A Divorce Attorney's Thoughts On Love and Marriage-James Sexton

I had a period of time after my divorce where I was really ambitious when it came to women. But then it felt like a job—like it felt like a job after a while. Where I was like, “God, it’s like enough, it’s kind of enough, you know? Like it’s like, it’s like when you’ve eaten so much that you just feel like, yeah.” I got that way with [ __ ] like it really was like I just had enough. Like it was fine; I was like, “This is great,” but, well, when you’re in your 20s or 30s maybe, yeah, yeah, your libido is a strong meal; it’s actually insane. Yeah, yeah. I was not—I definitely was. We age, we mellow, yeah, which I think is great.

Although I have to tell you one of the most depressing divorces I ever did was a guy who was, I think, 92. Oh geez. And what made it depressing is that he had left his wife of, I don’t know, 50-something, 60-something years for a younger woman—a woman in her 50s. And I just remember what was sad about it to me was this guy is still being led around by his dick. Like I thought, “Oh my God, like I’m gonna be chained to an idiot forever. Like I’m gonna forever be led around by my dick.” And I remember thinking like, “No,” I really thought that at like 90-something I would just—like a beautiful woman would walk by and I go, “Oh, there’s a human being.” Like there would be no appreciation without, yeah, there would just be no sense of like, yeah, you know, there would just—that would be gone from me. And this guy’s proof that 90-something years old and you’re still thinking with your dick. Like, “We’re doomed!” That terrified me; it really did. It actually upset me because I thought, “Man, I thought at some point I’d get to experience what it’s like to just be free.”

If you live in New York, where there’s—there’s a financial industry, there’s—oh yeah, there’s all kinds of industries here. Oh yeah. But to me, sometimes I—I wonder if female attractiveness isn’t the mo—the highest valued commodity. 100, it is. 100, it is. Yeah, yeah, of course. Because men are becoming rich and powerful in order to get a woman—of course, the woman they want—of course, what a—what an attractive woman. And when I say attractive, I don’t just mean attractive; I—I mean even just sexually confident. I mean, what an unbelievably lucrative career that is. Like I do divorces for people that, you know—a woman walks out with two, 300 million dollars. He was an analyst at Goldman Sachs who built a hedge fund and then sold it, and then used his trading algorithm to build it up to 500 million dollars. She was hot and slept with him for a while and then stopped and started sleeping with other people and playing tennis and having Botox, and she’s going to get half. Like that’s [ __ ] incredible. Like, you know what he had to do to get that and what she had—I’ll [ __ ] that guy for 200 million dollars. Are you kidding me? Like that’s insane; that’s incredible. Like and what—and God bless—I mean, I’m not saying that this person—this is the rules of the game, you know, but you can’t argue that that’s not easier than going to Harvard.

No, for sure. But then—but then the payoff, the trade-off for that is that when they hit a certain age, the value—right, any stock, if you hold it too long, it’s going to go down, you know? Like so play—play the stock the right way. I mean, and that’s what I think—if we were a little more honest about the nature of male-female coupling. I mean, right now we can’t even—you know, we can’t even establish what is gender, you know? We can’t establish any of that anymore. So, so divorce is becoming incredibly hilarious and fraught. But to me, what—what is—like sometimes you have to stand back and look at things to get the real perspective on what it is. And sometimes you look back at marriage—so when was it invented? Like 2000 BC roughly. And the life expectancy of humans back then was 18 years old. Yeah. And yeah, marriage was created for um, land ownership—land ownership and things like that. Yeah. And if you’re going to die in your early 20s or whatever, then—then getting married at 16, 18 makes sense.

Well, I think there’s a distinction that has to be made between pair bonds and marriage, right? Marriage is a—is a—is a government concept. Marriage is a contract; marriage is a legal status. Pair bonds—right, two people go in it together, you know, saying, “Hey, there’s 7.3 billion people in the world, and the two of us, we’re gonna—we’re gonna lock up together, and we’re gonna try to hold hands and get through this thing until we’re 80 years old.” Well, until whatever, you know. I mean, what’s interesting is, first of all, marriages end—they end in death or divorced, but they all end. Like every marriage ends. So it’s one of the only things that you go, “Wow, I really hope this ends in us dying.” You know, most things you—that’s not the desired outcome, but in marriage you hope—marriage will end in death. You hope that you will be together until one or both of you die, you know. But all marriages end. So as a guy—as a provider, if you knew it was going to end and you were going to have to give away half your money, you—you might think twice about doing it.

Well, I think that’s what makes being a divorce lawyer interesting is that it’s—it’s a lot of—what a court has to do is disregard what happened in the marriage because a—the truth is at the bottom of a bottomless pit—like you’re never going to get there. Yeah. Well, I was—he’s [ __ ] his secretary, right? Because you were not sleeping with me anymore. I have a client whose wife acknowledges she didn’t sleep with him for six years. What—what did you think was going on if you didn’t sleep with him for six years? So yeah, okay, don’t delegate—you’ve delegated that responsibility. If you don’t want to have sex with him, that’s okay; no one should force you to have sex with this person. Let him go have sex with someone else. You don’t want to do the laundry—hire someone to do the laundry. If you don’t want to mow your own lawn—hire someone to mow the lawn. Delegate that responsibility. And this guy wasn’t even sleeping around; he was going to those hand-job places, you know, where you get a massage—you get—like what—the most pathetic thing in the world, the most innocuous thing in the world. He didn’t have a girlfriend; there was no love involved. He was getting jacked off for fifty dollars. Like that’s sad. Like, I mean, first of all, hand jobs—like that’s an outdated technology; that’s like a Betamax, you know? Like who even does that anymore? But he—he was doing this, and he just thought, okay, that’s fine. She had the indignation to say he is not a good—he shouldn’t be a custodial parent; he’s a terrible person because he’s doing this. And it was like, “Wait, how is that—that much different than going to a strip club? How is that much more different?” Because we just—you know, he was like, “Well, should I deny it?” And I was like, “Is it true?” And he’s like, “Well, yeah.” I said, “No, we should own it. Let’s go in and say, yeah, you know what? Yeah, it’s pathetic; it’s really pathetic. My wife didn’t sleep with me for six years, and I’m human, and I wanted to have sex still. I didn’t want to blow up my life; I didn’t want to screw up my kids and have my kids have divorced parents. So I thought, all right, she’s clearly not interested in me, and more—I’m not going to have a girlfriend and get caught up in all the things where people could get hurt and there’s feelings and Fatal Attraction and stuff. I’m just gonna go—it’ll be transactional, like going to a strip club or anything else. And I’m—yeah, it’s a little pathetic that I’m a guy who makes a million dollars a year in finance and I’m paying someone fifty dollars to jack me off. Yeah, that’s kind of pathetic, but you know what? I figured it out. But to suggest that that means I’m a bad parent—that has nothing to do with my parenting at all, period, you know? So, and thankfully the judge agreed with me on that one.

But I—I really do think that—that the idea—I don’t think—I mean, if you break it down fundamentally, 56% of marriages end in divorce. But think about—that’s the ones that end in divorce. So how many people—what percentage stay together for the kids or because they don’t want to give away half their [ __ ]? Another 10—that’s conservative—conservative. But let’s say—let’s say 20. Then okay, you now have a technology that fails 76% of the time. That’s insane; that’s insane. That’s more likely than not—76%. If I tell you there’s a 76% chance when you walk out the door today you’re gonna get hit in the head with a bowling ball, you would not go out, or you’d wear a helmet for sure. But people just continue to get married. Not only do they continue to get married, there’s a presumption that you should get married, and if you don’t get married, there’s something wrong with you. So if you’ve got a girlfriend and you’ve been with her for five years and you say to someone, “We’re getting married,” they go, “Oh, that’s great,” you know? They don’t go, “Why—you’re happy—why would you get married? Like everything’s going fine—why would you put yourself through that? Why would you run that risk?” If you say to someone, “We’ve been together five years, and we’ve decided we’re not going to get married; we’re going to move in together, but we’re not going to get married,” ooh, what’s wrong? Yeah, intimacy issues—what’s your problem? Meanwhile, 56% end in divorce. It’s—it’s literally fits the legal definition of negligence. It’s a negligent behavior. The way you define negligence in law school is when what you lose by not doing something, okay, is lower than the risk of harm. It’s what’s called a BPL analysis. So the burden of not doing a thing is lower than the likelihood—the probability of harm. So BPL—it’s burden, probability, and loss. Marriage is an inherently negligent activity. It’s like owning a lion—like it’s—it’s—you’re—the likelihood of someone getting hurt seriously is very, very high. No one ever says it to you because why? Because—and I’m—I would say something—I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I—I still get misty-eyed at weddings. Like I still—really, there’s something in me that goes like, you know, maybe it’ll work out for these two.

Sweet—I absolutely believe in love. I think love is wonderful. But love and marriage have very little to do with each other. I don’t think there’s much of a correlation there. I—I think that’s where we got off track. Like I believe in pair bonds; I believe—I don’t think I can learn everything I need to know about myself from myself. I think having someone around you sees my blind spots, and that doesn’t have to be a romantic partner; that could be a friend; that could be any number of things. But there is something wonderful about romantic connection; we know that. I mean, the other statistic is 56% of marriages end in divorce, but 84% of people who get divorced are remarried within five years of their divorce. Really? Let’s think about that. So now you’ve—now you’ve done it and failed and felt the pain of the loss, and within five years 84% are remarried. So when you fall in love and you’re—you’re with a partner who’s in love with you, it’s just—it’s like hard to put the brakes on and say, “You know what, that’s as far as I’m gonna go.”

Well, I think we—you know, whoever discovered what—or it wasn’t a fish—and I think when we’re in a thing, we don’t see it. And so—I mean, and this is true—there must be some endorphins, some—some something’s being released in our brains. Listen, you want to test that theory—the next time you’re out with a couple who’ve been together for a while and it—like seems like they maybe got in a fight or they’re just—like kind of being, you know, impatient with each other at the table, you know, when you go—like a group thing—just say to them, “So tell me about how you met. Tell me—tell me the story of how you met.” And everything on them changes; like they go back to that place, and there’s this like, “Oh yeah, and she was this…” Because for that second you go back to that place—like you can go—someone with a horrible divorce—if you could get them to go to that place and talk to you about that time—like I—I would say something—when I was a kid, you know, like every kid—you have the fantasy of like, if you were invisible, what would you do? You didn’t go to the girls’ locker room, you know, whatever. I—I have this fantasy that if I could be invisible, I—I have about eight clients that I’d like to sneak into their house and find their wedding album—like I know it’s in the attic somewhere or something because I would love to see what it looked like when these people loved each other, because they are weaponized against each other now, and we are trying to kill each other, and we’re taking every secret, every intimacy, everything at their ugliest—at their ugliest—at their worst. And there’s something in me that just—the thought that like, “You guys at some point—like at some point you were like—they’re 7.3 billion people in the world, and you’re the one—like you’re the one I just want to be with and smell and touch and…” Like that—that feeling—we all know that feeling of like just the electricity of another person, you know? And—and I—I mean, I—you know, I—I think I’m romantic at heart in the sense that I really get it—like I really get why we do this. I—I felt it; I know it; I understand it. But tying that to the technology of marriage to me makes almost no sense whatsoever, and I actually think it’s almost antagonistic to that connection with another person because there’s so much expectation that comes with marriage. Culturally, we’ve created so much stuff around it—like when you—when you marry someone, they’re supposed to be—at least in the modern Western model—your best friend, best roommate, best co-parent, best travel partner, best uh, roommate, best everything, best activity partner. Like how—how would one person be all of those things? That’s insane. Like if—if I—if I was interviewing for a job and said, “I want you to be the best typist, and I also want you to be best on the phone, and I also want you to be great at it,” and I ran down a list of dissimilar things—like or if I went to an amazing chef and I said, “I know you’re a great chef, but can you farm?” Like well, that has to do with food, but they’re not the same thing. Like what are you talking—so I think—why do we put on people this idea—like whoever came up with the word “soulmate”—really, we should be paying—like divorce lawyers should be paying that person dividends because we’ve convinced people that if this person isn’t meeting every one of your needs, checking all of these boxes, they’re not your soulmate. Your soulmate would know exactly what to do, exactly what to say at exactly the right time. I can get—I can go off on this stuff. Yeah, I tend to—wait, what do you think the secret is—just keeping a marriage vital—keeping it—a lot, you know?

I think—I think people get unhappy in marriages the way that people go bankrupt—which is very slowly and then all at once. I think it’s very slow, and then it just goes off a cliff. So everybody will say, “Well, we divorced because he was cheating, or she was cheating, or we divorced because he had an alcohol issue or drug issue,” which lately we’re seeing more—like alcohol and drugs is—is a big, big thing, especially post-pandemic. There’s a tremendous amount of substance abuse stuff that’s causing a lot of issues in marriages. And certainly, like social media has increased the accessibility of adultery and connections to other people and reconnections with people from your past who remind you of a version of yourself that you felt more excited about because you were younger. So it’s—you know, it used to be if you—like ran into the girl you banged in high school, it was like once every 10 years—a reunion, you know? Or if you lived in the same town as you grew up in, you know, you might run into the person at the Walmart. But now it’s like on Facebook—you have all these excuses to be able to chit-chat with someone and all these benign entry points, you know, of like, “Oh, you know, I saw your pictures from vacation—where did you stay in Miami?” You know? And—and then it becomes, “Oh yeah, well, you looked great. I mean, boy, you look fantastic in a bikini.” And then all of a sudden, we’re off to the races, and we’re chatting with each other. So I—I, you know, if we were going to invent like an infidelity machine, you couldn’t do better than Facebook and Instagram. I mean, that’s about as good as it gets. But I—I genuinely think that the secret to staying happy in a marriage is probably the—the same secret to maintaining a healthy weight, you know? Don’t wait till you get super fat and then try to lose the weight. Don’t wait until you get—released—like my sister is a dentist, and she always says, “If you have a toothache, there’s nothing I can do really—like I can pull the tooth; I can give you a root canal, but like—I can prevent you from getting a toothache if you just come see me regularly, and you just floss, and you just brush your teeth, you’ll never get it.” To you—by the time your tooth hurts, something is already seriously wrong. By the time you’re in a divorce lawyer’s office, you’re [ __ ]—the whole thing’s [ __ ] at that point—like you’d be better off just—you know, figuring out the preventative maintenance—right? Like change the oil in your car—like so I—what I try to—if you reverse engineer divorce—like most people—the marriage killer, you know, the—the cheating or the gambling or the whatever—that’s the symptom—like the—the problem is these little disconnections. You know, one of the—one of the—one of the best stories I—I have is my—I had a client who—I did her divorce, and we’d spend a lot of time together because you do—you know, when your divorce lawyer—you spend a lot of time with people, and you get to know them very well. I mean, people lie to their therapists; they won’t lie to their divorce lawyer because, hey, there’s no reason to, and B—they, you know, I need to know everything, and it’s all attorney-client privilege. And this woman—we were sitting outside the courtroom waiting on a break in testimony, and she was a young woman in her—in her probably like late 30s, you know, very attractive. And we were just chit-chatting, and I said to her, “You know, was there a moment when you realized the marriage is over? You know, like was there a moment?” And she said, “Yeah, yeah.” And I said, “When was it?” And she said, “I—there was this granola that I like,” she said, “it—I—they only sold it at like this particular grocery store, and I like to put it in my yogurt,” and she said, “He used to always—whenever I’d be running low on it, I would just open the thing one day, and a new bag would be there.” She’s like, “And I—I just,” she’s like, “it made me feel so loved—like he didn’t—I didn’t have to ask; he didn’t want credit for it—like he didn’t go like, ‘Oh, did you see? I got your granola that you wanted,’ you know? Like he just would do this thing, you know?” And she said, “It was just something that—like I just—it always made me smile,” she said. “Every time the granola was running low and there was a new bag of granola, I just felt very loved, you know?” And she said, “One day the granola ran out, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s weird,’ you know? Maybe—maybe he didn’t see it.” She’s like, “So I left the bag in there because I thought, ‘Well, at some point he’ll notice,’ and he didn’t notice.” She goes, “So I took the bag out, and I waited, and he didn’t get a new bag, and I thought, ‘Okay, this thing’s going down.’”

And I thought to myself, wow, that's like, you know, that's such a small thing, like granola, like you just, but, but these are the things, like these are the little things that make us feel loved and that are gestures of love. And I said to her, was there anything like that for you with him? And she said, yeah, blow jobs. Um, and I almost spit out my coffee. And she goes, no, she goes, when we were first dating and even first married, she's like, I used to give [ __ ] a lot. She's like, you know, she's like, do it in the morning, took two minutes, and he was like super happy the rest of the day, you know. She's like, the rest of the day he would like call me or text me and be like, Oh, I'm so good this morning, you know, I had such pep in my step now. And she's like, it was just like, what did it really take out of my life to do that, you know? And it made him feel good. She's like, and then I got to a point where I was like, well, you know what, no, I'll wait, and then tonight we can both have, we can have sex and we'll both enjoy that. Like, what do I owe him a [ __ ]? Like, no, you know, like I don't owe him that, you know. And, and, and then she said, I got to a point where I was like, I look back and I'm like, yeah, I guess I, I didn't do that as often, hardly ever really, you know.

Which came first, you know, I said that to her, and she said, I, I, she said, I couldn't tell you. She said, but I think it's the same thing. It's the same thing. And I do think it's the same thing. And I'm not saying [ __ ] and granola is all you need to know, but, and I'm not, by the way, I'm not saying that that a [ __ ] is a small thing. I don't think I have any right to, I've never given one, but it seems like a phenomenal feat, and I, I'm grateful for everyone I've ever received, but I don't, I, I don't think it's a massive investment, right? Just like buying someone's granola is not a mess. She's like, when you love somebody, you love doing things for them, right? Their pleasure, their joy pleases you, like their, their, you know, their happiness makes you happy. Exactly. And somewhere along the line, and it happens a lot in marriage, it becomes, well, I'm not happy, why should you be happy? You know, and then that creates a spiral. And I really believe that you can, that spiral could go in the other direction, like if he did the granola, I think the [ __ ] would have come, you know. And if, like, I, and if the [ __ ] were there, I bet he'd have bought the granola. Like, I, I can't prove that, there's no control group, you know, I can't run that research, but it feels to me like those little things, like, like leaving a note, you know. I've said to some of my, my friends, you know, when they say to me, like, you know, as a divorce lawyer, you see all this misery, like what's, how do I stay out of your office? And I'll often say, I'm like, it's dumb little things, man. I'm like, just leave her a note. I'm like, leave her a note in the morning, just leave a little note says, hey beautiful, you know. So it was so fun watching that movie with you last night, so glad we got to have a date. I'll be thinking to you today, love you. Like, what is that tank that takes like a minute, not even like, and look what it can do, like look at, look at how that makes this person feel. And even if, right away it doesn't work, on that moment it doesn't work, okay, do it enough times, like, and, and then you're either gonna figure out that this person's gone, and then just [ __ ] bail, you're done. Because if you try for long enough and you, you give like that, but if you're not giving like that, and then you're not getting back either, well, I'm not surprised, you know. That's how you end up in my office, is this death spiral of everyone like, well, I'm not giving behind the granola, she's not giving me [ __ ], well, I'm not giving him [ __ ], he's mean to me, okay, well everybody's just gonna has an equal right to be [ __ ] miserable then.

I think if you're happy with yourself, be truly happy with who you are at that point in your life or whatever the situation is, I think it's easier for you to be happy with your partner. Yeah, but I would argue that as long as you're not happy with yourself, having someone happy with you is certainly not gonna hurt your feeling of who you are, right? Like, I don't, I, I, I don't need someone to tell me I'm handsome for me to have a nice day, but I can't think of anybody telling me I was handsome that it ruined my day, you know, most of the time. And you're like, oh, that's nice, you know, I got that going for me, like it, so yeah, I think self-love of course is the most important love, and to be secure in who you are and to not allow your self-definition to be easily swayed or pulled, like if you believe the good reviews, you got to believe the bad ones too. I get that, but I just don't think kindness, like it's just such an easy, especially if it's easy, like it's easy stuff, like just telling someone that they're beautiful or handsome or that you're cheering for, like it, just to me with marriage or pair bonds, I shouldn't even say marriage, like the world is trying to kill you all the time, you know, like people are criticizing you all the time, you feel like a failure a lot of the time. If you compare yourself to other people, you'll constantly be, you know, comparisons the thief of joy, so why not have like one person who's just cheering for you, you know? Like, constructive criticism is criticism, it's still just criticism. So if your spouse is just sitting around criticizing you and telling you all the things you could do to improve yourself instead of just being a fan and just saying, you know what, I, I, I know who you are and you're beautiful, I know who you are and your, your heart is good, and betting on the best parts of a person, I, I think that there's no, there's very little downside to that, you know. I think it'd put guys like me out of this business if people really leverage that the right way.

I asked you earlier if you believe in love, but you said you do, do you believe in marriage? I mean, I believe people believe in marriage. Yeah, do I believe in marriage? I don't, I don't think it's a useful technology. I, I understand culturally why people do it, but I don't think people should need it. I, I know I certainly don't need marriage. I don't think marriage, I was married, um, I, I was married before I really ever thought about what does that mean, you know. I married my college sweetheart, you know, I, I hadn't, I got married because that's what you do, you get married, you know, um, but I hadn't thought about it as a technology and why it's there. I didn't, I didn't understand it the way I do now, you know. There's a line from a Joseph Brodsky poem that he wrote when his wife died where he says, I wish I knew no astronomy when stars appear, and I feel that way as a divorce lawyer, like I wish I knew no astronomy when stars appear. I wish I, I wish I didn't know what the end of so many marriages looks like because I think I would have a more optimistic and unrealistic view of it. I would, yeah, but you'd be divorced and giving away half your years. I'd be foolish, yeah, I'd be fool, I'd be as foolish, but I don't know that, I don't know that it's always good to know, right? Sometimes there's tremendous joy to be had and like falling feels like flying for a little while, you know, so you hit the ground it feels really good, but as I said earlier, you know, now that the life expectancy of man is around the 80s or something, yeah, then it's like, so you're going to do this from your 20s or 30s until, yeah. Well, marriage is a technology that was designed for when women died in childbirth and when men died in their 40s if they were lucky, you know, 50s if they were super lucky, like if you were in your 50s or 60s you were an elder, you know, that was pretty amazing. And women, most women died in childbirth, like childbirth is traumatic, it's a traumatic thing, and before modern medicine and before we understood antibiotics. So marriages is, um, I don't think anyone ever planned that that it was going to be, okay, we're gonna do this forever, you know, we're going to do this till we're in our, you know, till we're a hundred. I mean, but I think that's part of a bigger problem, you know. I, I don't remember who said it, but I remember someone saying, I can't remember who it was, but we are, we are prehistoric creatures, right? Like we are, we are biological creatures living in medieval institutions, like education, work, really with god-like technology. How do you think that ends? Like, you, you think that ends in happily ever after? Like that's insane, like marriage was not designed, I mean, think about even the early days of marriage, think about every Rogers and Hammerstein musical, you know, think about Oklahoma, you know, where you'd have like, there's like the three people in town that aren't married, you know, and, and you sort of pick which of the three, you know, you were gonna go be with, and now you, you have access to just an endless supply of the opposite sex or, or I shouldn't even say the opposite sex, you have an endless supply of romantic partners in, in a device in your hand. How, how does that possibly stand up? How does marriage, the idea of monogamy, forced monogamy or enforced monogamy, how does that ever survive in, in that environment? I, I don't think it can, I don't think it's realistic, um, and, and I'm, I, the statistics prove me right, you know, the statistics are absolutely in my favor. Now, again, get married as many times as you want, if you have a prenup, if you have a prenup, go get married, get married, it's a blast. Being married is difficult, you know. Someone once said that that it's great to be married, sometimes the problem is you're married all the time.

So you're a fan of prenups? I'm a huge fan of prenups. I mean, I shouldn't be because a prenup for a couple of thousand dollars will save you hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially in legal fees, if not millions. So there are clients I have that have spent over a million dollars just in their legal fees that if they had spent two thousand dollars on a prenup, we would, none of that, they'd still have that money in their pocket, and that's incredible to me. Like I have two sons who are adults that they are absolutely gonna have prenups, like they have to have prenups, they'd be fools to not have prenups. It's like jumping out of a plane with no parachute, why would you do that? You know, it's just, it's stupid. Prenups are enforceable, they make sense. I actually think there's something very romantic about prenups because they're forcing you to have a conversation about this relationship, like we, I genuinely believe that we are the most aware of our health just after we got sick, right? Like when we, if you wake up and you have a toothache, all you can think about is the fact your tooth hurts, and then your toothache goes away, and for like a week you're taking care of your teeth, you go, oh my God, at least I don't have a toothache, you know. But then a month goes by and you don't wake up and go, at least I don't have a toothache, you know, it's the furthest thing from your mind. But theoretically you could wake up today and go, I don't have a toothache, I don't have a backache, I don't have a head cold, like this is a great day.

It was a typical prenup, look like? Typical, the easiest prenup in the world, easiest, yours, mine, ours, that's it. Yours, mine, ours. If in your name it's yours, if it's in my name, if it's mine, in a divorce, everything, all the assets are split 50 50. Well, no, what you say in a prenuptial agreement is, if it's an asset or a liability, if it's in my name it's mine, if it's in your name it's yours, if it's in our joint names we'll divide it 50 50. That's it, yours, mine, ours. And then you have to have ongoing conversations throughout the marriage about, you know, hey, I got this bonus at work, do I put it in my account, do I put it in the joining? If the husband owns a house that's worth whatever two million dollars and he marries a woman, the house is his still. Well, they have to have a conversation, do I owe you a house? That's an awkward conversation. Do, okay, you know what's a more awkward conversation? A conversation 10 years later with a lawyer about the fact that you have to give half of this house away to someone. Isn't it better to have that conversation when you still, why, why would you learn how to fight in a fight? But won't that undermine the love that each person feels? Like, why you're gonna die, does that undermine your life or does it make you conscious of the fact that this is finite and that you should be out there? Like, I think having a conversation with your partner about, look, I love you, you love me, we want to do this thing together, but the numbers are against us and the world is antagonistic to it, and I hope we'll be together forever, but if we split up, what do we owe each other? What do you expect from me? Because I have to tell you something, I'm a fair person, I'm a fair person. If you say to me, you know, Jim, I, I, if I'm not going to work as hard because you make a good living, so if we split up, I'm gonna need help for a couple of years because I'm not gonna pay attention to my career, okay? Does that, is that unreasonable? That's totally reasonable, you know. If I say, Hey, listen, I have this house and I bought it, you know, but I'm buying it with money that I made really before we were together, so if we split up, I don't really think you deserve half of it. I think that if we bought things for it together, that okay, those things you can, half of, but the house itself, like that's money I had before I met you. And why can't you have that conversation? Why not you instead? I mean, you buy a house, you do a HUD one, a lead paint disclosure, you gotta sign all these things, that's, this is how much the interest is going to be and this is what you, get married and get a [ __ ] pamphlet, you don't get anything. You just did the most legally significant thing you're ever gonna do other than die, and no one has explained any of it to you. People come into my office and they go, well, my retirement account, that's in my name, and I'm like, yeah, it doesn't matter, it's in your name, okay? Was it acquired during the marriage? Okay, she's got half of it. Well, I have this bank account, but it's in my sole name, it's money that I inherited from my mom. I'm like, okay, and it's in your name, yeah, but you inherited that money during the marriage, and did you put money that you earned during the marriage in that account also? Yeah, okay, that's co-mingled and transmuted, that's now marital property. So they don't know that, why? Because no one tells them that when they're getting married. All they did, you spend more time talking about the cake than you do talking about the fact that you just opted out of the title system that's gigantic. You can't legally change the beneficiary of your life insurance, even to your children, if you're married without your spouse signing a consent to that. No one tells you that when you get, you can get married, Elvis can marry you for twenty dollars at a drive-through cathedral, and you, it's a legal status, a massive legal, you buy your spouse a Rolex, you bought yourself one half of a Rolex, you buy someone a birthday present who you're married to, you bought them, you bought yourself one half of that birthday present. Nobody knows, people don't know that, they learn that for the first time in my office or in a courtroom, that's insane. What, what other thing in the world, like anything else, any other contract you would say, well, wait a minute, no one explained that to me, no one explained that when I leased this car, no one explained to me that there's wear and tear, doesn't say it anywhere in the contract, right? Okay, marriage contract doesn't say that, it doesn't say, you know, oh, and by the way, you're opting out of the title system and your retirement assets and all these other things, and if there's any debts and you could have enhanced earning capacity or celebrity goodwill that has to be valued by forensic accountants that'll cost you a hundred thousand dollars, you don't, no contract that says that, it just says, yep, we're getting married, it's two witnesses, we're good. Like, what other contract, what other contract in the United States or anywhere has that lack of disclosure and is that binding? None, zero, none. So why a prenup? Yes, that's an awkward conversation. I guess I don't know that it has to be, and I have to tell you, the more awkward of a conversation it is, the more you should think twice about getting married. Because if you can't have a conversation with this person about the possibility that someday one or both of you might hurt each other, like how many people while they're still happy and in love say something like, you know, babe, I love you, but we're going to disagree about something at some point, and when we do, how, how do you like to fight? Like, do you need a minute? Like, do you need like to be alone for a minute so you can kind of calm down or are you the like, hey, we gotta figure this out, we can't go to bed angry? Like, because let's talk about that now while we're not in the fight, like let's talk about it now while we, well, we still get along and we're happy and we're trying to figure out how to navigate each other. It's hard enough to navigate yourself, I want to navigate another human being. Why don't we have that conversation now? But no, we don't, we learn on the job, we learn how to fight in a fight, which is insane, you know. But, but again, why? Because it's, you know, it's awkward, it'd be awkward to have that conversation, more awkward than getting in a fight where you don't know the rules of engagement, where you don't know how your partner does better or would feel better, like, and you're not going to ask them that in the heat of battle, you know. So why wouldn't you have that awkward conversation while you have this abundance of affection for each other? I mean, when I negotiate prenups, it's the easiest thing in the world in a sense because these two people really like each other, you know, they're about to get married, so they're clearly not trying to kill each other at that point, they clearly like each other. So you just say, Hey, listen, go home, talk to your fiance about X, Y, and Z and see what they, you know, see what they think and see, tell them what your concern is, and, and very often people will come back and say to me, I mean, I have to tell you, I've been doing this now, you know, over 20 years, I do a lot of prenups, I do maybe five, six prenups a month, sometimes during like pre-wedding season, which is the fall and before the summer, I'll do 10, 15 a month. The people who say to me, oh, well, I, I don't want to have that conversation, you know, I think that they, they get the prenup, and within three, four years they're divorced, sometimes five years, and then seven years, but they're the ones who get divorced, they, they have no business getting married. Like the ones who have the discussion and figure out the, well, I'm worried because if you keep the place, yeah, you're right, okay, so what if I give you this amount of money and it's this much for each year, okay, yeah, that's cool, let's do it that way. Those people, they'll probably never gonna put the prenup in a safe someplace you'll never look at it, probably good communication, ah, because they're able to talk to each other and they're able to

Talk about hard things. How are you going to be married to someone, have children with someone, and you can't talk about hard things? You know, like, how are you going to navigate life and not be able to talk about hard things? Like, that's silly. So if you can't talk about hard things, don't get [ __ ] married. It's okay; you don't have to. You can stay together, but but people love… I had a client, no joke, he was in his 70s, he was married—who's married four times. I did his third and fourth divorces, and he was getting married for a fifth time. And I said to him, I was like, “You… because I actually thought he’s older, so I thought, like, does he know you don't have to marry them anymore? Like this, maybe he doesn't know. Yeah, maybe someone didn't tell him. Like, maybe someone didn't tell him, like you can [ __ ] them; you don't have to marry them anymore. You can just do that.” He's dividing his assets multiple times. Well, it's—I mean, it's getting smaller and smaller every time. But I said to him, I was like, “Why are you doing this again?” I was like, “You, you don't have to get married. Like, you're clearly not created it,” you know, like… and he was very funny. He said, um, he said, “You know, Jim,” he said, “you buy a car and you drive it for 200,000 miles, and eventually the engine craps out. So you go out and you buy a Ferrari, or you buy some flashy sports car, and you drive it for a couple of months, you realize this is not the car for me. So you get rid of it. Then you get another car, and you know, you think this one's going to be the one for you, but you know, after you drive it for like a year, you realize, yeah, this is not the car for me.”

You can lease them instead of buying them. “You’re gonna walk everywhere for the rest of your life.” Yeah, well, that was my answer. You could lease them. You could lease them, or you could—you could have some other alternative. I mean, here's the thing about marriage is—is it's a technology. So we made it up, so we can change it.

You think marriage will change in the next 20 years? No, no. I think it’ll—I actually think it's going to have—I mean, I think we're leaning—I think the pendulum always swings hard in the other direction. We have a—we have a tendency as a culture to overcorrect. So I think we're—we're heading into a spiral of like traditional stuff really. Like, I think you're gonna see like people getting like super religious again. People are gonna get super dogmatic. I think we're gonna see the Trad wife thing. We're going to see the hyper masculinity. We're gonna see like a very, you know… we've got to—we've gone so far in the direction of postmodernism where nothing means anything and everything's just, you know, like there is no definite… we become like Sartre, you know? Like we've become so postmodern that it's become almost a form of rugged individualism. I think we're going to swing in the other direction now in traditional institutions. It will be—I mean, you know, from a marriage place it's going to be great because I think people are going to get married. I mean, people were slowing down on getting married for a while. Sure, and they were getting married later, and they're having kids later. We're declining to have kids. And I think as we—I think as a culture we start re-solidifying into gender roles or gender tropes, depending on how we're going to look at it, I think you're going to see marriage resurge again. But I think that it's still going to be as flawed of a technology as it ever was. And I think we have so much out there now to compare ourselves to. You know, you used to compare yourself to the neighbors next door and what car they had in the driveway and what they were wearing when they left for church on Sunday. Now you're just looking at everyone's greatest hits while living your gag reel, you know? And you're never looking at any of that stuff when you're having like a peak experience. You're on the toilet, or you're bored, and you're looking at everyone's hashtag blast from me while they're in my office. Like, I can't tell you how many people do a consult with me and they're cheating, and they haven't slept with their spouse in three years, and they're miserable. And you're looking at their Instagram and it's all like, “Best life ever! #GreatestHubbyEver!” And you're like, “What is this? It's performance art,” you know? It's an advertisement of how happy you are. But this is what people are comparing themselves to. They're looking at that and going, “All my marriage isn't that good. That marriage isn't that good. Trust me, that marriage isn't that good. That marriage is…” Look at celebrities. You don't even look at the people you know. Look at celebrities. They're before they do… they… it is with great sadness that we advise that we're going to be moving in separate directions and consciously uncoupling, and like that, right before that, it's like, “Oh no, we're happy. We're great. We're phenomenal. You know, we're—we're—we're constantly advertising how wonderful our relationships are while they're on fire,” you know? And then wondering why everyone’s, you know, miserable in their relationship because they’re comparing it to something fake. It’s like comparing your—your body to a photoshopped body.

Other than social media, do you think there's something else in our society that made marriage more difficult to stay together now? Makes it important and just like your parents stayed married? Yeah, my parents stayed married until my mother passed away. Same—same with me, um, but they were—they were mixed results. I see. I think that my parents were not as—as caught up in their own happiness. I think we're very caught up in our own happiness. We're all very selfish. Yeah, we're all very sort of—I don't want to say narcissistic, but we're very much like we are the sun around which everything… What am I not getting? Yeah, my father was a Vietnam veteran. You know, he got out of the Naval Academy in ’66 and went to Vietnam for three years. So he was alive, so he was like, “[ __ ] I’m ahead. I’m playing with the house’s money. I’m alive.” Everybody in their wedding party, all the men in their wedding party died in Vietnam. There’s five guys in their wedding party; they all died in Vietnam. My parents never looked at their wedding album because every single man in it was dead. They were all helicopter pilots in Vietnam who got killed in their 20s, you know? So they didn't really see marriages like it was a partnership. It was like, “Yeah, we’re gonna do this thing. We’re gonna have kids. We’re gonna raise the kids. We’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna have a house. You know, we’re gonna have a car. Like, we’ll be successful.” The lights are on. My father was dirt poor. He came from like the Appalachian part of—of—of Virginia, a small town called Shawsville. Didn't have indoor plumbing until they left for the Naval Academy. And he just—I think he saw marriages, yeah, it’s what you do, you know? He met my mom on Fleet Week. She was a nurse in the city, and uh, he was, you know, on Fleet Week, and he had his uniform on, and he was in a bar, and he was drunk, and he—he went to her, and—and uh, he said, “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and I’m gonna marry you,” because he was drunk. And she said, “Are you in the military?” because he was wearing a uniform. And he said, “Yep.” And she said, “What country?” And he said, “Whatever country you’re from.” And he invited her to visit him at the Naval Academy a couple of weeks later, and she came. But he’d invited three other women; he just didn’t know if any of them would come, so he invited all of them. So my mom got there, and she saw these other women, and she said, “Either I’m leaving, or they’re all leaving.” And he was like, “I kind of like her,” so he made them all leave. And they were—yeah, they were married 50-plus years. But you know, their marriage had challenges, you know? He was an alcoholic. He’s been in recovery for maybe seven, eight years since she passed. But um, and—and he’s remarried, but he remarried within a year of my mom dying. Like he was the kind of—he’s of a generation of men that he needed someone to take care of him, you know? My mom died; he didn’t even know how to scramble an egg. Like it was, you know, like after she passed, I had him come to stay with me and my sons, and I was trying to like teach him, like, “Okay, Dad, here’s how you make like a batch of chili, and then you can eat it all week,” you know? And—and I was like, “How’s this guy gonna…” because they had this very… But that’s what I met another older woman, and her husband had died. She needed someone to take care of; he needed someone to take care of him. But that generation didn’t have it as easy as we… that’s what I’m saying. Like they—they were just meeting your basic needs, right? They were grateful to be alive. They were grateful to be alive because they’d either been through war… we’re not grateful unless we’re driving a Mercedes or—and even then we’re not grateful because—because the truth is, as well, okay, Mercedes for Mercedes, who cares, you know? When people have a Mercedes… my secretary has a Mercedes; she leases it, you know? I drive a Jeep. So is she better than me? Is she more successful than me? She works for me, you know? So I—I don’t—I don’t know that any of it’s enough anymore. Like, no matter what watch you have, somebody’s got another one or a better one or five of them. And all this comparison that we see… it’s all… and—and so I just think that’s the thing that makes it impossible, right? Like if—if—if you’re our parents’ generation was struggling to just make it through, right? To—to meet your basic needs, to keep a roof over your head, to raise your children. And now it’s very much, “Are you self-actualized? Are you happy? Do you have an eight-pack?” Like it would never have occurred to my father… did he have an eight-pack? I would never have been something he thought of, you know? It’s just not—it just wasn’t on his radar, you know? And I don’t think my mother would have ever been like, “Oh, you know, he—he doesn’t have an eight-pack.” Like that wouldn’t… because again, though, it’s not constantly being advertised to him, you know? I think that how many women did he interact with in a day? You know, how many women do I interact with in a day, visually or personally in some fashion or—or, you know, in a curated, mediated way? And again, those are curated women, by the way, so they’re photoshopped, they’re airbrushed, they’ve got filters on them. So again, you know, I—how does marriage survive in that setting? It had a hard enough time surviving without all of that. I mean, forget kids; the divorce rate keeps increasing, right? Yeah, it keeps going up. It keeps going up. It’s been hanging around 53 to 56 for a while. We had a bump after COVID. What are other countries like? Um, countries that have a significant religious narrative have the lowest divorce rates. So the lowest divorce rates are in like, you know, Saudi Arabia. Yeah, but they don’t have a whole lot of choice, right? You’re not allowed to divorce, or you just have your wife killed, you know? So that—that’s—you don’t have to divorce. Um, so the countries where there is this very strict religious prohibition against marriage or against divorce… but I mean, the United States is probably the highest divorce rate… we’re among the highest. Yeah, yeah. I don’t think we’re the—we might—we might be the highest now. For a while, Germany had a very high divorce rate. France had a pretty high divorce rate. What’s interesting is—is the divorce rate and the marriage satisfaction rates; those are different because most people… the goal is not, “Can we stay married?” The goal is, “Can we stay happily married?” You know, because if somebody said to me like, “Yeah, I’ve been married 25 years, and I’ve been [ __ ] miserable for 15 of them,” like I’m not going to envy you. Like, “Great job, really hung in there in that awful situation,” you know? Like that—that’s not impressive to me. You know, I have a cousin who got married, and I was—I was chatting with her; she’s a younger woman, and I—she—her—her husband uh, just joined the police force, and I said to him, so I was trying to make small talk, and I said, “So do you—you know, do you like it?” And he’s from a family of cops, and he said, “Not—not really, but you know, I’m gonna do like the 20 years, and then you know, you get your pension.” I thought, “I’ll just do my 20.” That’s 20 years. You’re 25 years old; that’s 25 to 45. Those are [ __ ] incredible years; you’ll never get those back. And your approach to life is… yeah, I mean, I don’t like it, but I’ll just kind of do it, you know? Like I’ve—I want to tiptoe through life and arrive safely at death. Like that seems, you know… but I—I get that that’s what we’re—if that’s what marriage is, if it’s an endurance event, you know, where… no—no, you’ve got to stay married. You know why? I mean, that’s why I think religions have been very quick to… I mean, I always tell people I’m not religious; I was raised very Catholic. But the reality is that—that, you know, I mean, there’s—if—if in fact God talked to humanity with Ten Commandments, I think it’s hilarious that the only thing he has to say twice is, “Don’t [ __ ] people you’re not married to.” Thou shalt not kill once, right? Honor the Sabbath once. Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife. Don’t commit adultery. It’s—it’s the only thing—it’s the only thing that got two commandments. So like, basically, don’t kill, honor the Sabbath, don’t [ __ ] people you’re not married to. Seriously, don’t [ __ ] people you’re not married to. Like, there’s no—it didn’t “shall not steal” one. You know, everything… it’s the only one that got double billing.

No, religion’s a big component, and it’s a huge component. But why? Because how else are you going to control people? How else are you going to get people to sign on for this thing and not sleep with each other? I mean, I’m not saying Freud was right, but we—we do want to sleep with people. We do want to kill people that don’t do what we want them to do. Like, we have these animal instincts; we have these impulses. And what do we do with them? Well, we have to live in a civilized society. So civilization… it’s discontent. We have to marry… certain… that marriage was outlawed or just abolished. It would just be a free-for-all. I don’t know that that’s true. I mean, I think that—I think people would like us to believe that’s true, you know? I—I don’t believe that. Like, I don’t believe if murder wasn’t illegal that I would just go killing people. Like, I—like you know, like I… rape and murder as many people as I want to, which is none, because I’m not a monster. Like I don’t—I rape as many people as I want to—none, because I don’t want to. I wouldn’t want to do that to another person. I think—I think society would be probably happier without marriage. Well, I think we would have a lot less of the damage that comes, right? I think we’d have to find new narratives to structure, to define relationships, right? I mean, I do think there is a part of us that wants to say… because you know, I—I as a grown man who’s divorced… when you’re—when you’re 20 and you say, “Oh, that’s my girlfriend,” nobody thinks any of it. When you’re 50 and you say, “Oh, that’s my girlfriend,” people go, “There’s a story there,” like, because you’re either divorced or commitment-phobic, or why do you have a girlfriend when you’re 50? Why isn’t that your wife? So they know there’s a story there. So we’d have to… and I get it; I get it because if—if someone says, “Oh, that’s my boyfriend,” it’s like, “All right, well, that could be for a week; that could have been nothing.” They could be like, “Yeah, it’s my boyfriend.” “My husband.” It’s like, “Oh, okay. Wait, that’s—that’s her husband. Like, she’s got some authority there.” So I get that there’s this idea that we want to say like, you know… it’s like when you’re a little kid, “This is my friend, but this is my best friend.” You know, “This is my best friend,” but like, how many adults still need to say that? Like, how many adults still need to say, “Oh, my friend Todd and I… and my best friend Tom and I…” Like, okay, like, so the extra special friend? Like—like what are they? These are like… do they get health insurance with that? Like, what is the deal with that? So I think that’s kind of what marriage has become is it’s like, you know… “Well, the person I love…” No, no, but like, “The person I love…” There’s a lot of people I love; I wouldn’t want to be married to any of them. But there’s a lot of people I love, you know? And—and I love my ex-wife. I wouldn’t want to be married to her. I think she loves me; she wouldn’t want to be married to me. I don’t blame her. I’m a great ex-husband; I’m a terrible husband. I’m a great ex-husband because the skill set for an ex-husband is totally different than the skill set for a husband. The skill set for a father is completely different than that of a husband. That’s the—the thing I have to tell people all the time. All the time people say, “Well, he’s a terrible husband, so you shouldn’t have custody of the kids.” I’m like, “What the [ __ ]? Where’s the overlap between being a good husband and being a good father?” Like, being a good father is a whole different skill. You can be a great husband and a [ __ ] father, and you can be an amazing father and a terrible husband. Like these—there’s very little overlap in those skill sets, you know? Maybe good listening skills would be helpful in both, or patience would be good in both. But that’s true of almost anything, you know? It’s a doctor and a lawyer; both be good if you had good listening skills. It doesn’t mean they’re the same profession.

So is divorce harder on women or men? That’s a great question. I think it’s equally hard on both, but I think that the world is more sympathetic to women when they get divorced. I think when a woman gets cheated on, the man’s a piece of [ __ ], and when a woman cheats on a man, she must have been forced into the arms of this other man, or she had to explore herself, or she was being neglected in some fashion. And so if—if a man cheats, he’s a piece of garbage, and if a man’s wife cheats, he mustn’t have been meeting her needs, and she had every right in the world… like… so the world is very unsympathetic to men when they get divorced. That’s—that’s been throughout Earth. Yeah, that’s been for… I mean, there was a maternal presumption, a legal—legal presumption, what was called the Tender Years Doctrine, which was that if a child was under the age of seven, they were automatically presumed that they would be in the custody of the mother, um, and men… so men get really beat up still in court. I mean, the loss theoretically is gender-blind right now, but I—I don’t—I don’t actually see that because the law is people; the law is judges, and judges are human, and they’re—they’re all the same biases. And it’s just not a moment right now where men are particularly sympathetic characters, you know? I think that, you know, even—even young men, I mean, if—you know, if at a school dance they sing Beyoncé’s “Girls Who Run the World,” like if there was a song called “Men Who Run the World, Men,” and it was a positive thing, like you get pilloried for that. So I think that men have a very hard time right now in divorce. They see their children less; they get hit harder financially; um, they are the bad guy no matter what. If they cheat, they’re the bad guy; if they get cheated on, they were the bad guy because they probably neglected her. There’s a presumption that the man is to blame a lot of the time. Now again, you know, marriage equality has been a thing for a while, so there are, you know, tons of gay couples. So you have two men…

Two women divorcing each other, um, and that hasn't really shook out too much yet in terms of how that plays out. Um, I don't know if it's that gay and lesbian couples are better at it than heterosexual couples, or if it's still they're in the honeymoon period, because you know marriage equality hasn't been around that long. But I, I think men find a less sympathetic world.

But in fairness, divorced men have it a little easier. I think divorced men meet a young woman, and the woman's like, "Instant family, just add me," that's great. You know, if he's got kids, it's like, "Oh, he's got kids, look at his nurturing, he is," and how lovely. And women, you know, they get divorced, they've got kids, guys are like, "Whoop, it's got baggage, I'm not going near that," you know. So I think I think they, that men and women have different problems post-divorce, and and the world could be better to both of them. I think that I have some women who, uh, who you know I've done their divorce, and whatever guy is with them is going to be very lucky because they're they're beautiful, they're smart, they're good moms, but they're also, you know, vibrant, exciting women. Now they're loaded, and they've got money.

Yeah, yeah, they've got money. They don't have as much financial insecurity, although I have to tell you that, you know, let's last remaining feminist taboo, I got a lot of women paying alimony these days. I mean, you know, women can. Women marry the like handsome musician who's not successful, or the artist, you know, like there's a lot of. Listen, it hasn't been, you know, there's been a significant effort in in our culture in the last decade, if anyone didn't notice, to improve the situation of women. If you have an equally qualified man, an uniquely qualified woman, the woman's diversity hire, the man's not. So I have a lot of women who get, when they get told like, "Oh yeah, no, you got to give him half your [ __ ]," or, "Oh no, you got to pay alimony because he makes 50 grand a year and you make 250." And they're like, you know, they could be the staunchest feminist in the world, and when you tell them they got to pay alimony, they're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa." He's a man, he's got a strong back, he can get out there and work. And and then suddenly the whole like gender is a construct and there's no such thing, that goes right out the window, and you got told you got to pay alimony. That's like, "Nope, no, no, no. I believe in strict gender roles, men should pay alimony, women, even if you earn 10 times, you should not have to pay alimony." I've had I've had very, very staunchly feminist clients who who changed their mind about how feminist they were when they got told that they were going to have to pay alimony.

Interesting. Yeah. And but I do have a lot of men who won't take alimony even though they're entitled to it, because there's just some feeling of like, yeah, no, I'm not doing that, it's emasculating. Like if she tells people that we know that I took alimony from her, like people think I'm less than a man. So again, it's all gender stuff, it's still out there, it's still still part of the Zeitgeist, you know, we're still trying to figure it all out.

How many, how many marriages are genuinely happy, you think? How many married couples? Gosh, because I see married couples that have been married, it looks like they've been married a decade or two, yeah, and they're having dinner, and they're having the same conversation they had yesterday, the day before, the day before that, in the weeks and months before that.

Yeah, you know, here's what I'll tell you, I, I have, I know a lot of people, and I, I think I know one couple that has like a genuinely happy marriage. What do you think the secret is? Ah, they really like each other. I don't know, like they're really good to each other. I have to tell you, they make me very uncomfortable. I, jokingly, my my ex-wife and I jokingly say that they were the reason we got divorced because we, we have, we've known them since we were in college, and we went to Disney with them with their kids and our kids when all the kids were little, and we were gonna go on a ride with our kids and their kids, and they, they were gonna like, you know, oh, like we'll take the kids on the ride and you guys can go. And my friend was like, "Oh good, we're just gonna go walk and hold hands," and they walked away and like holding hands. And we looked at them, and we didn't say anything to each other, but like five years later when we got divorced, I said, "You know, I, when I saw the two of them together, I thought, I don't feel like that about her." Like, and she said, "Oh my God, I remember that exact moment, I felt the same way." So I think they make people uncomfortable, like when you see someone who's got it right, like this guy just loves her, he loves her, they've been married 25 years, and dude, he's like, it's like he's talking about a girl he met yesterday. And and she's the same way about him, like she's a miracle when that happens.

Yeah, I just think it, look, you know, man, I tell people marriage is like the lottery, you are probably not going to win, you know, but but but if you win, what you win is so good. Like I don't know, maybe you buy a ticket [ __ ] it, like, but buy it to get a prenup. Like, do you, do you take all your money and buy lottery tickets? No. But if you and I don't buy lottery tickets, like I don't play the lottery, you're not gonna [ __ ] win. Why, you know, set the money on fire, it'll be more fun. But if somebody said to me, "No man, you know what, once a week I buy twenty dollars worth of lottery tickets," all right, go for it, you know. Somebody's gotta win, maybe it'll be you. Like same thing with marriage, like somebody's got to win, like yeah, I've met hundreds if not thousands of couples, and I know one, one that is legitimately happy and like really seemed to just feed that happiness by that marriage that they have, and and they both as individuals have become the best version of themselves by being, you know what, like if that's, they won the lottery. So buy the ticket, I guess, you know, but I mean don't, don't make that your retirement plan, like don't go like, well, you know, don't worry, I'm not saving money for my kids' college because, you know, I'm buying lottery tickets, like that's, you're an idiot if you're doing that.

Excellent, Jim, thank you so much for sharing your story. It's a pleasure. Your thoughts on marriage and love and divorce, fascinating topic, isn't it?

Yeah, it is, and I suspect it will continue to be. I, I don't know that we're going to culturally get any better at it, but uh, the economy is good, we're busy, economy's bad, we're busy, like we're, we're a recession-proof industry, so you know, it's, it's uh, even even kova didn't slow us down, you know, probably sped you up. Well, people said for better for worse, they didn't say for lunch, you know, and when you're locked in the house together, it was, that was not great for most marriages, like there was no, no uh, it was not, "Hey, we should all spend more time together," you know, there was, there was a lot of difficult conversations that came out of that. Barbers and divorce lawyers when the pandemic ended, we were, the lines were out the door, you know, so whatever the next thing is, you know, we'll, we'll still be here.

All right, thank you so much. You got it, man.