Transcript for The Divorce Expert: 86% of People Who Divorce Remarry! Why Sex Is Causing Divorces! If They Say This, Do Not Marry Them!

All marital problems stem from two things.

Giving him a unique insight into how relationships fail and succeed. There's about a 56% chance that your marriage will end into wars. Yeah, 86% of people agree marry within five years, but most people have no idea what they are getting themselves into. And a great example of that would be, pre-nups, who gets what when they break up and correct. And the most shocking cleanup I've ever seen said that for every 10 pounds, the wife gained, she would lose $10,000 a month in Alabama. 10 pounds of weight, and that was enforceable.

You'll be shocked to hear it's... Have you ever seen violence during the divorce? They ran her over four times and stabbed her.

And then if you think love is a terrible idea I think it's insane to love anything because someday That'll be gone and this thing's gonna break my heart no matter what I lose But that's not a reason not to love and I think there's something really important there

I'm a divorce lawyer who represents people in contested divorce and custody proceedings in court. So it's the fact that you've never spoken to someone who does what I do is a good thing. It means that either you've not married or it means that you've successfully married to the point where you had never end up in my office. By the time someone sets foot in my office, some things got terribly wrong in their life because no one ever meant to meet me, no one ever meant to be in my office ever.

Well, if you marry, There's about a 56% chance that your marriage will end in divorce. Now, that doesn't take into consideration how many people may consult with a divorce lawyer because they're having difficulty in their marriage, but they choose subsequent to meeting me not to divorce for some particular reason, whether that's, they don't want a part with half of their funds, or they've just decided it's easier to stay miserable and with a person, or they're staying together for the kids, but they want to know what their rights were. If you marry the chances of meeting someone like me are more likely than not if we look at it that way because it's more than 50%. So it's a it's a high number, you know.

I mean, if we consider the pot, if we consider failure staying together miserable for the children or staying together for financial economic reasons, and then we add that to the 56% that end in divorce, then it would be very hard to track that, but I think it's generous to think it's another 20% probably. But I mean, think about what that adds up to. That means that you've got You've got something that fails 70, 75% of the time. That's a negligent activity. That is more likely than not to cause significant harm in your life. So I don't say that to sound like the grim reaper when it comes to marriage. I actually really think marriages a lovely thing, and I get misdiited weddings like anybody, and not just for future business purposes. I think I think this statistic that's even more interesting to me than how many marriages end in divorce or how many people stay together miserable is that 86% of people who divorce, remarry within five years. So think about that. Now you've done this thing. It's failed. You've gone through this difficult process of having to undo it. And now within five years, 86% of people remarry. I mean, so that tells you how important this is to us as humans, how drawn to this idea, this technology of marriage we are. And that to me is fascinating, because I've often said, like, I'm not sure what marriage was designed, what problem is marriage designed to solve? to the fact that it takes this long to think. If I said to you, what purpose does this technology, this mug? What does it serve? Well, that's easy, right? It's hard to drink out of your hands and someone would have to keep coming up and pouring things in our hands. Okay, well, that's pretty straightforward. What problem does this solve? Well, that's easy, right? We will want to get the ring stands around and get yelled at by our significant other for not using a coaster. So these are easy things, but marriage, something so ubiquitous that it's assumed. if you're dating someone for a few years. And you say, guess what? We're getting married. Everyone goes, of course, phenomenal. Congratulations. That's great. Of course you're going to do that. You know, you're making honest woman over here. Of course. Whereas if you say, you know, we've been together for three, four years, we decided we're not going to get married. People go, ooh, that's wrong with this guy. He's got intimacy issues. He's not getting, you know, what's the problem that you don't want to get married? Whereas rationally, the response should be, you know, oh, yeah, we're getting married. What are you kidding me? Why are you doing that? It's like someone's saying I'm going to go skydiving. It's like, wait, are you crazy? That's a dangerous thing to do. You know, and it's not, I mean, the list in skydiving. It's not like it's 75% 76% of people die with skydiving. So the truth is, like, it makes very little sense to me that marriage is assumed to be a thing you will do. When in fact, we as the species are so unbelievably bad at it.

This time it's different. This time it's different. It's this time I'm really in love. That other time when I thought I was in love, that wasn't it? This time it's different. It really, it's a blind spot. And again, where does it come from? You'd have to ask people smarter than me. You know, it could be neuroscience. It could be the realm of real deep social psychology, it could just be a cognitive bias. I have no idea. It could be a delusion brought on by inadequate lighting. You know, but whatever it is, we go, oh, yeah, but this one's different. This way, I did a pre-nap last week for a guy. who went through the one of the ugliest divorces I've ever seen. And that's not hyperbole. Like, I've been doing this for 25 years. Just to say, so for me to say, the ugliest divorce I've ever seen is, that's amazing. That's like, that's a really big debt. It's like, I've Michelin Chef saying this was the best meal I've ever had. So this guy had a horrific divorce that lasted four or five years. He's remaring a woman 30 years younger than him who he met four months ago. And when I said to him, as artfully and tactfully as I could, you know, you've only known this person for a short time and, you know, have you thought about maybe just, you know, being a little cautious in terms of what you've seen how difficult a divorce can be, you know, do you think maybe it might be? He just, oh no, this is, I've never felt anything like this. I've never been this in love. I've never been so connected with someone we just get each other. And, you know, It would be very in delicate and rude for me to say, like, snap out of it, man. You got to get your, like, really, you know, bring your logical brain to this, this equation. Do not bring the part of you that's just filled with romance and has Christmas in your eyes. Like, really, you got to look at this honestly.

Yeah. Yeah, I see a lot of that. I mean, I, you know, I'm hesitant to say gold diggers because I think that has a, a projorative like built into it, that, that somehow I think that that people bring different things to the table in relationships. I, I think love is an economy. And I'm not saying that in a way that devalues love. I think that love is a verb. I think that love is an emotion. And I think that love is an economy. You know, there is a giving and taking of value. And that can be incredibly symbiotic. You know, that can be incredibly healthy and wonderful that that, you know, I am way too serious. And the person who I'm with is going to bring lightness and levity to the relationship. And I'm going to help them be a little more serious. And they're going to help me lighten up, you know, and I'm hard charging and hard working and everything's like 10 moves ahead. And my partner's going to like help me calm down and help me, you know, not be so hard charging and be a little softer, be a little kinder and rest my head and give me a sort of warm place to do that. That's beautiful. We're each bringing something different. So if I'm a powerful hardworking, financially successful, financially secure man, and I meet a young, beautiful woman who has energy and excitement and who has tremendous gifts, but doesn't have the resources to be able to do much with that. She's a talented artist, but she's busy working a thankless, awful job, slinging cappuccinos. She's not able to in this prime of her life focus on this thing, she's so talented at. I can say to her, hey, listen, why don't you focus on that and I have resources and abundance of them and I'm happy to share them with you and and feel like I'm part of your success and you in turn or part of my success because you give me this wonderful respite from the chaos of my work and and like I don't think that that's a dishonest economy. I don't think that so like to say a gold digger sort of implies like oh she's in it for the money and it's okay, why'm in it for the beauty? You know, so does that mean I'm a horrible shallow person or is beauty beautiful? Is beauty something you want to be around? And if we're honest about the interaction, how is that predatory, how is that unfair to either of us? You know, if we're honest about it, like what's harder for me to deal with is when I have a client, who is 150 pounds overweight, five foot seven, and there is just nothing about him that aesthetically or even personality-wise, a woman would go, oh, that's my guy, but he's a billionaire. And he's got a young, gorgeous woman who is allegedly madly in love with him, and he really believes that it's his personality. And it's nothing to do with the fact that he's a billionaire or that that is a very small consideration. That feels to me like the worst kind of delusion. You know, whereas you could very honestly say, like, yeah, we each bring different things to the table, we each bring different things to each other's lives. And then yeah, so it is a quote unquote gold digger. But, you know, it's also a man who wants to buy the company of someone who might not otherwise be interested in him if he wasn't so successful. So I think there's a, there's a, there's a give and a take in that relationship.

Yeah, so the pre-nup conversation is a really interesting one because I do a lot of pre-nups. Sure, a prenuptial agreement is a contract between two people that defines the rules set essentially for their marriage. So marriage, when we talk about marriage, people tend to just sort of use the word marriage. And they're actually talking about a number of different things. Like in some context, marriage is a spiritual commitment, right? It's a religious commitment. It's tied to in Catholicism, it's a sacrament. In Judaism, it's a covenant with God. In Islam, it has its own status. So, marriage exists as a religious concept. Socially, we have a definition of marriage, right? Like, I am married to this person. We have married our destinies to each other. We have agreed that we are a each other's person. And then marriage has a specific legal definition. And my job as a divorce lawyer is to take that piece apart for someone, or to create protections for people who are contemplating entering into that legal status. So like, you've been to weddings, right? I'm sure you've never at the end of the wedding said, great guys, I had a wonderful time. The cake was delicious. I need to see the paperwork. Can I see the license now? I just want to make sure everything was done properly and that there were witness. You've never said that. You've never said to your parents, can I see your marriage license? I'd like to make sure everything is in order here. That's not how it works. We don't do that. So you could go have a wedding. and tell people that you're married and never actually legally married. You could just tell people that you're married. You don't check people's paperwork. Like, you could just wear a ring if you want to. And similarly, if you don't wear a ring, it doesn't mean you're not legally married. Like, you could be legally married and still take your ring off and you're still legally married. If it was just as easy as taking the ring off, I'd be out of a job. So, marriage is a legal status. That's one of the meanings of marriage. And a pre-nuptial agreement, the way I would describe it, is two people deciding that they, having picked each other out of eight billion people to choose from in the world, are in a better position to make the rules that will govern the economics of their relationship than the legislature would be, than politicians would be. And anyone who's ever been to the Department of Motor Vehicles, or who's ever been to any government agency, very rarely, would you interact with a government agency and go, We should definitely put these people in charge of our family life. They're going to do a great job. They're really crushing it. That's not something people yet. Most people who are married have almost no idea what legal rights and obligations were conferred on them by getting married. They just have no idea. It's most legally significant thing they're going to do in their life other than die. And they have no idea what their rights and obligations are. And those rights and obligations can change. politics and the legislature and the way that rules that govern the spousal support rights, child support rights, the division of property, those are subject to change by government change. So, for example, in the United States, alimony spousal support maintenance, whatever we want to call it, which is a payment a person makes to their spouse when there's been an economic disparity in the marriage and now they're getting divorced. That used to be tax deductible. It used to have no formula. Was it the discretion of a judge? Then in 2016, Trump came into office and he said, yeah, I'm not letting it be tax deductible anymore. So completely changed. Now, you're already married at this point. And now the rules about what governs your marriage have changed. So there aren't a lot of contracts in the world that people could enter into that the terms could wildly change due to circumstances beyond your control and you're still in that same contract. So pre and up fuel agreements, are designed for two people who at that moment have an abundance of affection for each other. If they didn't, then there's no reason that they should be getting married, that they make up a rule set that's going to govern their relationship.

Correct. Now it's hard to say in advance who gets what when we break up some time in the future. because we don't know what we're going to have in 10 years, in 20 years. So what do you do? You create structures like you create, you know, I refer to the simplest prune up as a yours mine in hours. which is if it's in my name, whether it's an asset or a liability, it's mine. Free from any claim by you, free from any obligation to you. If it's in your name, it's yours. Free from any claim by any obligation to me. Hours, if it's in our joint names, then we're equally responsible for it, if it's an obligation, or we equally are entitled to have the value of it, if it's an asset. That to me, just creating those three buckets, Now, here's the problem. You create those three buckets. You both sign off on it and you get married. You can't just set it and forget it now. You actually have to have conversations with this person that you're married to, which theoretically you should be able to do, right? Like if you've decided, this is going to be my primary relationship. This is the person I'm going to time I destiny to. You should be able to talk about, hey, I just got this big bonus at work. I'm going to put this much in my soul account, and I'm going to put this much in the joint account. And then should be able to say, if you're the person, well, why are you putting so much of it in your personal account? Like, or things weird without, or something, or is there, you know, have some conversation, again, about why are we marrying? It's that economy concept, which is, look, what do I owe you if I marry you? I'd like to know that in advance, because people say to me all the time, you know, while I marry this person, and when we got married, He had nothing. He had nothing, and he built his business while he was married to me. And I was very, you know, there for him while he was building it. So, therefore, I believe I'm entitled to have the value of that business. That's a logical argument. I don't know that I agree with it, but it's logical. But keep going with that logic, right? So if that was true, and I built this business and my wife, who was married to me while I was building their business, she helped make that. Okay. Well, her mother and father, helped make who she is. So I owe them something, right? Like, because if they hadn't done what they did, I wouldn't have her. And if I didn't have her, I wouldn't have my business. So how much do I owe them? And you know now that I think about it, her grandmother definitely influenced who her mother was, which influenced who she was, which influenced what she did for me. So just, can you let me know in advance? It's bar down the chain. Do I owe people? And how much do I owe them? They can't all get half. So did they get half of the half of the half? Or do I, like, and if this is the logic that we're going to follow, then I would like to know in advance what that is because there are no other transactions where if you went into purchase a car and he said, how much is this car? And they said, money. And he said, well, how much, you know, it's a good amount. Okay, again, we just keep talking in abstractions. I'd like to know what does this add up to? How much is it? You know, and even if you can't make it a dollar number, it's x% of last year's earnings, or like give me a formula, something to tie it to, and at least have that conversation, because then you can decide, am I going to sign up for this thing or not?

Well, and you know, there's a lot to that. There's a lot to unpack there. So the first thing I would say is, all marriages end. They end in death or they end in divorce, but they all end, right? And so if you said I'm going to get life insurance, it would be foolish for someone who's with you to say, hey, are you planning on dying soon? Like it? No, but in the event that I do, I'd like to make sure that things are taking care of in a certain way. And in the event that I do, there's going to be enough things to be upset and sad about for the people around me, so I'd like them to have one less thing. You know, and I also know that there's a possibility. I hope I won't, but there's a possibility that I'm going to die in an hour. So I'd really hope it doesn't happen, but I can't say it's definitely not going to happen. So divorce, you know, when we look at statistics like that, it's okay to say, hey, look, you know what? I hope this never happens. But if it did, what do we owe each other? You know, what would you need? Like, it's not just a conversation about, what do I want to keep? What am I entitled to keep? It's also, what would you need?

Yeah, I've seen marriage. I've seen marriages that were scheduled to happen not happened because the pre-nap discussion happened. But more often than not, I've seen the threat of not marrying someone because they want you to sign a pre-nap. cause a person to fold in their request for a pre-nup, which to me is a really bad start for a marriage. So I've had a lot of clients who come in, say, look, I want to have a pre-nup. I have a lot of confidence in this marriage. I really love this person, but I would like to have a pre-nup in place. And I draft a pre-nup for them, and it has reasonable terms, and they give it to their fiance, and their fiance says, yeah, I'm not signing that. It's not happening. And instead of saying, okay, like then you're choosing for us to not marry, you know, that's okay. But like I love you and I'd love to marry you, but this is something that I need in order to feel comfortable with that. They just go, okay, yeah, I'd never mind. And they walk away from it. And because they're intimidated. And I think that's an awful way to start a marriage. Like I think that's much worse than having a discussion about difficult things. I don't think you would think it's irresponsible. You've been with with women for five years to say to her, let's say a year ago, or let's say four years ago, to say to her, you know, we're going to get in a fight sometime. That's going to happen. But we're going to disagree about something. It'll probably be my fault. I'll probably say something stupid. I do that sometimes. So when we get in the fight someday, which again, I hope we don't. I'll do everything I can and not ever get an argument with you. But at some point, someone's going to say something. It's going to hurt my feelings. I'm going to take it the wrong way. I'll say something. You'll take it the wrong way. Or maybe I'm just an idiot. Sometimes I'll be in a bad mood and I'll say something or I'll have too many drinks and I'll say something to you and upset you. When that happens, How do you, how do you like to fight? Like, what's best? Do you need a minute? Like, do you need a minute to calm down? Do you need to, like, sleep on it? Or do you need to, like, we gotta fix this right now. I can't go to bed angry. Like, I won't be able to sleep, I won't be able to function. Like, like, do we have to address it right then in there? Because, you know, best time to talk about how we're gonna argue when we're not arguing. You know, the worst time to learn how to fight in the middle of a fight. That's the worst time to learn how to fight. So I like a pre-nup. I think a pre-nup can be a very romantic thing. Because it's basically saying, look, I love you. You love me. We want this thing to work, or else we wouldn't be signing up for it. But in the event, it breaks down. You have a right to know what you're entitled to. I have a right to know what I'm entitled to. We both have an interest in making sure that we both have the things we need so that neither of us feels like we're crawling out of this relationship instead of walking out of it. Like if I lose you, I'm going to have a lot more to be sad about than my stuff. But boy, let me tell you, not knowing where I'm going to live or how I'm going to pay my bills, that's going to add a layer of pain and complexity to what is undoubtedly going to be a really hard situation. So let's take that off of each other. Let's let's know that because I don't ever want the person who lays their head on the pillow next to me to be there because they don't want to get divorced. I would rather that it be that they like having me their next to them, that their life is better because I'm there, that they feel like I bring value to their life, and they bring value to mine. Not, well, I don't want to go through all that.

Yeah. I mean, I have to tell you it's a very seamless. I don't. I don't think it's easy to distinguish between where attorneys and counselors at law, I have an undergraduate degree in psychology. And I think I use it as much as I use my law degree because this is so personal that it's very hard to not give human advice while I'm giving legal advice. And I'm dealing in the clay of human emotion and human connection and human frailty and human emotional complexity.

You know, it could be true in the UK, but certainly not in the USA. They are enforceable. They are binding. Sometimes they're crazy how enforceable they are. I mean, like, it's because the nature of a cleanup is, as long as it was not what's called unconscionable, unconscionable as a contract that is so unfair that no fair dealing person would offer it and no sane person would accept it. So that's what unconscious ability is. So you have to be a contract has to be unconscionable for it to be set aside. Okay. Now, I have seen some pre-nups that were in their interpretation unconscionable, meaning You know, at the time they entered into it, he had nothing and she had nothing. And now they're getting divorced and under the terms of this, he's going to walk out with $100 million and she's going to walk out with almost nothing. But as long as it was not unconscionable at the time it was made, if it's unconscionable in its performance, it's still binding. So I have seen the outcome of pre-nups sometimes be shockingly unfair, but you have a right to contract. As long as it wasn't fraud, as long as it wasn't the rest or undo influence, or if someone was under the influence of drugs or alcohol when they signed off on it, It's a binding contract because we believe in in in human autonomy and agency and the right to make decisions about your life and your future.

which was enforceable, had a provision that said that for every 10 pounds the wife gained in the marriage, she would lose $10,000 a month in Alamani. 10 pounds of weight. Yes, yes. So it was a very wealthy man who was wearing a very attractive woman. But he was very concerned that she was going to become less attractive and he was going to become more wealthy. So his solution to this was in the pre-neptural agreement. He wanted a clause that said she would get, if they divorced, she was going to get like $70,000 a month for Alamani. But for every 10 pounds she gained from the date of marriage, she would forfeit 10,000 a month worth of Alamani. And it was designed to sort of create an incentive that she would remain thin. And that was enforceable. Meaning they tried to challenge and set aside that provision. And the court said, this is a disgusting provision. I don't know why you married this person. But it's enforceable. It's a contract. The two of you signed it and you had to write to sign it and you agreed to these rules. And they may be ridiculous rules, but you agreed to them. And you have a right to do that. Do you think that was love? Again, I think it's a kind of love. I think it's a form of love. Is it a form of love? I'd be interested in now. I think it's very shallow in some ways. There's something very honest about it. I mean, you can't argue with the fact that there's something very upfront about it. He was making very clear and putting in writing. Here's the value you bring to this relationship. You know, I consider your physical appearance vitally important to this relationship. And by the way, don't skip the other side of that equation. Yeah. She was going to get $70,000 a month. That's very impressive number. I think she also understood there was a value to be attached to him as well. Is it something I would be interested in on either side of that equation? No. But do I have a right to say to someone that's not love? I don't think I have a right to say that to someone. I think that if this is an economy, the two of you have agreed on that, you know, as a lawyer, my job as a lawyer is not to look, like I don't look at it that way. I look at the engineering of it. So like if I'm representing her, in that transaction. All I can think is, okay, so we're going to want her baseline weight to be as high as possible. So I'm going to want her to have pennies in her pockets after the day we sign the prena because you'd have to establish a baseline, right? Because if you say gaining 10 pounds, you'd have to establish a baseline weight on the date of the marriage. So she was weighed on the date of the marriage. Well, in or about the date of the marriage, the party's acknowledged that on or about the date of marriage, she weighed approximately x pounds. So if I'm her, I want that to be as high as possible. So I'm going to be putting pennies in my pockets and eating as many cheeseburgers as I can before the way in. Now we're getting divorced. I'm going to be like a wrestler. I'm gonna be in the sauna. I'm gonna be sweating as much as I can. I'm gonna take dioretics. I'm gonna eat nothing but grilled vegetables for a week or two, you know? And I'm gonna take off every ounce of clothing I can because I wanna minimize my weight. This is why lawyers don't get invited to parties because that's how we analyze problems. Like I didn't hear that and go, what is the nature of their coupling? I looked at it and I went, oh, I could play with that. I could work. I could do whoever I'm representing in that transaction. I could figure out a way to kind of make that work. You become a coach. Kind of is. I mean, it turns into an engineering question as opposed to a human question.

Pedally clauses. Yeah. Pedality clauses. Yeah. Yeah. So it's something people include in prenuptial agreements, and also sometimes in what's called a postnuptial agreement. So a postnuptial agreement, you know, an upshore meaning marriage, pre meaning before marriage, post meaning after marriage. So if you didn't get a prenupt, but you're marriage for whatever reason. becomes fragile, maybe someone learns of an affair, or maybe you're starting to have difficulties with each other. But you don't want a divorce. But you'd like there to be some clarity as to if we divorce what will the rules be? You can do something called a post-notchual agreement. And that would, in the event, you divorce, make the divorce a little less acrimonious because you've resolved certain issues. It's basically like the pre-nup you should have had. So I have seen people in both pre-nups and in post-nups put in what's called fidelity clauses, which essentially are a clause that say that if you cheat on your spouse, here's what the penalty will be. And it could be a financial penalty. It could have a support related context. It could have be a percentage of certain ownership rights things that you have.

Yeah, from a legal standpoint, they're a terrible idea. For a couple of reasons. One, defining cheating is very tricky. If you're going to define cheating as a specific form of sexual contact, I guess that's a pretty clear definition. But even in fidelity, it's not all created equal. I mean, I think we get all agree that if you, if you're a partner, when they were drunk on vacation or at a party, you know, had some kind of fleeting sexual contact with another person. And then woke up the next day and went, oh my God, what did I do? I regret this so much. But they're never going to see this person again. It was just a stupid dowliance that happened, you know, again, not excusing that behavior. But that's different than if you were having an ongoing affair with another person. Or I think there are probably some people if they were being honest. If they said, would you rather that your spouse on a drunken night out kissed somebody, or was texting another person five times a day for six weeks and sharing the most intimate thoughts? you know, and what we call an emotional affair. Well, I mean, I think we can agree that like something about an emotional affair, like someone becoming your confidant. I once heard someone say, and in my professional life, I found it to be true, that when men find out that a woman who they're with has had an affair, their first question is, did you sleep with them? When women find out a man had an affair, their first question is, are you in love with her? And I think that tells you a lot about men and women's relationships. Because there's a sense of, okay, what was this? Was this sex? Or was this, like, I don't love you anymore. I don't want you in my life anymore. Because those are two really different things. And so a fidelity clause is a one size fits all concept that just says, okay, we're gonna define cheating. And then there's gonna be a penalty for you doing it. Now again, in what I've observed in life cheating as its own penalty. Cheating turns your life at best, cheating turns your life into like an unbelievably complicated, like jumping from one foot to another, lying to everyone involved. Like rarely does anybody get out of infidelity without hurting themselves and a bunch of other people. Whether it's not only their partner, but even the person who they cheated with or that person's partner. There's so much pain to go around when cheating happens. And so to say, and there's going to be an economic penalty, you know, it's a bit like, you know, using drugs is illegal in a lot of places. But I can't imagine that there's a heroin addict who goes, you know, I'm going to shoot up, I'll wait. It's illegal. I don't want to get in trouble. Yeah. That's not how it works. You're adding insult to injury. This person, they're already in a very difficult position. I don't think making it illegal is going to do much, except create an underground economy. Same kind of thing. I think that in fidelity, there should be sufficient incentives in a relationship to not cheat. And there are already, by definition, so many consequences for cheating, that adding to that an economic penalty, I don't know that a person's gonna be about to cheat and then go, shh, this could cost me like 20 more grand. I'm not gonna do it.

Yeah, pre-nups are, I have to tell you, there's a generational shift happening. I see a lot of people in there, I've been doing this job for 25 years, and I will tell you, The people currently in their 20s and early 30s, like the prime demographic for marriage, mid-20s to mid-30s, are getting pre-nups at a rate that I would say is probably five X, what it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Certainly 25 years ago from when I started. I think there's a more pragmatic view of relationships. I think that There's a lot more open discussion. I mean, although there is a tremendous increase in the amount of like performative, look how happy we are, you know what I mean? Well, it's like, you know, white teeth and rotting comes. You know, like we're doing the performative social media, look at our great hashtag blast and meanwhile our life is, you know, our relationship is is rotting from the inside. And we see a lot of that. Like I would say, I see people in my office. who publicly are having the greatest relationships ever. Like if you believe they're social media, they are so madly in love. And it shocks me because I think about all the people that are dissatisfied in their perfectly acceptable relationship because it's not as amazing as that relationship. And me, well, that relationship is nowhere near that amazing as they'd have you believe it. And we've got the audacity now as a culture that people without any apology You know, do the, we're perfectly happy. These hateful rumors that were unhappy or terrible. And then, we've decided the amically behind ways. We were asked you to respect our privacy during this difficult time. And you're like, okay, but wait a minute. Like a month ago when there was rumors that the two of you were splitting up, you yelled at all of us for saying it's so mean that we're speculating. And now you're like, yes, we've split up. So we were right. So you were making us feel awful about ourselves and how madly love you were with each other. But now we were basing our lives. We're basing our level of satisfaction on watching your greatest hits while we live our gag real.

are often not as happy 100%. I'll actually extrapolate that further. My father is a southerners, so he has a lot of southern folksy things. He says, and one of them was empty barrels make the most noise. And he used to say that to me when I was a kid all the time. Whenever somebody had something fancy that they owned, because I grew up without a lot of money, and then someone would drive a beautiful car, and it's wow, of course, so cool. And he'd say, you know, empty barrels make the most noise, that the people that have true joy in their relationship really don't feel like they have to advertise it. People who have like, I represent some of the wealthiest people in the world. New York is the epicenter of commerce and finance for the United States, and to some degree for the world. You know, in the UAE, you're more likely to find a gold plated Ferrari, but in New York, like finance, Wall Street, like it is the home of it. So I represent, I have a client who's worth $8 billion. You would walk past him on the street, you would never know he has very much money at all. He drives a cheap grand Cherokee. which is like a very mid-range car. He wears like, you know, totally non-descript clothing. Like he just looks like a typical middle-aged dude. And you would not look at him and go, he gets his haircut at like supercuts for 25 bucks. Like he's not. Posh in the things that he owns and does. And he could buy you know he his income annually is like the gross domestic product of a few companies of a few countries and you know he's not but then they get I have clients who appear to be incredibly wealthy and as a divorce lawyer I get to see the absolutely unfiltered version of people's finances and I can tell you they are deeply in debt many of them This is particularly true of celebrities. Celebrities have to live these big, performative lives. Because if they don't drive a posh car and they don't wear the latest designer labels, there's this sense of, oh, they're not doing well. And especially with sort of influencer culture, there's just so much like everything everyone's wearing and doing has to be the best of the best and the most expensive. I find very often, the more people have to flaunt their wealth The less wealth they probably have. Money talks like wealth whispers. And it's very comfortable just whispering. It doesn't feel like it has to prove to the world. In fact, it would rather that everyone not know who it was. There was a time where fame was an unfortunate side effect of talent. So you were really good at something. So then everybody heard about who you were and all of a sudden, everybody knew who you were. And that was unfortunate. Because you couldn't go out to eat anymore. You couldn't just live your life anymore. Now, of course, there were times where it probably felt really nice. You know, it feels good. Listen, I walked down the street in New York City. Sometimes people, today, guys, said to me, hey, man, love your stuff. Thanks. That's great. It feels nice. Definitely nice. There's times where it doesn't, there's times where I'm on my phone. I'm on the middle of talking to a client and somebody's standing there next to me waiting to talk to me and I know they're waiting to say something so lovely. But there's a part of me, it's like, okay man, I gotta like do what I'm doing right now. I'm doing the thing, you know. And now being famous is the goal for so many people. So I think there is definitely when people say, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer, look at a happy wearer Because the reason I was never really interested in being famous is that The praise of strangers never really felt that important to me. Like if the people in my life think I have something interesting to say and care about me and like me, that's really meaningful to me. And I'm touched for anyone who's ever appreciated my work or enjoyed it. But I never said like, I really want to get out there and you know, have people know who I am and tell me I'm smart because I know I'm smart. Like it's okay. Like, you know, my beliefs don't require you to believe them. And so I think this performative culture when it comes to relationships is an unfortunate thing because again, we're comparing ourselves. We can't help as a species, but compare ourselves to the things we see around us.

How much, like, how much sex is enough sex? Like, honestly, like, we don't talk about these things. We don't, there's so much of our day-to-day life that we're constantly feeling like we're not doing well. based on nothing. Like, I don't think I'm doing that. Well, compared to what? I'm not good looking enough. Compared to what? A photo shop damage of a person on steroids? Yeah, you're right. You don't look like a photo shop person on steroids. You're not supposed to. Like, women are going into doctor's office saying, make me look like this and showing the doctor something that's been photo shopped. That person doesn't look like that. Like, how would you know you're not having enough sex? How much sex are people having? Is that free from one sex? Yeah, for sex is huge. Sex is huge. It's, well, I mean, first of all, it better be, because what's the difference between a spouse and a roommate otherwise? Like, if it's just like, oh, we're gonna be partners in a home together. Like, you know, I have to marry each other to do that. You can just live together and be, I mean, sex is the glue. Sex is the thing that brings you together. Sex is what makes a romantic relationship, a romantic relationship. And again, it can be any number of varieties of sex. It can be preferences of sex. It can be anything. But we don't talk about, we talk about all kinds of things in polite society now, if you can call it that. I mean, we talk more than we ever did about transgender issues and LGBTQ plus issues. And I mean, that's progress. I think it's great that people can talk about anything. We can talk about cake. We can talk about, like, I'm a big fan and people be able to speak openly about the things that make them happy and make them feel good and, you know, not having to feel ashamed about certain things. But baseline, like, how, how, well, we're not having enough sex. Okay, compared to what? The sex we used to have as a couple, that makes sense. That makes sense to me. Like, if we set a baseline and say, we used to have sex every day. We first started dating, we had sex four times a day. Okay, but then the list of where's off? You know, now we, we used to have sex once a day. Now once a week. Is that okay? Is that natural? Is that part of the progression of a relationship? Or is that a sign that one or both of us are feeling dissatisfied with each other? Can we talk about that and not have it be a fight? Can we talk about that and not hear it as something that we have to react defensively too? And that's the stuff I tried to talk about in my book is that people come in and they go, well, you know, we're unhappy with each other. I was cheating on her, but I was cheating on her because she wasn't sleeping with me. Well, I wasn't sleeping with him because he's never nice to me. Nice to her, because every time I talk to her, she does put me down. Okay, and you sit here going, okay, so you guys have just been in this death spiral. You know, just going down and down and down. You started at, I love you more than eight billion other people in the world. But somehow you just started to do this death spiral. And now you're right, you won. You guys, you won. You're both right. You don't have to sleep with them. You don't have to be nice to her. You don't have to say a kind word. You don't have to do any of that. You don't have to be married. Great news. You don't have to be married. But you decided to be married. You signed up to be married. So at some point, this made sense to you. You liked to chother that much. And you were both pointing in the same direction. And at some point, you lost the plot. So my feeling is, wouldn't it be better before you completely lose the plot to just do the preventative maintenance?

Talk about, are we still, as connected as we were? Are we still as excited as we were? Are we still, are we still attracted to each other? Are we still enjoying each other physically, mentally, emotionally? We don't want to do that there because it's uncomfortable, right? Okay. Lots of things are uncomfortable that are so good for you. You know, exercise is uncomfortable until you get in a rhythm of it and that feels really good, you know? So how would you know? If the first time you went to the gym and you worked out and you went home and you were like, oh my God, I'm so sore. I never working out again. Then you will never get into an exercise routine. You have to get through that part where everything's really sore. And you're still sometimes going to be sore, you overdid it, you know? But you start to realize, yeah, but it's also bringing tremendous value to my life. You know, and so why not? Like why not trade what you want now, which is comfort in the moment, for what you want most, which is real connection, real intimacy, like real joy. And that can be, and again, we want it. 86% of people who get divorced wouldn't get remarried within five years if we didn't want it. If we didn't believe it was possible. And if you've ever met someone, who is happily married over a long period of time, you and the lottery, like their lives are just so much better because they just go, I have this partner, because this is terrifying, like life is terrifying and it's brutal and it ends, it invariably ends, we're all gonna die, everyone we love is gonna die. Like we're playing a game you can't win to the utmost. And to me, have a partner in that someone who you can hold their hand and go you know when you're scared I'll be here for you and when I'm scared you'll be here for me and you'll help me see my blind spots and I'll help you see yours and let's just do this thing will never be alone like what a gorgeous thought that is what a beautiful thought that is what a worthy pursuit that is but yeah you got to be uncomfortable You gotta tell each other something other than what the other person wants to hear once in a while. But to me, if the payoff is real connection, keeping real intimacy, keeping your partner happy and satisfied with you, so that the thought of splitting up or running off with somebody else is just a fleeting thought that maybe occasionally jumps into their head, like that seems such a worthwhile investment to me.

It can be lots of things. I think you can be. I try to give a lot of examples, but I think some of the simplest examples are very small gestures of courtesy. I mean, think about when you first started dating. all the little things that made the back of your neck tingle about this person. Like they would say, the littlest thing about you, and it made you so happy, because they were noticing you. And they saw beautiful things in you, and that made you see and feel those things in yourself. That's a amazing thing we can do for each other. And so, at its core level, like the example I've given to a lot of my male friends, and several of them have done it and I've got a lot of really good feedback on it is leave even note. Just leave a note in the morning when you leave for work or wherever it is you're going, just leave a note. You know, it was so great hanging out with you last night. I'm with the prettiest girl in the whole world. Can't wait to see you again. Sit, what does that take? 10 seconds. 10 seconds. And every guy I meet, who I say that to, They go, yeah, the first time I did it, she was like, what is going on? Why did you leave me that note? What's going on? But then after a little while, like, if this is just something you do, that you go, yeah, I just, you know, I want to make a practice of like, how I want to tell you this stuff I forget to tell you sometimes. You know, like, what does that take? Like, what does it take for your partner to say to you? You're so smart. Like, I just love being around you. Like, you're so handsome. I'm so lucky. Like, what does that take? That's nothing. Doesn't cost anything. It takes nothing to do that. Why don't we do it? I don't know. I don't know. I think we just whoever discovered water, it wasn't a fish. Like I think you're just in it, and you just stop seeing it, and that person's just there. And again, I don't know, and I also think culture is antagonistic to it, because the example I give to people, because people love their dogs, and I love my dogs. But like dogs are a great way to look at this rationally, because I've got a 13 year old dog. I got him when he was a puppy. And then he was 13. And like me, he slowed down a lot. His back hurts. He's not quite the puppy he used to be. I have never once looked at that dog and gone. I got to get a puppy. This old dog. Oh, you didn't look as cute as he used to and like, oh my god, have you seen our cute puppies are like, I would never. It's my dog. Man, I fall more in love with that dog every single day. You know, and yes, your puppies are cute and they're great. And I'll pat him, but that's my dog. Man, I wouldn't trade all the puppies in the world for that dog. your partner, your romantic partner like what when did it become acceptable as it as it is in in in culture to just just piss all over your partner like every guy it's like the I'm married to the most loadsome harpy ever to castrate a band. Like, this one, the old ball in shame. And women, it's like the guy is like, oh, this idiot. Like, this just lovable idiot. You know, he doesn't know. He doesn't know anything. He's so stupid, men are so stupid. Like, when did that, what do you think's gonna come from that? Other than this disdain that we can then have for each other, and this sort of disrespect, as opposed to being like so into each other, which is what you were. When you were strangers. You know, when you didn't know each other, you know, every, all the same women sitting around in a group of women talking about how much their husband's suck. When their female friend goes, oh my God, I'm seeing this guy, I just started saying, what are the, oh my God, he sounds so great. Oh, all this is, all this is is your guy five years ago. But somehow now, you're really going to buy the delusion that if she, it all works out with him and they get married and they do their little fairy tale thing and the cake and the dress and the whole thing that in five years she's still going to be like, he's so great. No, it's going to be crazy again, just like the rest of you. So we need to start as a culture. You know, perhaps changing the way, because I think there is something about that where we, you know, we're trying to like not make people self conscious. So we just like take the piss out of our partner all the time in front of, you know, people or around other people. And I don't find that charming.

You're watching how happy wife had. Who ever said that should just be beaten to death? Happy wife happy life. Like, if I were one more person give that advice to somebody, I have to tell you, that is just the most ridiculous. What does that even mean? Happy wife happy life.

That's something to aspire to. You know, man, I can't wait for some day for my kids to just sit there while the up person in the other room is just mildly dissatisfied with them. And they can just sit and watch, you know, the football. Get really? That's what we're aspiring to. That's what you hope for. Like, I gotta tell you, I just, I think our goals are really misaligned. You know, my greatest accomplishment in life is my children. Really, that's your greatest accomplishment in life is your children. Let me ask you this, what will your children's greatest accomplishment life be? Having children? Guess what? This is the ideology of a cancer cell. growth for the sake of growth for the sake of growth, reproduction for the sake of reproduction. I don't think that's the highest noblest goal. I think there should be something in there about quality of life, about making the world where the experience of others better. Like again, it's not for me to define, but I certainly, I don't intelligence is hard to define, but I can spot stupid a mile away. And I have to tell you, a good relationship, you know, it's kind of hard to quantify, but man, I know what sucks. I know a bad relationship when I see one, and we all know them. So what's more uncomfortable? That relationship, where, you know, at least she's not yelling at me, and she's only mildly dissatisfied, and I can just be left alone for an hour and watch the football, or having admin comfortable conversation. Again, while you're still like each other, But there's a little slippage. There's a little something going in the other direction and I don't want it to go too far. I mean, put it into the physical context. It is a whole lot easier to maintain a healthy weight. then to gain a hundred pounds and then try to figure out how to lose it. That's much, much harder. And it's much worse for you. And the chances of you actually accomplishing them at our way lower, whereas maintaining a healthy way, that's not an unrealistic thing to be able to do.

If you're going to, you know, Jordan, I find Jordan Peterson very entertaining. I've been a fan of his work a long time. And I loved actually your conversation with him. What I will say is I think that he's sort of hyperbolic in his presentation sometimes, which I enjoy. But I think we totally agree on this. I think that what he's saying more than anything is that you can invest now in candor and enlistening to this other person in a non-defensive manner. And so there's a chapter in my book called Hit Send Now. where I talk about exactly that, where I say, you need to be able to have these conversations, but have them in a way that you're hearing it and you're saying it, you're agreeing, it's a contract that we know we love each other. So we're gonna try to say it with love, we're gonna try to hear it with love, because I'm only saying it, because this is important to me, this relationship, and I want it to be good for you and for me. So I'm gonna go out on the limb here, I'm gonna take this risk, because you're worth it. You are worth it for me to take this risk. It's scary. I'm not excited about having to say it. But you know what? Like I care enough. And when you say things to me, I'm going to hear it. I'm going to hear it is you saying, I care so much about this relationship. I'm going to say this harder thing to say. And it might be little. It might be, you know, you said the other night you were talking about my sister and you made that little joke about her and it felt like you were like kind of making fun of my sister and I thought you liked my sister and it's really important to me that you liked my sister because I really liked my sister. So maybe I misunderstood you and if I did, okay, great, let me know that. It's not now. Just hit send now. The reason I said hit send now is when you You're like right in email, where you said something important, and you like write it, you write it, and you craft it, and you're like about to hit send, and you're like, oh boy. And then you hit it, and you're like, well, it's there now. And I'm sending it now, like it's done. I hit send now. That's where I got the term hit send now, because, but I said, like make it a technique, like say to your partner, I want to do this. I want you to do it and I want to do it, but I want to make it clear, like make the subject heading of the email hitting send now.

So they know this is not an attack. This is something I want to get off my chest. You don't have to respond right away. You don't have to respond in writing if you don't want to. But I just want to put this out there because I want you to digest it.

Yep. Yep. And to again, to make a point of calling this out as a technique when you're in a good place. So when you're already in a good place, there's an abundance of goodwill between us. We're in a good spot. That's a good time to say, hey, look, this is good, man. And this is important. So let's keep it good. And the way we're going to do that is if I say to you, you know, we used to are making an example. We used to have sex five times a week. And now I feel like it's like, you know, once a week, maybe. And I think you're so attractive. I love it. I don't feel any less attracted to you. And I know we've been busy and things like that. But I don't want to see that slip. I want you to be the person that fills all my desires and all my fantasies. I don't want to look at porn. I don't want to think about other things. I want to really be focused on you. Is there something I'm doing? that's causing you to be less interested in me, is there something I could do that would spark things better? Is there something going on that I need to know in terms of how you feel about me?

If it's personal and it's offensive, isn't it better to know? Like, because I'd tell you, I'll come up with a thousand different reasons that might be and only one of them might be accurate. And the other 999 might be complete garbage in my mind. Like, I might be convinced that it's because you're cheating. I might be convinced that I'm not attractive to you all of a sudden, because you know, my hair got gray or I got a bad haircut or something stupid. What if it's that? Then wouldn't you rather know? Wouldn't you rather know? Wouldn't you then find some other, and listen, I'm not saying, by the way, everything isn't everything, right? Like there are things in relationships that you might just say, yeah, I don't know, that's changed. Like I used to be really into that, and I'm not anymore. You know, that used to mean a lot to me, and now it doesn't. And that gives your partner a chance to say, well, look, it's still really important to me. So can we find some common ground?

Yeah, and that's a great question. And also is increasing? Yeah, so here's what I'll say. reverse engineering the demise of a marriage is a very difficult thing for anybody to do because the two people in the relationship aren't even really fully aware of what's going on in themselves much less at each other and then an outside observer asking them so like You can do all the studies you want of people's self-reported satisfaction or lack of satisfaction in a relationship or what caused them to become dissatisfied. That is so loaded up with people's delusion and people's projection and all these other things that only you quantify. So everything I'm saying, I'm saying as a divorce lawyer, why I think is empathetic and who I think for a living puts myself in other people's mind to try to understand what they're doing and why they did what they did and come up with the best and worst possible excuses for it. And then to tell that story, right? Like I'm a full contact storyteller. That's my job. So, and my job, if you're really honest, is to manipulate people's emotional state. My job is to make a judge field good about my client and bad about the other side. Make the other side feel scared and make my client feel safe. That's my job. So manipulate everybody's emotional state through the power of storytelling. That's what being a divorce lawyer is. It sounds sexier when I say it that way. But that is what it is. So when we look at that as the job, where does sex fall into that equation? It's everywhere in that equation. Because again, it is the thing that separates this relationship from other kinds of relationships. Sex is a thing that is definitional to a romantic relationship. Now again, will it always be the same? Will it always stay at the same level of importance? No. But is it a great canary in the coal mine? that, you know, like, something's off with the sex now, that the tragedy's not far behind. Yeah, like, because almost every couple, when I walked to my side of the equation about when did this thing start? When did this ship start to sink? There was certainly some change in sex. Because again, sex is definitional in terms of what distinguishes a romantic relationship from a platonic relationship. Because listen, guys, we can do this however we want as a society. We don't have to get married. We do not have to get married. We just have to reproduce. But we could just decide, hey, we're just going to reproduce. And we're going to live in like colonies of platonic, you know, relationships and we'll just have sex for the purposes of breeding at certain times. And then we'll figure out who gets to raise what kids and that'll be that. We don't do that. And it's not like what we don't do that because we made a set of rules. Societies don't do that. never really done that. Like there's somehow this permutation in the human and animal kingdom keeps coming up where we have pair bonds and we reproduce with the person who's our partner and then we sort of work together and how much does the tribe, how much does the rest of the world get involved in that, how extended is the family, how extended is the tribe, that varies from species to species, from culture to culture, from time to time. But this fundamental idea of reproduction between the male and the female of the species and they're being something continued interaction and the sharing of responsibilities towards the rearing of the young. It's pretty common, right? So what's the thing that makes A and B. It's the sex. Like there's sex. There's some romantic or sexual component to that relationship that then leads to reproduction of some kind. So I think when you take that out of the equation or when there's a change in that, there's a disruption in the force, right? There's a disruption in the system. And then you can trace it back. Like, yeah, and again, sometimes it's not direct cause and effect. Like, oh, we started having less sex, then we stopped being nice to each other. Sometimes it stopped being nice to each other, so we stopped having as much sex. But it's an element. It's always an element there. And that's my key piece of advice to everyone in the book that I try to say over and over and over again, if you had to like summarize it is pay attention. Just pay attention. to what you're feeling, to what your partner's feeling, and then say it. You know, I say that all marital problems stem from two things. I don't know what I want, and I don't know how to express it. And I think if you can figure that out, if you can figure out what you want, and figure out how to express it, that's like 99% of the battle.

Yeah, it's a great question. So I, as my career has progressed, I am now a guy who you hire when you're in a really bad situation. So I'm a trial lawyer. So now you can do things with a scalpel and you can do them with a chainsaw. I'm a chainsaw now. Like now I'm, you hire me because your situation's bad. Because you're more expensive? No, I'm more expensive because I'm really good in high conflict situations. I'm really tactical. I'm really strategic. I think 10 moves ahead. And I outpace everyone with my work ethic. I wake up at 4 AM and I wake up very sharp and I wake and I'm immediately thinking about clients and cases and I'm dedicated to this work and an absolutely insane way in a way that is in no way good as a human being. It's really really I'm a great lawyer. I'm questionable as a human being but I'm really really good as a lawyer because I'm better at this than I've ever been in anything in my life.

Yeah, for many years in my career, early in my career, the first decade or more of my career, when I handled more sort of regular people's divorces, you know? Yeah, I would frequently, I would frequently try to steer people if I thought that that was possible. I still to this day. If I think it's possible for people to work something out, either in individual counseling or in individual counseling and then maybe couples counseling, I will steer them in that direction, of course. Who cheats more men or women? I think both men and women cheat with a tremendous amount of frequency. I think that I don't think that you could really say one does it more than the other. I think that more men are accused of having ruined the relationship by cheating than women are.

Men generally want more sex. Women want more quality sex. manner quantity based in my experience coming to sex and that's like men would rather have frequent sex that may not be the highest possible quality but it like kind of gets the job done. I mean, it's the same reason my pornography is more popular with men than women. I think that manner just like I got to get the poison out of my system here. I got to be cut on with my day and I'm not going to be able to think straight until I just get that over with and so I think that that Women, it's a different, I don't think women have, don't find sex important. I hate to make generalizations about gender. But from my seat, the number of men that come in and say to me, like, yeah, she's just not sleeping with me. Well, what did she expect? Like, of course I slept with somebody else. She was like, sleep with me once a week. She was sleeping with me once a month. I've had clients who came in and were like, yeah, we had net sex in six years. six years, like, first of all, why would you put up with that? Second of all, if you're this person spouse, how what the hell did you think was going on? You thought things were okay? Like, yeah, we had sex in six years. We just forgot to do that. Like, I get it if you didn't clean your gutters in six years, or, you know, maybe, like, I get it if you didn't change your oil in a year. Like, it's bad idea that, like, I get it out and slip your mind. Look, oh my God, I'm into the dentist in a year.

Oh my god, please, if you could have like a PhD in infidelity, I would have it. Yeah, I mean, it's because a cheating is a huge component to divorcees so many divorces, but the question is always cause a effect and the danger of putting so much emphasis on cheating is that it's an oversimplification. So someone comes in and goes, we're getting divorced. Why? Because he's sleeping with his secretary. I get it, like yes, that's true. That is one of the variables that has led to your divorce. But you, you hadn't slept with him in three years. So I'm not saying that makes the cheating forgivable. But you're saying you had a really super awesome healthy marriage and then this nefarious secretary came into the picture and suddenly he was wooed away. No, there were conditions. that made that very likely to happen, right? And so let's start going back a little further in the cause. Like the truth is that the bottom of a bottomless pit. So we can try to reverse engine here this and say, well, he slept with his secretary because you weren't sleeping with her. I wasn't sleeping with him because he wasn't nice to me. Well, I wasn't nice to him because he was never paying any attention to me. I wasn't paying attention to her because what did I want to pay attention to? She hasn't changed at all or she's changed so much and she's nothing like she used to be. And again, everyone You'll be shocked to hear when they tell the story of their life, they're usually the hero. They rarely come into my office and go, listen, I'm a piece of garbage. You know, but I will tell you when it comes to cheating. Sometimes they do.

Yeah, I mean, I've had people come in and tell me stories that I just think to myself like how how did you actually like just the engineering of it? Like I've had people who came in and they had multiple, they had two families happening at once and neither of them knew about the other. Like that that the mistress who he started a family with like thought he was divorced and the wife thought that he was traveling for business and like he would literally have Christmas with both he would have Thanksgiving with both like he would and he just found a way to sort of logistically do it and I've seen things like that many times I mean I've seen people I it's almost become a cliche that people who sleep with their They're sister-in-law or they're brother-in-law. Whether-in-law? Oh, and I haven't seen mother-in-law yet. Father-in-law? I have seen father-in-law. Yeah, I have seen father-in-law. Yeah, I saw that, saw that one. There's a chapter in my book about nannies. None of people sleep with the nanny that's pretty common.

Yeah. I don't know what that's about. I mean, I do. I have a theory about it. I think that what I call the nanny fascination. I think that it's not that hard to understand. Like the nanny is a lot of the characteristics of the wife, right? She's good with the kids. She's there to be a supportive other to the husband. Um, she's a helpmate, you know, but without any of the autonomy and agency without any of the, like, she's an employee at the end of the day. So much simpler of a relationship in the sense that it's like you got to do a good job. I'm going to fire you, you know, so not talking back. Yeah, I don't talk back because I'm a employer, you know, and you're not gonna, so I think I get it, you know, I get it. I also think too that, and this is, this is dangerous ground, especially in the year of our Lord, 2024. But I think she's also a version of the wife, like, She's a version of the wife when the wife was just a woman. Like, she has a life outside the home. Like, she, when she's not nannying, she's out doing stuff. And so she's got things to talk about. Like, she's gone places. She does things. There's something mysterious about her, you know? And I think that's one of the advice I give in the book is that I think that wives can can embrace the part of themselves that's the nanny. Take the time to like, don't let your spouse and your children eclipse who you are. Who you are is who you're has to fill in love with. Your kids exist because a man and a woman found each other attractive. And so don't Don't forget in your desire to be a good parent and your desire to be a good partner. Don't forget to be really good to yourself and to cultivate your interests and your passions and to try to enjoy them as best you can. You know, without shirking, obviously none of us wants to shark our responsibilities to our families and our children. But you're important. Like I think people are the husband and the wife, you know, are important or are in the same sex marriage, husband, husband, wife, wife. You're important to each other. You know, remember who you are. Remember the value you brought to the relationship.

Oh, it's like I think. Listen, there's a reason because I understand how trapped people feel. I think that you sign on for this thing that feels so good. Love, we fall in love so fast.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, that's an extreme example. But I actually, when you spend enough time with people who are in horrifyingly awful situations, like they're having an affair for many years, They've hidden money or they've done, you know, like they've engaged in transgressions that if their spouse found out about it, it would just be like, are you kidding me, you know? And I think most of the time, like it starts which is one sort of bad choice. And then that bad choice leads to a series of choice. Like they always say, if you watch enough serial killer things, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. You know, you don't get caught for the crime, you get caught for the cover-up. It's like the things you do to try to cover your tracks is the thing that leave the tracks. And it's the same.

I think God. I've only had one client. in 25 years of practice, who there was an active effort made by their spouse to try to kill them. And they ran her over four times and stabbed her. Thought she was dead, left her for dead, and six months of surgeries and all kinds of things later she survived. She's well, she has injuries for the rest of her life that will play her, but she is alive and he is in prison for the rest of his life. That's thank God the only time I've ever seen that happen. I mean, I see a lot of domestic violence. I see a lot of intimate partner abuse. She was your client in that case.

He was a perpetrator of domestic violence for many years, but there was nothing in his history that would lead you to believe that he had that propensity towards violence. The divorce was going very badly for him. I was doing my job very well. You know, he, I don't want to say snap because it gives it too much credit. I think he just got in in his head that she was his enemy and the cause of everything bad that it ever happened to him and that killing her would be a better choice. And he got her to meet him in a sort of remote location, a parking lot of a hotel under a false pretence that he wanted to give her something related to the kids or something. And he stabbed her several times, then ran her over several times.

He did himself. Yeah, he did himself. And it was shocking, I mean, you don't want it. What's happened more commonly is I've had clients who've committed suicide in self-harm and I've had clients who their spouse, you know, committed suicide. That's happened many times where people I think feel They're losing everything. They're all life's falling apart. They can't imagine what their post divorce life will be or they're so horrified by the behavior they engaged in during that they think that it's just impossible to get out of this situation.

Yeah. It's more Commonly happened to me. It's only happened to me where I apply. I lost a client that way once. It's happened four times on the other side where I got any mail saying this person's been found. You know, it ends the case, obviously. So it's a hard thing as a professional because I know that I've done a lot to make this person's life very difficult because that's my job. But if that person had hired me a month before their spouse did, I would have been arguing for their benefit. I would have been arguing as their advocate. I would have been trying to help them as best I can. And instead, I was hired by their spouse and my jobs to kind of take them apart as best I can. Like, I'm a weapon. You know, a divorce lawyer is a weapon, and a weapon in the hands of a good person is protects things, and a weapon in the hands of a villain is very harmful.

Yeah, sure, absolutely. I think I've cried for a lot of reasons about my work. I've cried from frustration when I couldn't, when justice wasn't served, and I felt that I could have done more or different, Um, out of frustration, I've cried. I've cried. I think I've cried more often out of beauty. I, I, I, I, I much more weld up by what I, by things that are beautiful to me than things that are upsetting to me. Like I, I'm astounded by the strength of people sometimes. I'm astounded by the resilience of people. Um, you think of an example?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I had a client. I got him his dog back. You know, there's nothing about animals that I think is just so, like it's just so pure how much we love them. Like they don't really care what we make. They don't care if we're impressive or not, or if anybody bought our book, or if anybody, how many views we have, or clicks we have, like they don't. They just love us. You know, maybe it's because we feed them. Maybe it's because we scratch them the right way, but I want to believe that it's just that they're just so much heart and so much love, you know. And I have this guy who, At the beginning of the case, he just said, look, man, I don't care. Like, I don't care what I have to pay her. I don't care where to get me my dog. Like, just get me my dog. She doesn't really love the dog. But she took the dog because she knows how much I love the dog. So just get me my dog back. Like, I just want my dog back. And he was this older, gruff guy. This is the last guy you would think, you know, would like that the dog would be that important to him. And we fought really hard. And we got him his dog back. And I remember when I came out and I ran down the like, okay, I got this, we got this and the dog and he started crying and I started crying like a child, you know, because there was just something so beautiful about like that, yeah, that's what mattered to him, like that he got his dog back, you know. And I could imagine in my head like the reunion between those two. And that was very moving to me.

Yeah, and we're honest, we're always losing everyone all the time. And that's why to love anything is insane, right? Because to love anything is to expose yourself to the inevitability of losing it. And I've learned that as a hospice volunteer for many years, and I've learned that as a human being, and I've learned that as a divorce layer, that we're all losing everything all the time. Even our child, like you have a child, that child tomorrow, the child they were the day before his dead, is gone. There are new things every day until all of us are ghosts, until all of us are gone. And so to me, keeping that awareness in your mind, is everything. You honor that dog by saying, I took for granted when this was a puppy peeing on everything and running around and eating all my shoes. I didn't realize there was a limited amount of time. There was a finite number of times you will watch the sunset. You don't know that number, but it exists. You just don't know it yet. There's only so many more summers that you will be here to see. You just don't know the number. It could be one. It could be a hundred. It's probably not a hundred, right? So I think to me, when people say, well, how is a divorce layer so like, you know, into love and such a romantic at heart? Like, how could you not be? How could you not be when you're confronted every day with how fragile love is and how transient it is and how powerful it is? It means so much to us, so much of what we do all day is to find love and to be loved and to feel worthy of love. And then we have it And we just kind of forget we have it until it's going away. And then it's too late. Or it's gone. And now it's completely too late. Like if you realize it was a Pablo, if you realize how amazing Pablo is when Pablo's gone, shame on you. Like, you should, when you pick him up and smell him, you know? Like, that's the to me. Like, that's everything. There's a, I didn't if you ever read Technot Hans work, the Buddhist monk. So Technot Hans was a, a, a, a, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in like the 80s. He wrote some beautiful books. He passed away a few years ago, but he wrote several books. One of them being peace is a beautiful one. He's written a whole bunch of books, peace in every step. But he, he as a Buddhist monk has this mindfulness exercise. And I've said it to people, I've shared it with people a couple of times. They always look at me like I'm insane when I say it. So I'll share it with you because you brought up death. If I bring it up too much in polite conversation, people just think I'm morbid. And they're like, all this guy does talk about death and divorce. We got to hang out with nicer, more fun people. But he has this mindfulness exercise that it's this. He says, when you hug someone, think about the fact that they're there and you're hugging them. Then close your eyes. And they think about that they've died. And this is the last time you're hugging them before you let go of their body and it's taken away. And then remember that they're alive and you're hugging them. Like how could that not choke you up? Like how could you not like when you hug your dog? You will someday, most likely, have to put your dog down. You will have to make that very painful, but very responsible in loving decision, that the best of this dog's life is over, and that there's nothing but pain ahead. I've had to do it several times in my life. It's heartbreaking, but it's the final act of love and service to something that you've had dominion over and taken care of and have the duty of taking care of. And I know every time you, I've had to do that three times and just smelling it and going, oh, that's it. That's it. It's gone now. And the memory of that scent, it'll fade. But like right now, That dog's alive. Pablo's alive. And you can smell him. And you're not letting go of him now. He's there. He's there right now. Like so, how do you not? Right now. Just breathe that in every chance you have because you don't know how many more times you'll have. And I don't, when people say to me, like, well, how can you think so much about death or how can you think so much about Brexit? How can you not haven't you ever lost anything? Have you forgotten what it was like to have it? Like, did you not keep in your mind like how beautiful this was and how it's gone? Like my mother died eight years ago. I found a old video tape. I didn't even know like existed. And it was, my dad had gotten a video camera and he'd like shop, you know, all these videos. And I could hear my mother's voice. And like hearing it, I went, like, oh my god, like that was her voice. Like I haven't heard it in eight years. And I heard it again. And it was so familiar, you know, and I thought to myself, oh my god, like, I'm so glad I got to hear that. But when she was alive, I never thought, like, oh my God, she's here. Like, I get to hear her voice. Because someday, that'll be gone. Like, it'll be gone. The memory of her voice will be gone. It will fade. Every tears in rain, it will just fade. And so, to me, like, that, if we could just have that presence of mind, when it comes to love, love is not permanently gifted. It is loaned. And the people you love, the dog you love, the people, they're loaned to you. And you're loaned to them. And if you could just remember every day to treat it like something that's impermanent and that you're losing all the time. Like, because I'll tell you something, I think it's insane to love anything because of the pain that it's going to cause. But all my God, man, I love that pain because it means I got to feel it. Like, I know when I got my dog cover, I only got Kaba because Buster died. If he hadn't died, then I never would have had room in my life to get another dog. So in some horrible way, I guess I'm glad that he died. But that's not how it works. How it works is that he died, Buster. And I will never love again. I will never do this to myself again. I will never feel this pain again. It's the worst thing in the world. I will never expose myself to that. And then a friend called me up and said, hey man, we're doing an adoption in that with this dog and I just need you to watch him for the night. He's a poppy. He's got mange. He's a little goofy thing, but like, I just need you to watch him for the night. And I was like, yeah, you know what, I don't have the kids this weekend. Like, I'll watch a dog for a night. Then you feeling love. brings this stupid dog, this little stupid, main-ridden worms, and he walks in to my apartment, and he pees immediately on the floor, and I thought, oh, shit, I just got a dog. I just got a dog again. I'm doing this again, and that was 13 years ago, and man, I'm so glad, like I'm so glad. And he'll, He'll sit there with his little gray face now and he'll sit there next to me and he'll look at me. He's crazy about me as I'm about him because he knows I saved him and I know he saved me. And he looks at me and I think to myself, oh, you're gonna kill me. Like you're gonna kill me when I lose you. And it's gonna happen sooner rather than later. I'm not gonna have another 13 years. I'm lucky if I have another year. But man, like, I don't know. I'll do it. I'm so glad he did it. He saved you. Yeah, because he, he reminded me of a thing I forget that we all forget that I have an infinite capacity for love. No matter what I lose. Because we're just losing all of it all the time. But that's not a reason not to love. It's so brave to love. And it's only brave because it's scary. Like, if you're not scared, it's not brave. It's only brave because it's terrifying. It's terrifying to know like this thing's gonna break my heart. Then I'm going to let it, I'm going to let it break my heart because the joy that it's going to give me in the interim. Like, I wouldn't trade that for anything in the world. And you know, right now, if you say to me, when Kaba passes away, will I ever do it again? I'm like, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not, but you know what, I'm lying. I'm lying. I'm lying. I'll love again. I know it. I know it. And I think it's the same thing with romantic love. Our hearts get broken. We fall apart. We break in relationship and we heal in relationship. And we recover from that breaking in relationship. And I think there's something really, really important there. You've really accomplished me the first person you got me to cry on a podcast. It's pretty. It's really something to me proud of. I cry all the time though to answer your question. Yeah, I cry constantly. For a guy who's like tattooed up and down and does Brazilian Gigietsu for fun, I cry constantly. Usually because something's beautiful, I think that that's what moves me the most is how beautiful it all is. Like I I think this is all, it's a game we can't win, you know, and we just keep playing it. And that's so lovely, like it's so brave, it's so, it's so cool that like it's all ending all the time and we just keep doing it, you know, we just keep doing it because if there's something in our hearts that wants it, you know, maybe that's, I don't know, like I'm not a religious person, but Maybe that's some insight into the nature of God that like we we come from something and we disconnect and then we spend all our life trying to reconnect to something.

It's everything. No, it's everything. I think doing what I do for a living I see that better than most people like they because we just keep putting these giant bets on the table. And we wouldn't do it if we didn't think the prize was worth it, you know, but see I also believe too. That we need to start looking at romantic relationships like chapters in a long book. Like, I don't soulmates. I have to say, whoever created the term soulmate, like, I owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude because they really help facilitate divorces in industry. Because the idea that we have a soulmate, and that that's the one. always creates the possibility that A, this person's perfect for us, for how could I be dissatisfied with them? If they're perfect for me, I must depict the wrong one and look that one over there, that might be the perfect one. Why? Because I feel as great about them as I did about this one when I first met it, but I just don't remember that as much anymore. So the sole main thing, oh, it's great for business for me, but I think it's terrible for human beings. I think you probably could have a whole bunch of people that you could have had a very satisfying romantic relationship with. Again, not to keep comparing things to dogs, but like, because you love the dog you have now, does it mean you didn't really love the dog you have, like, that's ridiculous. It's like, people have children. Don't go like, well, I, you know, I couldn't love anything more than this other child. So I'm not having any more children because, you know, I couldn't possibly love it. It's like, no, you have an infinite capacity for love. So if you have two children, a five-chill-drain, like, you love all the children that you have. You know, so, it's a chapters. I think you should look at relationships as chapters just because a relationship ends in something other than death, right? It ends in divorce, it ends in a breakup, whatever it might be. It doesn't mean it wasn't successful. Did you leave it a better person than you came to it with? Did they? Did you partner? Did you learn from it? Did you learn what you want or don't want? Did you learn how you should behave or how you shouldn't behave? Did you learn something about how you want and need to be loved or how you fail in your attempts to convey love to someone else. Like, why not look at it as what was good for me in this chapter? May not be the sustaining thing. Like, who you find attractive and what's compelling in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s and your 50s can be different. You talk to a lot of 20 something you're all just say, well, Cardi, you want when you're in your... Lambo, want the Lambo. Great. You're gonna put a car seat, Lambo? If you get one car, and that's car, you're going to drive for the rest of your life, okay? And you've never been 50 yet. So you don't know what you're going to want when you're 50. Now there's this idealized thing where everybody goes like, wow. You know, you'll grow together and then what you'll want, you'll grow together and you'll change to, okay, what are you basing that on? Like is that, is that a thing? Is that demonstrably true? Or is that just like your hope? Like we hope, we'll grow together and we'll grow in complementary ways. Because why? Because of proximity? Because we're near each other. We're going to grow in complementary ways. Like, is that naive? I think that might be naive. Like, I don't have any proof of that.

And what do you do in that equation? You compare, right? Yeah. You compare. And what are you compared to? Something fake. bullshit. Yes, you can pair to something thing. You compare it to the rom com, which is basically porn for women, right? Like it's it's an idealized, stylized version. You saw Titanic. You know why they had that perfect romance because he died before he could screw it up. You think 10 years later, she'd have been like, keep painting your French girls. Go, no, she wouldn't up. She'd have been like, forget it. What are you doing? Get a job. You know, there would have been issues in that relationship. So it only was perfect because it ended. It ended before they could screw it up. You know, they end the movie. Like the old thing I think was worse and well is he said, you know, whether something's a comedy or a tragedy depends on when you end the story. You know, so it's relationships. Like you ever want to test that theory in the reverse, go out with a couple that's unhappy with each other and then say to them, so tell me about how you met all of a sudden they like soften tremendously and they start like talking about who they were and who their partner was back in that day when they when it was all possibility and and they were choosing each other, you know. And so I think there's tremendous value in You know, a great example, I always try to like take non-relationship examples of relationship items. So one of my sons, when he was a teenager, was very critical of me as a father. He was very like sort of dismissive of me as a father. We were talking about something and his sort of said, well dad, you know, you're not like the perfect father. And I said, well first of all, I don't know what a perfect father is. I was like, but what are you comparing me to? your idea of a perfect father or like a father you actually know and have seen. Because here's the thing, if you compare me to your perfect father in your imagination, I'm going to compare you to my perfect son in my imagination and guess what? You suck. because we all suck compared to the ideal of our imagination. And by the way, I said to him, learn this lesson now, because if you compare a woman, you're in a relationship with, with your imagined ideal of a woman, I promise you you will be dissatisfied for the rest of your life in your relationship. And if she compares you to her idealized imagination of what the perfect man would be, She's going to be disappointed. We need to start comparing relationships to real relationships. But how are we going to do that if we're so deeply committed to lying to each other about how great our relationship is?

In terms of how long the relationship lasted? Yeah, 48 hours. You joking. Now, 40 hours. But that's usually an enalment. That's a big, it's baby. Um, yeah, that happens sometimes. That happens sometimes. Where people just have like immediate, immediate regret, you know, or they marry it on a whim. I mean, you can There's no, like there's a waiting period to get a firearm, you know, there's a waiting period for almost anything. Marriage, go right now, get married. No problem. You just go to just to the piece, pay $40 license fee, and you married. Sit, go to Vegas. You can get a big guy named Goddress like Elvis will marry you for $50 bucks.

Yeah, it's not that.

Yeah. So, so I mean, money is power, right? Money has a lot to do with power. I think there's a lot, you know, there's a, it's a mis-attributed Oscar wild, but it's not something he would have said. There's the saying that everything in the world is about sex, except sex, which is about power. And I think money is about power. Money is about control. Money is about opportunities, security. It's about a whole bunch of things. It's not really about money. Like money's just a of a currency that we trade in. So I think money has a whole bunch of complicated stuff tied up in it. It's why we can't in polite conversation, like talk about, what did you pay for that? How much do you make? It's considered sort of in delicate to do that. Because we've loaded it up with all kinds of emotional things about worth and relative worth. And so it's not uncommon that people are dishonest with themselves and with each other about money. It's also not uncommon in a relationship that one of two dynamics emerges. Either one person has a tremendous amount of economic disparity, like leverage, or they have economic power that they can or can't leverage because of marriage. Or both people have somewhat equal bargaining positions and then something changes. So like I see a tremendous number of divorces when husband and wife are both working and husband loses job. big, big precipitor for divorce because men, it sends them spiraling into a depression that they've lost this job, that much of how they define themselves in sort of the traditional masculine gender role as that of a provider and a protector. And now I've failed at that through no fault of my own. They laid off the entire Northeastern region. It's not my fault, but I no longer have a job. And I now have to go around try to find one and redefine myself. And at the same time, My spouse has managed to keep their job. And I've seen a lot of women that when their spouse loses the job and they become the breadwinner. They find that very unappealing. That a man as the breadwinner was appealing. The man as economic equal is appealing. The man as I have to take care of him financially and provide for him very uncomfortable. So I see when a man loses his job, I would love if they kept statistics on these kinds of things. But I can tell you in my practice, I've seen plenty of women lose their job. It has no impact on the marriage. Men lose their job in a heterosexual male female marriage. It is disastrous consequences a great deal of the time. And I think that has a lot to do again. It's not about money. It's about what the money symbolizes. It's about providing. It's about power, control, respect for the ability to go out there and like forge something from the world.

Yeah, I mean, they're entitled to find out. So, like part of, yeah, part of, well, in a divorce, you have what's called mandatory discovery, which is that I have a right to review all of your financials in that process. So a tremendous amount of what I do all day and my team, is they we go through people's books like we go through the credit card slips we got through all the economics to find out like where the money is where it went you know and that's how we find out what everybody spent on their girlfriend or boyfriend and all the credit card receipts really when someone says I've got the receipts like no I've got the receipts Because I can, I can subpoena them, meaning I can get them directly from the credit card company. I can get them directly from your employer, all your information about what you actually were given. And it's very hard to move money around without leaving a trace these days.

Yes. And the problem with that is it's a great story, makes for a great story. There are in most jurisdictions protections against that because it's what's called a transferring contemplation of divorce. So it's essentially a form. It's like a fraudulent conveyance. It's designed to thwart someone's otherwise appropriate legal remedy. So if I know I'm being sued and that this person has a valid claim. So I sell my Lamborghini for $5 to my brother. the court can void that transaction.

You're lucky as long as it was not to, yeah, I actually have seen that many times. I've seen, well, I represent a lot of people in finance and people in finance have a way of seeing money very differently. And I've seen people who over a 20 year period, like did things to take things out of the marital estate. so that they were beyond the reach of the court.

It's more common that people don't realize the debt structure that they're living under. Because a lot of people live under a tremendous debt structure. This happens in celebrity divorce is a lot because a lot of it is the appearance of wealth, but it's not actual wealth. And so, you know, they're highly leveraged.

credit card debt is a big thing where the cars that you don't own the cars you lease the cars so they're actually owned by the bank even your home if you're home you know 70 80 percent of the equity in your home is the banks mortgage then you don't really have much you don't own your home the bank owns your home

Of course. Well, you get your, you get the assets net of liabilities. Yeah. And most people like their net worth is what do you own net of liabilities? So there are a lot of people making a very, very good living, but they don't really have a lot of assets. because what they've done is they've leveraged in a tremendous way. They have mortgages and they have debts accumulating. They have least automobiles. They have jewelry that they took a personal loan to guarantee, where that they purchase jewelry knowing that it will immediately depreciate and value. The resale on it is much, much lower than the value that they just paid for it. So it's an illusion in many ways.

Yeah, what's actually funnier is when somebody, when someone really threw no fault of even their own comes into some massive amount of money. Like I've had people I actually had a client who won the lottery. And so he went from like nothing, like a minimum wage kind of a job, and they lived a very modest life. And they were unhappily married, but they were like, well, you know, can't really afford to live as a couple. We certainly can't afford to live apart. Like, it's bad enough. We can't pay with our electric bill. They have two electric bills. We'd have a hell of a time. And he won a lot, or he used to play the power ball. And he won, like, you know, it was some insane amount. It was like, I don't know, $50 million. So then after taxes, it's like a 50% tax. It was like $25 million. And he was beyond thrilled until he got told, yes, he's gets half. She gets exactly half. And he was like, wait, why? I bought the ticket. I'm like, you are one person in the eyes of the law. If she won the lottery, you'd get half of it. You won the lottery. She gets half of it. So it works. Did they stay together? No, of course not. She was like, they're miserable with it. I mean, at that point, he was suddenly very motivated that maybe we should stay together. But she was like, I get, wait a minute, I get, I get, you know, half a 25 million. And I don't have to deal with you anymore. See ya. That was it. That was it. So I was in my office. She had served him with divorce papers.

I don't think a lot of the same things are true, meaning impermanence, soulmates, all of those kinds of issues. But I think because gay and lesbian couples were forced to the outskirts of the culture. They were the outsider for so long. So much of my life, even as a 51 year old man, so much of my life, I saw my gay and lesbian friends ostracized, marginalized, and put on the periphery. that when you are put on the periphery, there is as awful as that is. It is unfair as that is an injustice that is and how much it should rightly offend our sensibility to see people marginalized and ostracized. It creates a certain freedom where it's like okay then we we don't have to follow those rules we can make our own rules invention yeah we can just we can do it how we want to do it because you know what they think we stink they think we're the worst they think we're just you know okay so then we can we can do it how we want to do it because no matter what they're not going to accept us so we might as well do it the way it makes sense for us instead of you know tradition is peer pressure from dead people So if you're someone who's like, my parents have rejected me. Sorry, tradition is peer pressure exerted by dead people. I mean, it's really what it is. I'm not saying traditions aren't valuable. But if they're poor, tradition is peer pressure from dead people. Like your grandma did it this way, so you should do it this way. Like, okay, your grandma lived in a whole different time. Your grandma did not have the entire totality of human wisdom in her hand. that she could press a few buttons on. So to say, oh, yeah, like the same rules, the same institutions, the same ways of being, they should be exactly the same. That's insane.

And they did. And they did. Like I have a lot of gay male friends. I live in Chelsea, which is a section of New York City that for many years was a primarily gay male section to live in. And so I happen to have a lot of gay male friends. And it's very funny to me because when I would talk to them even before marriage equality and before the sort of widespread acceptance of gay and lesbian families and gay and lesbian lives and relationships is being valid, like it wasn't that long ago that Will in Grace, like Will couldn't kiss his boyfriend on TV. This was like the 90s that that was going on. So this isn't that long ago. I have suits older than that. Like this is the thing. So, you know, they, they used to my gay male friends used to have these very kind of non-conventional permutations of relationships. They were like, yeah, you know, we, we can kiss other people, but like we can't have sex with other people or we can do oral sex with other people we can't. But we have to let them know that we're doing like it because they were like, hey, we're on the outskirts. We get to kind of make up our own rules. And there's something very, and what's funny to me about that. is when marriage equality was coming about. And I've been a consulting attorney for something called Lambda Legal, which is gay and lesbian, legal defense, which 20 years ago it meant the right to exist. Like the right to not be fired from your job because you're gay. Like that seems to me basic. human rights. You know, the idea now, like we've gone quite far in terms of now there's some controversies that I kind of go, okay, wait, I'm not quite sure, even as someone who's identified as a progressive liberal for quite some of my life, I don't know that I can go this bridge too far. But the basic fundamental right, like the right to marry, I always felt, you know what? If you want to be able to participate in this unbelievably failing technology, you have every right in the world, like if you hate gay people, let them marry. Why should they be having all the fun? Like let them marry. And I remember sort of thinking that jokingly. And when marriage equality finally happened. in the United States. I went to a good friend of mine, who will remain nameless, and I said to him, he'd been in a long-term relationship, maybe like two years. And I said, so many he sniked, you're like, you know, you're married. He goes, no, I'm not psyched. Why would I be excited about this? I said, what do you mean? You can get married now. He was like, yeah, I never had to deal with that. I never had to have the conversation. It never had to be like, you know, where is this going? Are we in it? He's like, if anything, I could go like, oh, I would marry you, but the government said, whoa, let me die. I wish I wish we could, but the government, it's out of my hands. He's like, now, Now I have to have this conversation. Now I have to like, well, where is this going? And are we getting married? And what do you think? And if we should we move in, it should be a, even kids should we have kids? Like it used to be, we were barred from having kids or adopting kids. Now we get adopt kids. It's no problem. It's like, great. Now I got to have that conversation. So again, I'm not suggesting. that we shouldn't have marriage equality, we shouldn't have the freedom to adopt and have children. But I think it's a foul-stean bargain for everybody. And so my experience of gay and lesbian couples currently, because I'm currently doing a number of divorces for lesbian couples and gay couples, I think that the honeymoon period isn't quite over yet, Like marriage equality's only been the law of a land for like, you know, 10 years, something like that. So give it some time. We'll say, maybe they're better at it. Maybe they'll be worse at it. Maybe they'll be just as equally awful at it as we are. What about open relationships? Do they work more? You know, I'm not qualified to answer that question for the following reason. I meet a lot of people who have tried various types of ethical non-monogamy polyamory, but they all have in common that they're in my office. So I see all the ones that didn't work. So me saying, well, I've met a lot of couples where they tried the polyamory thing or they tried ethical non-monogamy and it didn't work and it led to divorce. is like an oncologist saying, like, dude, everybody's got cancer. I met like 10 people today. We have cancer, right? You're an oncologist. Like, of course, you meet a lot of people that have cancer. Like, a guy who's a cab driver doesn't meet that many people who have cancer. Like, you might meet one or two, but he's not going to meet all of them, but you working cancer. So you're going to meet people. Like, I happen to meet people getting divorced. So all of the, I've met a lot of people. that gave that a shot and it did not work. Now again, was that the liking case of emergency break glass? Let's just try this. Have you ever seen it work? I've never in any of my friendships and any of my personal relationships. I've never seen non-monogamy successful, but I don't think we're quite at a place as a culture. where we're really being honest about monogamy. Like, as they're parallel, some of her work, I think is brilliant about monogamy and fidelity because I don't think it's quite, I think there are a lot of couples where there is non-monogamy happening, but there's sort of a don't ask, don't tell policy, and there's a sense of, you know, if this is what you need to do, to sort of stay happily committed, because if we're honest, a marriage is a whole bunch of different relationships in one relationship. It's your roommate, it's your co-parent, it's your travel companion, it's your family companion, meaning like they have to deal with your mother-in-law and your father-in-law too, and like it's a whole bunch of relationships. And it may be that men and women or a particular man and a particular woman in a relationship have a different sense of how important sex is. And you know, it's okay to delegate. It's okay to say, you know, listen, I don't really like football. So go watch football with your friends.

I've had a lot of people who come in and say to me, he had a bunch of affairs over the years, and I just let it go. Like, really? Or she had a bunch of affairs over the years, and it wasn't, we didn't make an issue of it. Yeah, really. And see, just the fact that you, and it's understandable, I'm not criticizing you. But the fact that you go really is Okay, why would that be that shocking? Like people cheat all the time. People step outside of their relationship all the time. People like diversity of sexual partners.

I don't know there'd be qualified to say whether someone was in love or not. Here's what I will say because love is an emotion and love is a verb. I've certainly seen people that were having the fairs and in every aspect of their outward life appear to be deeply committed to their marriage. So they were, okay. They were an economic provider. They were a diligent parent. They were attentive to the emotional state of their partner. They still had an active sexual relationship with their partner, but it wasn't to let's say a terribly prolific one, perhaps. So you can see and be in love. Sure, I mean, listen, just the term cheat. You know, like, like, okay, well, then a cheat meal. Like you can be on a healthy diet and enjoy a cheat meal. You know, and there's something great about it because it's a cheat meal. It's like a little thing you do to treat yourself. And then you go back to eating healthy and regular, right? Because look, there's something about the human desire for variety. There's something about passion. I mean, you know, I always say this, I'm not a religious person, but like we're all familiar with the 10 commandments. And theoretically, if that story is true, which again, it's not provable or disprovable, but God handed down 10 rules. Like that's a talk to humanity and say, here's 10 rules. Don't kill good one. Honor the Sabbath. Good one, okay? Don't cheat on your spouse. Don't covet your neighbor's wife. It got two. It got two rules. Like he didn't say they'll show him that kill. Like seriously don't kill. That's right. No, but don't sleep with other people. Got two at a ten rules from God theoretically. Like that's amazing. That should show you how long this has been a thing. how human of a problem or issue or compulsion. This is, it's the most human thing. This design, like, yeah, we want to, you know, Freud civilization, and it's this contents. You know, all of these, all of these brilliant minds from all over the world over the whole span of time have struggled with monogamy, have struggled with sex, have struggled with the desire for sex, wars are fought over sex. People rise in empires, rise in fall, people rise in fall. I used to say that like, I think 90% of what most of the men I do, they do to get laid. They do! They, why work cards so I can make money. Why? So I can get a nice car. Why? So I can attract beautiful women. Like, look, look at the red pill space, the man is fear all this. Everything is about making yourself appealing to women or making yourself appealing to potential sexual partners. Whether it's just one or a whole diversity of them. Okay, that's a different thing. But it's about that. It's about that.

Should we get married? I mean, from a job security place, I hope people continue to get married because if they don't, I'll be out of a job. But in seriousness, I don't think we will continue to get married. Should we? I don't think we should say all of us should. I think we should ask the question. I think we shouldn't assume we should get married. That's what I think. I think that we should ask the question, what is the problem to which marriage is a solution? And do I have that problem and will it solve that problem? Because the fact that it's an odd question to say when someone says, I want to get married, that it would be odd for me to go, why? Yeah. Why is that weird? So if you said, I want to have a podcast. Why? It's a perfectly reasonable question. I want to go to Florida. Why? I like the weather. I have a friend there. Whatever. I want to get married.

I think that there's religious reasons. That's a big one. I mean all the time. Like in the comments, there will be like a billion people that go marriage. There's a covenant between God and to the end of this as if like I hadn't heard of this. You know, as if I didn't go to Catholic school my entire life. Like, yes, I get it. I get it. That's a belief you have, and that's okay. Like, my beliefs don't require that you believe them. Yours may require that I believe them, and that's okay. Like, we're going to agree to disagree. If your fundamental thing is that God spoke to you and told you a thing, whether it was in written form or verbally, like, I can't argue with that.

I'm a fan of marriage to the extent that it facilitates love, but I just don't see a nexus between those two things. I don't think these two things have that much to do with each other. And I think to the extent that they have something to do with each other, they probably could have existed without the marriage. I think marriage is a symbol of something. And I don't think you need the symbol to have the something. It's confusing a finger pointing at the moon with the moon. It's confusing that the simply marriage is supposed to be, I think, a symbol. And I love it for that. I love the idea of two people who are so excited about how they make each other feel and how the effect they have on each other and the effect that the other has on them. that they want to get up in front of a bunch of people who they know and say, this is my person. I found them and I'm going to stick with them through good and through bad and I'm going to see their blind spots and I'm going to Not be a yes man. I'm at a telling when they get it wrong, but with love. And I want them to do the same thing for me. I want them to cheer for me and I want them to be on my side. And I want them to disagree with me when I need to be disagreed with. So I don't make really dumb decisions just because I got a cheerleader all the time behind me. Like I got a cheerleader because I need one. The world sucks and everybody's always criticizing me and I criticize myself constantly. But having this person next to me who goes, man, you can do this. Come on. Get up. You can do it. You know, or I fell down. So, okay, people fall down. You're great. Get up. Come on. You can do it. or who's gonna say to me, you know, I know you're doing this for this reason, and I get it, but I don't think it's gonna make you feel what you think it's gonna make you feel so maybe you don't do it, and I'm gonna go, okay, they wouldn't say that if it wasn't out of love, so I'm gonna hear that, and I'm not gonna be afraid of it. And I wanna get up and we're gonna say this to a bunch of people, and then we're gonna wear rings, because we'll be a reminder for us, and for the world that I got a person, I got a person, and that's my person, you know? Dude, how do you not cheer for that? That's incredible. It's great. You can have that without the... Yeah, of course. Without the control. You want to get the government involved? Like, you have to get the government involved. Really? Like, that story I just told... That's the story. That's the feeling. That's the interpersonal connection. When you say to most people, they say, I'm getting married. You go, why? They first of all, they look at you like you have lobster coming out of your nose, like they've never the question never even occurred to them. Why? Who's your married? That's what you do. That's insane. But if you say to them, why? They'll usually say something that's a total non-answer. Well, I'm in love. Okay, what does that mean you have to get married? Well, because I want to, you know, I want to maintain that connection. Okay, how specifically is marriage going to maintain that connection? And again, if it's a public declaration, okay, I think there's value in a public declaration. If I want to, I don't smoke cigarettes, but if I wanted, if I was smoking cigarettes, I want to quit smoking cigarettes. There's value in getting up and saying, hey guys, just see all know, I'm going to quit smoking. And if you love me, I want you to help hold me accountable. So if you see me smoking or if I ask you for a cigarette, don't get me one because I really do want to quit smoking. You know, there's value in that. There's value in the tribe all going all right, man. You know, that's what you want. Let's do it. We're going to we're committed to it. Same thing with marriage. If the purpose of marriage is to say, hey, guys, it's really hard to be monogamous. I don't know if anyone's noticed. So, and like the world is really antagonistic to marriage, but like I really want all the great things that come from having a person who sees my blind spots and who's supporting me and I'm supporting them and the symbiosis, the beauty of that relationship and the connection of those two people. So, I want you to hold me accountable. I want you, my friend, that when I, you see me looking at the other girl that you go to me, hey, hey, bro. Forget about what you got at home? Come on, man. You got a good one. What are you doing? You know? Like, I want you to hold me accountable. I want women out there to see that wedding ring and to go, yep, not him. Not him. Even if he talks to me, not him, he's married. Let's leave that one. Why? Because if it was my one? I wouldn't want him talking to some other girl, so I'm not going to talk to him. Instead, it's not what we do. That is not what we do as a culture. You ever want to get laid, put on a wedding ring and go out. Suddenly you're safe. Suddenly you're a guy they can talk to, and he's not on the make, because he's married. He's obviously wearing an outward symbol of his relationship. Again, this is crazy. It's crazy because we're just not being honest. about what this thing really is. Marriage is a legal status. It's a government intervention. Everything else is just stuff we're putting on top of it and calling it that thing. But you can have all that stuff without having legally the status of merit.

Oh boy, it made me cry again. What was the first time I experienced true love? Gosh, that's a great question. And just the fact that Just the experience of being asked that question is running my mind through the most lovely slide show of so many times I've felt loved and felt deep love. So boy, what a lovely thing to ask every morning if I could like that's a lovely question because Just the fact that there's, just the fact that there's a competition going on in my brain right now is the greatest thing in the world because all the stuff that's running through my head and it's so diverse. There's me kissing an amazing woman for the first time and feeling that. There's my sons, each of my sons kissing me or hugging me. There's Kaba and Buster, Pickles, Lady, Maggie, every dog I ever had, and there's an image I can imagine of it. There's my, the first thing that popped into my head, which is gonna sound crazy, but maybe it's the stage in life that I'm in. When I was a little boy, my father, my father was not a particularly a few civilly loving guy he was a Vietnam veteran he was a bad alcoholic he's been sober now for eight years and very proud of him and he's in his eighties now the growing up he was very unemotional to me and I remember I had this best friend Tommy, and we had pizza one night at my parents' house, and you know, pizza's cut into like eight slices. And Tommy and I were like, you know, growing boys, we wanted to eat, you know, cray, and we ate really fast. You know, we each ate our three slices, and my dad would have had two left, you know, for him. And we ate so fast that our six slices were gone, and there was just two left. And I know my dad was like super hungry. But he was like, if you guys want, you can have them. And I remember, you know, we just ate them like you would, obliviously like a kid. And a couple of weeks later, I was at my friend's house, same friend, and his day ordered pizza. And there was like, you know, same thing, eight slices. And his dad ate like four slices. And I remember thinking, my dad would never do that. And I remember I felt very loved. because I remember thinking like this is a guy who'd never said he loved me, like ever. It just wasn't his vocabulary, it wasn't who he was. But I just remember thinking like oh he loves me. Like it satisfied him more to see me eating that extra piece of pizza than what eating that piece of pizza would have given to him. And I remember thinking like oh he loves me. So I would say to me That was a very pure and true kind of love. And when I had my sons, I remember thinking, oh, I get that. Like they can have the whole pizza. So to me, that's true love is when it's not even sacrificing to give that the joy of the other person just gives you so much joy and fills you so much that it's just the greatest thing.

You know, and I've to tell you, I think I'm really grateful to hear you say that. I hope you do that because I really think we are the most aware of the joy of our good health when we're in the presence of illness. We are most aware of the beauty of life when we're in the presence of death and the impermanence. And we can be the most aware of the power and presence and beauty of romantic love. when we remember that it is impermanent, is not permanently gifted, it's loaned, and that we're blessed to have it for however long we have it. So if that's what anyone walks out of talking to a divorce lawyer, thinking about, then mission accomplished. Thanks for having me.