I mean, the proliferation of it is also a function of the fact that everyone has a video camera and everyone has a camera, a sophisticated camera in their hand. You know, so there's a tremendous amount of concern about, you know, this person has images of me, photos of me. Tremendous amounts of, you know, cheating has gotten much, much easier than it used to be. I mean, the idea of, like, connecting with a potential sexual partner and also having conversations with people we have absolutely no business having conversations with and having neutral entry points to get into.