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

James Sexton
All marital problems stem from two things, and that's. What about sex? How often is sex the issue in divorce? Oh, my God. James Sexton, the world's number one divorce lawyer, specializing in billionaires, athletes, and celebrities for over two decades, giving him a unique insight into how relationships fail and succeed.

There's about a 56% chance that your marriage will end in divorce, yet 86% of people remarry within five years. Most people have no idea what they are getting themselves into. And a great example of that would be prenups. Who gets what when they break up. Correct.

And the most shocking prenup I've ever seen said that for every ten pounds the wife gained, she would lose $10,000 a month in alimony. Ten pounds of weight. And that was enforceable. Your money issues lead to divorce. Oh, it's controversial.

Steven Bartlett
What's the quickest? Someone's gone from marriage to divorce in 48 hours. Who cheats more, men or women? You'll be shocked to hear. Have you ever seen violence during a divorce?

James Sexton
They ran her over four times and stabbed her. Jesus Christ. So here's the question then. Should we get married? And then do 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. Congratulations. Diary of a seogang. We've made some progress.

Steven Bartlett
63% of you that listen to this podcast regularly don't subscribe, which is down from 69%. Our goal is 50%. So if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you know. And the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get.

Thank you and enjoy this episode.

James, I've never spoken to somebody that does what you do. What do you do? I'm a divorce lawyer. 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.

James Sexton
It means that either you've not married, or it means that you've successfully married to the point where you would never end up in my office. By the time someone sets foot in my office, something's gone terribly wrong in their life, because no one ever meant to meet me. No one ever meant to be in my office, ever. What is the probability that someday I do meet somebody like you and not in this context? 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 to 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. So if you marry, the chances of meeting someone like me are more likely than not, if we look at it that way. Cause it's more than 50%, so it's a high number, you know? But if we define failure as all of the other things you've described there, where we kind of stay together, but we're miserable, or we stay together for some other reason, how. What percentage of marriages, on that basis, do you think actually fail?

I mean, if we consider the. 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, I mean, 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 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 marriage is a lovely thing. And I get misty eyed at weddings, like anybody, and not just for future business purposes.

I think the 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.

See, 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 want to get, you know, the ring stains around. We 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.

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 an honest woman of her, 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, oof, what'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 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, listen to skydiving.

It's not like the 75%, 76% of people die who are skydiving. The truth is, it makes very little sense to me that marriage is assumed to be a thing you will do, when, in fact, we as a species, are so unbelievably bad at it that. Sort of 86% that then get remarried after divorce. Are they then, have they learned from their mistakes? Are they better at mistakes?

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.

It could be neuroscience. It could be the realm of a 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.

But whatever it is, we go, oh, yeah, but this one's different. I did a prenup last week, for a guy who went through 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 a really big deal.

That's like a 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 remarrying 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, you've seen how difficult a divorce can be, you know, do you think maybe it might be he. 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 indelicate and rude for me to say, like, snap out of it, man. You gotta get your, like, really, you know, bring your logical brain to this equation.

Do not bring the part of you that's just filled with romance and has Christmas in your eyes. Like, really, you gotta look at this honestly. Do you see a lot of gold diggers? Do you see a lot of gold digger sort of patterns? That is, you see someone that's incredibly wealthy.

Steven Bartlett
You see someone that's, I don't know, 40 years younger than them? Yeah, yeah, I see a lot of that. I mean, you know, I'm hesitant to say gold diggers because I think that has a pejorative, like, built into it, that somehow I think that people bring different things to the table in relationships. I think love is an economy. And I'm not saying that in a way that devalues love.

James Sexton
I think that love is a verb. I think that love is an emotion, and I think that love is an economy. There is a giving and taking of value, and that can be incredibly symbiotic, that can be incredibly healthy and wonderful, that 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, ten 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.

Like, 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, you know, like, she's a talented artist, but, you know, she's busy working, you know, a thankless, awful job, you know, like, slinging cappuccinos, you know, and she's not able to, in this prime of her life, focus on this thing she's so talented at. And I can say to her, hey, listen, and 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 feel like I'm part of your success, and you, in turn, are part of my success because you give me this wonderful respite from the chaos of my work.

And 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 like, okay, well, I'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, you know, 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's allegedly madly in love with him, and he really believes that it's his personality and has nothing to do with the fact that he's a billionaire or that that is a very small consideration. Feels to me like the worst kind of delusion. 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 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 give and a take in that relationship. I think that's very fair. Have you seen examples of the latter example where you described that billionaire, where there's not many redeeming qualities, where they're heading towards marriage, they don't yet have a prenup.

Steven Bartlett
You're maybe advising them that they should get a prenup and they're not interested because they're so deluded by the belief that the person is interested in their wonderful personality or. Yeah. So the prenup conversation is a really interesting one, because I do a lot of prenups. Sure. Prenuptial agreement is a contract between two people that defines the rule set essentially for their marriage.

James Sexton
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 contexts, 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 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 protection 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 witnesses.

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's 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 marry. You could just tell people that you're married. You don't check people's paperwork. Like, you can 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 prenuptial agreement. The way I would describe it, is two people deciding that they, having picked each other out of 8 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. Like, they're going to do a great job. They're really crushing it, you know, like, 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 the 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. So, like 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. It was at 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.

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 prenuptial 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. Typically, as we see it in movies and such and we hear about it in culture, is really deciding who gets what? When they break up, right?

Correct. Now, it's hard to say in advance who gets what when we break up sometime in the future because we don't know what we're gonna have in ten years, in 20 years. So what do you do? You create structures. Like, you create.

You know, I refer to the simplest prenup as a yours, mine and ours. 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 me. Any obligation to me. Ours. 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 half 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 tie my 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 sole account, and I'm going to put this much in the joint account, and then you should be able to say, if you're the other person, well, why are you putting so much of it in your personal account? Like, are things weird with us 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, well, I married 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 there for him while he was building it. So therefore, I believe I'm entitled to half the value of that business. Now, 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 that business, she helped make that. Okay, well, her mother and father helped make who she is so I owe them something, right?

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, how far 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 in to purchase a car and you said, how much is this car? And they said, money. He said, well, how much?

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?

And even if you can't make it a dollar number, it's x percent of last year's earnings. Or give me a formula, something to tie it to, and at least have that conversation, because then you can decide, am I gonna sign up for this thing or not? You must meet a lot of people who are in a relationship where one of the people doesn't want to have a prenup. Yes. Because when I think about having a prenup, I'm with a woman at the moment.

Steven Bartlett
We've been together for five years. Frankly, if I said to her, I want to get a prenup, she would be all for it. That's the type of person she is. She'll be all for. Doesn't care.

She'd be all for it. Excellent. You've done well. But I can imagine in other relationships I'd be nervous to even say the words. Because immediately you're thinking about how you're getting out before you get in.

Yeah. 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.

James Sexton
They end in death or they end in divorce, but they all end. Right? And so if you said, I'm gonna get life insurance, it would be foolish for someone who's with you to say, wait, are you planning on dying soon? Like. No, but in the event that I do, I'd like to make sure that things are taken 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 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? Have you seen it break down a marriage because someone mentioned a prenup? Have you seen it? Yeah, I've seen marriage.

I've seen marriages that were scheduled to happen, not happen, because the prenup discussion happened. But more often than not, I've seen the threat of not marrying someone because they want you to sign a prenup. Cause a person to fold in their request for a prenup, 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 prenup. I have a lot of confidence in this marriage.

I really love this person. But I would like to have a prenup in place, and I draft a prenup 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, then you're choosing for us to not marry, that's okay, but 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, never mind.

And they walk away from it because they're intimidated. And I think that's an awful way to start a marriage. I think that's much worse than having a discussion about difficult things. Like, I don't think you would think it's irresponsible. You've been with a woman 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 gonna get in a fight sometime that's gonna happen.

Like, we're gonna disagree about something. It'll probably be my fault. I'll probably say something stupid. I do that sometimes. So when we get in a fight someday, which, again, I hope we don't, I'll do everything I can and not ever get in an argument with you.

But at some point, something's gonna happen. You're gonna say something that's gonna hurt my feelings, I'm gonna 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 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 sleep on it, or do you need to, like, we got to 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. Do we have to address it right then and there? Because, you know the best time to talk about how we're going to 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 prenup. I think a predict 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 know.

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 there 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. In that case of that person you referenced there where they came to you for a prenup, their partner gave them an ultimatum and said, listen, no, I'm not signing that. How do you kind of draw the line between being a lawyer versus, like, a therapist or an advisor?

Steven Bartlett
Sort of like a relationship advisor? 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.

James Sexton
We're 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. I thought prenups were illegal. I thought they were like, people went and got them.

Steven Bartlett
But when it comes to enforcement, enforcement, they don't hold up. 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, because the nature of a prenup is as long as it was not what's called unconscionable.

James Sexton
Unconscionable is 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 unconscionability is. So you have to be. A contract has to be unconscionable for it to be set aside. Now, I have seen some prenups that were, in their interpretation, unconscionable, meaning 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 prenups sometimes be shockingly unfair. But you have a right to contract as long as it wasn't fraud, as long as it wasn't duress or undue 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 human autonomy and agency and the right to make decisions about your life and your future. So is that example, really?

Steven Bartlett
And is that the most shocking one you've seen in terms of. No. The most shocking prenup I've ever seen, which was enforceable, had a provision that said that for every ten pounds the wife gained in the marriage, she would lose $10,000 a month in alimony. Ten pounds of weight? Yes.

James Sexton
Yes. So it was a very wealthy man who was marrying 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 prenuptial agreement. He wanted a clause that said she would get, if they divorced, she was going to get like $70,000 a month for alimony, but for every ten pounds she gained from the date of marriage, she would forfeit 10,000 a month worth of alimony. And it was designed to sort of create an incentive.

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 a right 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.

Steven Bartlett
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? No, I think it's very shallow in some ways.

James Sexton
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. I consider your physical appearance vitally important to this relationship. And by the way, don't skip the other side of that equation.

Steven Bartlett
Yeah. She was going to get $70,000 a month. That's very impressive number. So I think she also understood there was a value to be attached to him as well.

James Sexton
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, see, 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 could 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 at the day we signed the prenup. Because you'd have to establish a baseline, right. Cause if you say gaining ten pounds, you'd have to establish a baseline weight on the date of the marriage.

Steven Bartlett
So she was weighed on the day of the marriage. Well, in or about the date of the marriage, the parties 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 gonna be putting pennies in my pockets and eating as many cheeseburgers as I can before the weigh in. Now we're getting divorced.

James Sexton
I'm going to be like a wrestler. I'm going to be in the sauna. I'm going to be sweating as much as I can. I'm going to take diuretics. I'm going to eat nothing but grilled vegetables for a week or two, and I'm going to take off every ounce of clothing I can because I want to minimize my weight.

This is why lawyers don't get invited to parties, because that's how we analyze problems. 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 get it.

I get whoever I'm representing in that transaction, I can 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. I heard about this thing when I was reading your book, also watching some of your stuff online that I didn't know existed, which was fidelity contracts.

Fidelity clauses. Yeah. Fidelity clauses, yeah. Yeah. So it's something people include in prenuptial agreements and also sometimes in what's called a post nuptial agreement.

So a post nuptial agreement. You know, nuptial meaning marriage meaning before marriage, post meaning after marriage. So if you didn't get a prenup, but your 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 nuptial agreement. Okay.

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 prenup you should have had. Okay. So I have seen people in both prenups and in postnups 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, you know, a support related context. It could have be a percentage of certain ownership rights. You know, things that you have. Are they a good idea from what you've seen? Are they useful in.

I think they're a terrible idea. Yeah. From a legal standpoint, they're a terrible idea for a couple of reasons. One, defining cheating is very tricky. You know, if we're going to define cheating as a specific form of sexual contact, I guess that's a pretty clear definition.

But even infidelity, it's not all created equal. I mean, I think we could all agree that if your partner, when they were drunk on vacation or at a party, 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 dalliance.

It happened again. Not excusing that behavior, 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 and what we call an emotional affair. Well, I mean, I think we can agree that 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 him?

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 going to define cheating and then there's going to be a penalty for you doing it. Now, again, in what I've observed in life, cheating is its own penalty. Cheating turns your life, at best, cheating turns your life into like an unbelievably complicated, like, jumping from 1ft 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.

Like, there's so, 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. Oh, wait, it's illegal. I don't want to get in trouble. Yeah, like, that's not how it works.

Like, you're adding insult to injury. You know, this person, they're already in a very difficult position. I don't think making it illegal is gonna do much except create an underground economy. Same kind of thing. I think that infidelity, 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, this could cost me like 20 more grand. I'm not going to do it. Are you seeing more and more people getting those prenups? Yeah, prenups are.

I have to tell you, there's a generational shift happening. I see a lot of people in their. I've been doing this job for 25 years and I will tell you, the people currently in their twenties and early thirties, like the prime demographic for marriage, mid, mid twenties to mid thirties, are getting prenups at a rate that I would say is probably five x what it was ten 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 performative. Look how happy we are. Meanwhile. It's like white teeth and rotting gums. We're doing the performative social media.

Look at how great hashtag blessed. And meanwhile, our life is. Our relationship is rotting from the inside, and we see a lot of that. I have to tell you something. I see people in my office who publicly are having the greatest relationships ever, if you believe their 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. 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, we're perfectly happy. These hateful rumors that we're unhappy or terrible, and then we've decided to amicably heart ways.

We 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 in love you were with each other. But now, you know, we were basing our lives like, we're basing our level of satisfaction on watching your greatest hits while we live. Our gag reel. Do you think there's something in the idea that those that endeavor to convince the world that they're happy in their relationships are often not as happy 100%? I'll actually extrapolate that further.

My father's a southerner, 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 someone would drive a beautiful car, and I'd say, wow, that car is so cool. 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. Like, 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 jeep grand Cherokee, which is, like, a very mid range car. He wears, like, you know, totally nondescript clothing. Like, he just looks like a typical middle aged dude. And you would not look at him and go, he gets his hair cut at, like, super cuts for $25. Like, he's not posh in the things that he owns and does, and he could buy his income annually is, like, the gross domestic product of a few countries.

And, you know, he's not. But then. Yet 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.

You know, this is particularly true of celebrities. You know, celebrities have to live these big, performative lives. Cause if they don't, you know, drive a posh car and they don't wear the latest designer labels, there's this sense of, ooh, are they 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 these are, the more people have to flaunt their wealth, the less wealth they probably have.

Like, 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 walk down the street in New York City sometimes.

People today, guys said to me, hey, man, love your stuff. Thanks. That's great. Feels nice. Definitely nice.

There's times where it doesn't. There's times where I'm on my phone, I'm in 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 how happy we are. Look at how happy we are. Look at how happy we are. You know, it's like, please tell me how happy we are.

Because if you don't tell me how happy we are, I'm gonna have to look at this relationship and I'm gonna see how unhappy we are. You know, when someone wants to be famous, it's like, tell me I have value. Please tell me I have value. Oh, God, please tell me I have value. Because, you know, 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, oh, 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. But you must see so much of that in your office where someone comes in and they say, my marriage isn't working. And they use the. They use a comparative measure.

Steven Bartlett
They say, well, you know, Jenny and Dave, they're like this and we're not. So. But how much sex are they having? How much sex is enough sex? Like, honestly, like, we don't talk about these things.

James Sexton
We don't. 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 photoshopped image of a person on steroids. Yeah, you're right. You don't look like a Photoshop person on steroids.

You're not supposed to. Like, women are going into doctor's offices saying, make me look like this. And showing the doctor something that's been photoshopped. 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 frequent? One sex? Yeah.

Sex is huge. Sex is huge. Well, I mean, first of all, it better be, because what's the difference between a spouse and a roommate otherwise? Like, it was just like, oh, we're gonna be partners in a home together. Like, you don't 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, you know, transgender issues and LGBTQ issues.

And I think that's progress. I think it's great that people can talk about anything. We can talk about kink. We can talk about, like, I'm a big fan of people being 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, hey, we used to have sex every day. We first started dating, we had sex four times a day, okay? But then the luster wears off, you know?

Now, 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 to? 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 this. 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. Well, I'm not nice to her because every time I talk to her, all she does is 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 8 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 him. 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 each other 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? What's preventative maintenance? Talk about, are we still as connected as we were? Are we still as excited as we were?

Are we still. You know, are we still attracted to each other? Are we still enjoying each other physically, mentally, like, emotionally? We don't want to do that, though, 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 then you went home and you were like, oh, my God, I'm so sore, I'm 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. 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 won the lottery. Like, they're so. Their lives are just so much better because they just go, I had this partner because this is terrifying.

Like, life is terrifying, and it's brutal and it ends. It invariably ends. We're all going to die. Everyone we love is going to die. Like, we're playing a game.

You can't win to the utmost and to me, to 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 and we'll 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 gotta be uncomfortable once in a while. You gotta tell each other something other than what the other person wants to hear once in a while. But to me, like, 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, that seems such a worthwhile investment.

Steven Bartlett
Preventative maintenance. I want to just drill down a little bit into what that actually looks like because there'll be a lot of people right now, including myself, who heard you use this term preventative maintenance. And immediately I thought, Jesus Christ, I probably should do that a little bit more. Sure. What do you mean by preventative maintenance?

James Sexton
It can be lots of things. I think it 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, you know, and they saw beautiful things in you and that made you see and feel those things in yourself, you know, that's a amazing thing we can do for each other, you know?

And so, I mean, 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 a 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. That's it. 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 are you. 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. Now he's 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 gotta get a puppy.

This old dog, he didn't look as cute as he used to. And like, oh, my God. Have you seen how cute puppies are? Like, I would never. That's my dog, man.

I fall more in love with that dog every single day, you know? And, yeah, sure, puppies are cute, and they're great, and I'll pet them, 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, when did it become acceptable, as it is in culture, to just piss all over your partner?

Like, every guy? It's like, I'm married to the most loathsome harp you ever to castrate a man. Like this one. The old ball and chain and women. It's like, the guy is like, oh, this idiot.

Like, this just lovable idiot. 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, when you didn't know each other, all the same women sitting around in a group of women talking about how much their husbands suck, when their female friend goes, oh, my God, I'm seeing this guy I just started seeing. What did he. Oh, my God.

He sounds so great. All this is. All this is is your guy five years ago, but somehow now you're really gonna buy the delusion that if she. It all works out with him and they get married and they do their little fairytale thing and the cake and the dress and the whole thing, that in five years, she's still gonna be like, he's so great. No, it's gonna be, oh, he's again, just like the rest of you.

So we need to start as a culture, perhaps changing the way. Cause I think there is something about that where we're trying to not make people self conscious, so we just take the piss out of our partner all the time in front of people or around other people. I don't find that charming. Do you think that when we get to the lovable idiot. Oh, my God.

Steven Bartlett
Happy wife, happy life. All that stuff, which is part of. The hell, happy wife. Whoever said that should just be beaten to death. Happy wife, happy life.

James Sexton
If I hear 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. If she's happy, then I'm happy. Because.

Is that true? I think it's used by men who believe that their wife is always unhappy. So if she's not shouting at me and I can just sit here and watch the football, then all is well. Why is that something to aspire to? You know, man, I can't wait.

What for someday for my kids to just sit there while the 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 don't. 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? What? Let me ask you this.

What will your children's greatest accomplishment in life be having children? Because guess what? This is the ideology of a cancer cell. Growth for the sake of 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 or the experience of others better. Again, it's not for me to define, but I certainly. Intelligence is hard to define. But I can spot stupid a mile away.

And I have to tell you, a good relationship, 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 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 to have an uncomfortable 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 than to gain 100 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 it are way lower. Whereas maintaining a healthy weight, that's not an unrealistic thing to be able to.

Steven Bartlett
Do, is I sat here with one psychologist who I'm sure you'll know, a very famous individual called Jordan Peterson. And he said to me, he said he was shouting when he said it. He said, listen, you're gonna have to sit down for 90 minutes a week, and you're gonna have to listen to her. And she's gonna tell you everything that's wrong. And he goes, if you don't listen to her for 90 minutes a week, you'll be listening to her in divorce court.

And he was, he was almost shouting when he says it. The analogy he's making, what he's saying is what you're saying. Yeah. Is you're gonna have to. You know, I find Jordan Peterson very entertaining.

James Sexton
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 in listening to this other person in a non defensive manner. And so there's a chapter in my book called hits, and 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 going to try to say it with love. We're going to 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 going to go out on a limb here. I'm going to 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? I care enough. And when you say things to me, I'm going to hear it. I'm going to hear it as you saying, I care so much about this relationship.

I'm going to say this harder thing to say. 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 like my sister because I really like my sister. So maybe I misunderstood you.

And if I did, okay, great. Let me know that. Hit send now. Just hit send now. The reason I said hit send now is when you, you ever, like, write an email where you said something important and you, like, write it and rewrite 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. Can I send it now? Like, it's done. I hit send now. That's where I got the term hit send now.

Because 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. Okay.

Steven Bartlett
So they know. 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.

James Sexton
You don't have to respond in writing if you don't want to. But I just want to put this out there. Cause I want you to digest it. And the key to this, as I read in your book, is to do it quickly and do it honestly. 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 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.

Like, I don't feel any less attracted to you. And I know, you know, we've been busy and things like that, but, like, 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? But what if it's personal and what if it's offensive?

Steven Bartlett
What if it's. Isn't it better to know if it's personal and it's offensive? Isn't it better to know? Like. Cause I tell you, I'll come up with a thousand different reasons it might be, and only one of them might be accurate, and the other 999 might be complete garbage in my mind.

James Sexton
Like, I might be convinced that it's cause you're cheating. I might be convinced that I'm not attractive to you all of a sudden. Cause, you know, my hair got grayer 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?

And 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 now I'm not anymore, you know? Or 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? How frequent is sex the issue in divorce? As in not. I'm not talking about affairs. I'm saying sexlessness.

Yeah, that's a great question. And also, is it increasing? Yeah. So here's what I'll say. There's 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 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 I don't think you quantified. So everything I'm saying, I'm saying as a divorce lawyer who I think is empathetic and who I think for a living, puts myself in other people's minds 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 feel good about my client, bad about the other side, make the other side feel scared, and make my client feel safe. That's my job, is to 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? 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, because almost every couple, when I talked 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 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, well, we don't do that because we made a set of rules. Societies don't do that.

They've never really done that. 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, right? 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 there being some then continued interaction and a 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, we.

And again, sometimes it's not direct cause and effect. Like, oh, we started having less sex, so then we stopped being nice to each other. Sometimes we stopped being nice to each other, so we stopped having as much sex. But it's an element. It's always an element there.

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 summarize it is pay attention. Just pay attention to what you're feeling, to what your partner's feeling, and then say it. 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. When someone gets to you, how often do they go from getting to a divorce lawyer, having that conversation we want to separate to repairing and rebuilding and getting back to happiness. Yeah, it's a great question. 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 know, 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.

Steven Bartlett
Because you're more expensive? Is that. No, I'm more expensive because I'm really good in high conflict situations. I'm really tactical, I'm really strategic. I think ten moves ahead and I outpace everyone with my work ethic.

James Sexton
I wake up at 04:00 a.m. 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 in 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 at anything in my life.

Steven Bartlett
Have you ever seen someone get to you and then go back to perfect? Like. 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.

James Sexton
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. Who's more dissatisfied with the amount of sex, men or women generally. Men want more sex. Men generally want more sex. Women want more quality sex.

Men are 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 kind of gets the job done. I mean, it's the same reason why pornography is more popular with men than women. I think that men are just like, I gotta get the poison out of my system here. I gotta get on with my day, and I'm not gonna be able to think straight until I just get that over with.

And so I think that women, it's a different. I don't think women 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. Like, she's just not sleeping with me. Well, what did she expect?

Like, of course I slept with somebody else. Like, she was, like, sleeping 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 hadn't had 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's spouse, what the hell did you think was going on? You thought things were okay? Like, yeah, we haven't 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 a bad idea, but, like, I get it. I could slip your mind, like, oh, my God, I've been to the dentist in a year. But sex, you must have had a lot of affair stories. Oh, my God, please.

If you could have, like, a PhD in infidelity, I would have it. Yeah. I mean, it's because cheating is a huge component to divorces. So many divorces. But the question is always, cause or 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 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. 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 at the bottom of a bottomless pit. So we can try to reverse engineer this and say, well, he slept with his secretary because you weren't sleeping with him. 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. Well, 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. I was gonna say, you must have had people come in and admit things to you about their current affairs that you just blow your mind. Is there a particular example where you go, that was the most shocking example that I had heard of someone deceiving the marital commitment. Yeah. I mean, I've had people come in and tell me stories that I just think to myself, like, 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. The mistress, who he started a family with, thought he was divorced, and the wife thought that he was traveling for business, and he would literally have Christmas with both. He would have Thanksgiving with both, and he just found a way to logistically do it.

And I've seen things like that many times. I mean, I've seen people. It's almost become a cliche that people who sleep with their. Their sister in law or their brother in law or cousin. Oh, I haven't seen mother in law yet.

Steven Bartlett
Father in law. I have seen father in law. Yeah, I have seen father in law. Yeah, I saw that. Saw that one.

James Sexton
There's a chapter in my book about nannies, how people sleep with the nanny. That's pretty common. Why do you talk in the book about how wealthy clients like to sleep with the nanny? Yeah, I don't know what that's about. I mean, I do.

I have a theory about it, and 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. 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, or I'm going to fire you. You know? So not talking back. Yeah, don't talk back, because I'm your 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. Like, take the time to, like, don't let your spouse and your children eclipse who you are. Like, who you are is who your husband fell in love with. Your kids exist because a man and a woman found each other attractive. So 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 without shirking.

Obviously, none of us wants to shirk our responsibilities to our families and to our children, but you're important. Like, I think people are. The husband and the wife, you know, are important. Or in a 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. People often go to divorce lawyers when their marriages break down. But listen, I'm a huge fan, maybe the biggest fan you'll ever meet. Of serial killer documentaries.

Sure. And just murder documentaries, period. There's not one I haven't seen. I've seen them all. And in those documentaries, one of the first things you learn is that if the wife goes missing, like, 80% of the time, it's the husband.

Steven Bartlett
And I was just thinking about how that kind of. Some people might see it as a choice. Go to you. Yeah. I shouldn't be laughing here.

James Sexton
But 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, we fall in love so fast. Have you seen that documentary on Netflix, American Dream? Was it american? What?

Steven Bartlett
Was that documentary on Netflix where the guy has a wife and two kids, and then he meets a younger woman out and about at work, and he decided of getting a divorce. He decides to murder his wife and the two baby girls, smother them both, and dump them in a barrel at work. And he's seemingly. Obviously, he's not, but seemingly. No, he's seemingly a normal guy who, as you say, just looked like he was trapped in a situation where he met someone new, had this family, didn't know how to handle it, and made this horrific decision.

James Sexton
Yeah. 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, they would just be like, are you kidding me?

You know? And I think most of the time, it starts with just one sort of bad choice, and then that bad choice leads to a series of choices. They always say, if you watch enough serial killer things, it's not the crime, it's the coverup. You don't get caught for the crime. You get caught for the coverup.

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. Have you seen murder in your practice? Do you deal with that? Is that part of your work?

Thank God. 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 plague 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. He was your client in that case. She was my client in that case. Yeah. She was your client before that happened to her.

Yeah, she was my client before that happened to her. 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, and he, you know, he. I don't want to say he snapped because he gives it too much credit.

I think he just got it in his head that she was his enemy and the cause of everything bad that had 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 pretense 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 it himself. Did it himself?

Yeah, he did it 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 and self harm, and I've had clients who their spouse committed suicide. That's happened many times where people, I think, feel they're losing everything.

Their whole 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. So you would be working with a client, and then you get a notification, an email, a message saying that they've ended their life? Yeah. Yeah.

It's more commonly happened to me. It's only happened to me where I. I lost a client that way once. It's happened four times on the other side where I got an email saying, this person's been found, and, 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, you know, 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 job's 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 protects things, and a weapon in the hands of a villain is very harmful. So has your work ever made you cry? 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 out of frustration. I've cried. I've cried. I think I've cried more often out of beauty.

I'm much more welled up by things that are beautiful to me than things that are upsetting to me. I'm astounded by the strength of people sometimes. I'm astounded by the resilience of people. Can you think of an example on either end of the spectrum? Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I had a client, I got him his dog back. You know, there's something about animals that I think is just so, 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, 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 had 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 what, 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, 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 lake, okay, I got you this. We got you this.

We got you this. And you and the dog. And he started crying, and I started crying like a child, you know, because I. 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, the impermanence of a relationship with a dog is something that I've heard you talk about before. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett
And how we can. And sort of the impermanence, the fact that we only have dogs for a short time. I've got a dog as well, and I've had it since it was a puppy, and it now has gray hairs and it's older and it doesn't run like it used to. And little Pablo, I'm now realizing that he's in the last season of his life, and it just makes you want to play with them more and cherish those moments more and be kinder and give them another treat. Yeah.

James Sexton
And if 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. I 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 lawyer, that, like, 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 is dead. It's gone. They're a new thing every day until, you know, until all of us are ghosts, until all of us are gone. And so, to me, keeping that awareness in your mind is everything. Like.

Like you honor that dog by saying, you know what I took for granted when this was a puppy peeing on everything and running around and eating all my shoes. You know, like, I didn't realize, like, there was a limited amount of time. Like, there is 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, like, well, how is a divorce lawyer 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, was it Pablo? You're done. Yeah. 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 don't know if you've ever read thich nhat Hanh's work. There's buddhist monk. So thich nhat Hanh was a vietnamese buddhist monk.

He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in, like, the eighties. 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, as a buddhist monk, has this mindfulness exercise, and I've said it to people. I've shared it with people a couple 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 then they're like, all right.

All this guy does talk about death and divorce. We got to hang out with, like, nicer, more fun people. But he has this mindfulness exercise, and 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, right? You will have to make the very painful but very responsible and 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, 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 breakfast? Like, 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, and I found an old videotape that I didn't even know, like, existed, and it was. My dad had, like, gotten a video camera. And he'd, like, shot, you know, all these video. And I could hear my mother's voice, and, like, hearing it, I went, like, it.

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, 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 like tears and 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. Like, 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. 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, oh, my God, man, I love that pain because it means I got to feel it. Like, I know when I got my dog kaba, I only got kaba because bustard 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 went, 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 event with this dog, and I just need you to watch him for the night.

He's a puppy. 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 fell in love. Brings this stupid dog, this little stupid mange ridden worms, and he walks into 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 sit there with his little gray face now, and he'll sit there next to me, and he'll look at me. He's as crazy about me as I am 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 going to kill me. Like, you're going to kill me when I lose you. And it's going to happen sooner rather than later. I'm not going to 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 I did it. He saved you. Yeah.

Yeah. Cause 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.

That's not a reason not to. Like, 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 going to 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 Kaaba passes away, will I ever do it again? I'm like, nope, absolutely not. Absolutely not. But you know what?

I'm lying. I'm lying. Like, 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. You know, 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 something. The first person who got me to cry on a podcast, it's pretty. It's really something to be 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 jiu jitsu 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. I want to talk to you about our sponsor, LinkedIn. For all of the entrepreneurs and business owners that listen to this podcast, you'll probably want to hear this one, so stay tuned for a second. Whenever you're scaling and building a business, your business needs are completely unique.

Steven Bartlett
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Back to the episode. It's interesting because I saw in your face when we, halfway through the conversation that you were talking about how beautiful love was, and I could see the emotion in your face when you're talking about how beautiful love is. And it's contrasting because at the start of the conversation, I would have thought that you thought marriage and love was just this terrible idea. Obviously, there's a distinction between the two. It's everything.

James Sexton
No, it's everything. I think doing what I do for a living, I see that better than most people 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. But see, I also believe, too, that we need to start looking at romantic relationships like chapters in a long book. Soul mates. I have to tell you, whoever created the term soulmate, I owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude because they really helped facilitate divorce as an 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 have picked 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 soulmate 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 had? That's ridiculous. It's like people who 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's like, no, you have an infinite capacity for love. So if you have two children, you have five children, like, you love all the children that you have, you know. So chapters, you're saying, 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 twenties and your thirties and your forties and your fifties can be different. You talk to a lot of 20 something year olds and say, what car do you want when you're in your lambo? Want the lambo?

Great. You gonna put a car seat in a lambo? If you get one car, and that's your car, you're gonna drive for the rest of your life. Okay. And you've never been 50 yet, so you don't know what you're gonna want when you're 50.

Now, there's this idealized thing where everybody goes, like, well, but, you know, you'll grow together, and then what you'll want, you'll grow together and you'll change together. 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. God, so many of the couples you see, they must be confused as to whether this relationship is actually broken or we're just, like, not doing the work. I think that about a lot of my friends.

Steven Bartlett
They'll come to me and say, my relationship struggling. And the first thing you try and figure out is whether this is something that is fixable or it's. They're the wrong. And what do you do in that equation? You compare, right?

James Sexton
Yeah, you compare. And what do you compare to? Something fake. Bullshit. Yes.

You compare to something fake. You compare it to the rom.com. Yeah. 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? Cause he died before you could screw it up.

You think ten years later, she'd have been like, keep painting your french, girls. Go, no, she wouldn't have. 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 saying, I think, was Orson Welles who 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 talking about who they were and who their partner was back in that day when it was all a possibility and they were choosing each other. And so I think there's tremendous value in, you know, 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 he sort of said, like, well, dad, you know, you're not, like, the perfect father. And I said, well, first of all, like, 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 gonna do that if we're so deeply committed to lying to each other about how great our relationship is? What's the quickest someone's gone from marriage to divorce that you've seen in terms. Of how long the relationship lasted? Yeah. 48 hours.

Steven Bartlett
You're joking. No, 48 hours. But that's usually an annulment. That's. I mean, Vegas, baby.

James Sexton
Yeah, it happens sometimes. That happens sometimes where people just have, like, immediately immediate regret, you know, or they married 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. You go right now, get married. No problem. You just go. You just go to justice, the peace.

Pay dollar 40 license fee, and you're married. That's it. Go to Vegas. You can get. Guy dressed like Elvis will marry you for $50.

Steven Bartlett
You said there's two main reasons why people get divorced. Infidelity, which we've talked about, and the other one we haven't talked about, which is money. I found this very interesting because I wouldn't imagine that money issues. And it's not the money issues we think about. It's not someone going broke.

James Sexton
Yeah. It's not that. In your book, you talk about it being transparency. Yeah. So, I mean, money is power, right?

Money has a lot to do with power. And I think there's a lot. You know, there's a. It's misattributed to Oscar Wilde, 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 opportunity, security. It's about a whole bunch of things, but it's not really about money. Money's just a currency, right, 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 indelicate 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 precipitate 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 is 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 northeast region. It's not my fault, but I no longer have a job, and then I have to go around and 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 they. 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 it 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 forge something from the world.

Steven Bartlett
We said at the start of this conversation on the subject of money, sometimes you give legal advice, and sometimes you give human advice as it relates to money. Should I be telling my partner how much money I have? Because I imagine there's two different legal. There's a legal answer and a human answer. Yeah.

James Sexton
I mean, they're entitled to find out. So part of. Yeah, part of. 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 go 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 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. But a lot of people then must be trying to hide money, because I think I've heard of cases where there was one particular case of a footballer who apparently put everything in his mother's name. Did you see that? Yes.

And the problem with that is it's a great story. Makes for a great story. But there are, in most jurisdictions, protections against that because it's what's called a transfer and 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. But what if I. Before that, before there was any, you know, suspicion of divorce or any issues, I put everything in my brother's or my mom's name. You can do that.

You're allowed to do that as long as it was not done. 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.

Steven Bartlett
Must be quite surprising when you're the other partner and you assume that your partner is super rich. You go for the divorce, and you find out that they have nothing. 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 divorces a lot, because a lot of it is the appearance of wealth, but it's not actual wealth. And so they're highly leveraged.

James Sexton
And so what does that mean for. The average person that doesn't know what leverage is? Credit card debt, primarily, credit card debt is a big thing, or that cars, that you don't own the cars, you lease the cars, so they're actually owned by the bank. Even your home. If your home, 70, 80% of the equity in your home is the bank's mortgage, then you don't really have much.

You don't own your home. The bank owns your home. I think this is something people misunderstand, is that you get 50% of your partner's assets, and you get 50% of their debts, of course. Well, you get the assets net of liabilities, 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 leased automobiles of jewelry that they took a personal loan to guarantee, or that they purchased jewelry knowing that it will immediately depreciate in 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. What about the opposite of that, where someone was in a relationship and their partner thought they were broke or didn't have much money? It turns out they're sat on a fortune. Yeah. What's actually funnier is when somebody.

When someone really, through 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. He had, 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 our electric bill to have two electric bills. We'd have a hell of a time. And he won the lottery. He used to play the powerball, and he won, like, you know, 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, yeah, she 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. That's how it works.

Steven Bartlett
Did they stay together? No, of course not. She was like, they're miserable with each other. I mean, at that point, he was suddenly very motivated that maybe we should stay together. But she was like, I get.

James Sexton
Wait a minute. I get half a 25 million, and I don't have to deal with you anymore? See ya. And that was it. That was it.

That's why I was in my office. She had served him with divorce papers. What about lgbt couples? Yeah. Does everything we've said apply in equal measure?

Steven Bartlett
Do they get divorced in the same do they have the same issues with talking about sex? Do they? You know, I don't think. I think a lot of the same things are true. Meaning, impermanence, soulmates, all of those kinds of issues.

James Sexton
But I think because gay and lesbian couples were forced to the outskirts, 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 and as unfair as that is, and unjust as 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 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 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 that makes sense for us. Instead of, you know, traditional is peer pressure from dead people. So if you're someone who's like, my parents have rejected me. Sorry.

Steven Bartlett
Tradition is. Is peer pressure exerted by dead people. I mean, it's really what it is. I'm not saying traditions aren't valuable, but at their core, tradition is peer pressure from dead people. Like, your grandma did it this way, so you should do it this way.

James Sexton
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.

Steven Bartlett
We didn't make rules for non heterosexual relationships, so they're getting to make their own rules. And it turns out. And they did. And they did. Like, I have a lot of gay male friends.

James Sexton
I live in Chelsea, which is a section of New York City that for many years was 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 as being valid, like, it wasn't that long ago that will and grace, like, will couldn't kiss his boyfriend on tv. This was, like, the nineties that that was going on. So this isn't that long ago, gang.

I have suits older than that. Like, this is a 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 it. Like, 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 a gay and lesbian legal defense, which, you know, 20 years ago, it meant, like, the right to exist. Like, the right to, like, not be fired from your job because you're gay. Like, that seemed to me like 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. Years.

And I said, so, man, he psyched you, like, you know, you get 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 goes, yeah.

Like, I never had to deal with that. I never had to have the conversation. It never had to be like, you know, where's this going? You know, are we in a? He's like, if anything, I could go, like, oh, I would marry you, but, oh, the government let me.

Oh, 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? And should we have even kids? Should we have kids? Like, it used to be we were barred from having kids or adopting kids. Now we can adopt kids, it's no problem.

It's like, great, now I gotta 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 to have children, but I think it's a faustian 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 has only been the law of the land for, like, you know, ten years, something like that.

So give it some time. We'll see. 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.

Steven Bartlett
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. Yeah, of course.

James Sexton
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, ten people today who 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 gonna meet all of them, but you work in cancer, so you're gonna 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, like, in case of emergency, break glass. Like, let's just try this. Have you ever seen it work?

I've never in any of my friendships, in 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 Esther Perel, some of her work, I think, is brilliant about monogamy infidelity, 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 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.

Steven Bartlett
Do you see that a lot where the partner or the other partner that you're not dealing with has accepted, yes, the other partner cheating? Well, not cheating, but they've allowed them to just quietly go, 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, or she had a bunch of affairs over the years and we didn't make an issue of it really. And see, just the fact that you, and it's understandable.

James Sexton
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.

Steven Bartlett
Okay, so here's the question then. Have you ever seen an affair in the presence of someone being in love? I don't know that I'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.

James Sexton
I've certainly seen people that were having affairs and in every aspect of their outward life appear to be deeply committed to their marriage. Okay, so they were, okay. They were an economic provider. They were a diligent parent, attentive to the emotional state of their partner. They still had an active sexual relationship with their partner.

But it wasn't a, let's say a terribly prolific one, perhaps. So you can cheat and be in love. Sure. I mean, listen, just the term cheat. Okay, well, then a cheat meal, you can be on a healthy diet and enjoy a cheat meal.

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 ten Commandments, you know? And theoretically, if that story is true, which, again, it's not provable or disprovable, but God handed down ten rules. Like, that's. They talked to humanity and said, here's ten 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 thou shall not kill.

Like, seriously, don't kill. That's right. No, but don't sleep with other people. Got two out of 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 desire. Like, yeah, we want to freud civilization and its discontents. 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 and empires rise and fall. People rise and 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. Why work hard so I can make money?

Why? So I can get a nice car. Why? So I can attract beautiful women. Like, look at.

Look at the red pill, space, the manosphere. 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.

Steven Bartlett
So should we get married? Should we get married? I mean, from a job security place, I hope people continue to get, because if they don't, I'll be out of a job. But in seriousness, I don't think. I 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.

James Sexton
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? Why is that weird? Like, if you said, I want to have a podcast, why? That'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. Why? What do people respond when you typically ask that question? What's the most frequent response to the reason for the invention of the technology of marriage? Because I posted many years ago that I was suspicious about marriage, and I remember all the comments that I got and different people arguing different things.

Steven Bartlett
Well, it holds the. It's controversial. It's super controversial. People get very attached to it. But I remember one of them I remember was a case that it's the best environment to raise kids in when the parents are in that kind of bond.

I heard another one which means that you stay and you solve the problems instead of running away. So marriage is really good for that regard. But, you know, the reasons why people say marriage makes sense, what are those key reasons why? I think that there's religious reasons. That's a big one.

James Sexton
I get all the time in the comments. There will be, like, a billion people that go, marriage is a covenant between God. And as if. Like, I had 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, were you gonna 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. You sound like you're a big fan of love and not a big fan of marriage. 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. The symbolic 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 going to tell them 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.

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. It's okay. People fall down. You're great. Get up.

Come on, you can do it. Or who's gonna say to me, you know, yeah, that's. I know you're doing this for this reason, and I get it, but I don't. I don't think it's gonna make you feel what you think it's gonna make you feel. So maybe 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 going to be afraid of it, like, and I want to get up, and we're going to say this to a bunch of people, and then we're going to wear rings because it'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 contract.

What, are you going to get the government involved? Like, well, 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 connect. When you say to most people, they say, I'm getting married, you go, why? First of all, they look at you like you have lobsters coming out of your nose. The question never even occurred to them.

Why? Because you get 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, why 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 so you 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 give 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. It's the 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.

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. 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, you know, 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 obvious. He's wearing an outward symbol of his relationship again, like, 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 marriage. James, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for, but I might have told them who they're leaving it for.

Steven Bartlett
And the question that's been left for you is a brilliant one because it's very on topic, and once in a while, this happens.

When was the first time you experienced true love?

James Sexton
Oh, boy, you made me cry again.

When 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 slideshow of so many times. I felt loved and felt deep love. 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. There's my sons, each of my sons kissing me or hugging me.

There's kaaba and buster, pickles lady and 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 effusively loving guy. He was a Vietnam veteran. He was a bad alcoholic. He's been sober now for eight years.

I'm very proud of him. And he's in his eighties now, but 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, the crane. 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.

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. They 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. I get that.

Like, they can have the whole pizza. So to me, that's, you know, that's true love is when it's. 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. That it's just the greatest thing.

Steven Bartlett
James, thank you. Thank you for all the work you do. You've given me. So interesting. You know, I went into this conversation thinking I'd learn about divorce and relationships, but I leave this conversation with a profound appreciation for love.

James Sexton
Good. That's great in a way that I don't think I've ever had before. And I also, with that profound appreciation, I think, causes you to want to take a certain set of actions. I hope so. I think about what you said about the impermeance of love.

Steven Bartlett
You've made me want to cuddle Pablo, because I know that I don't have many years left with him, but also, there's many people in my life that maybe I do have many years with. I don't know how many years I have with them? You don't. And I have 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.

James Sexton
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, it 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, Steve.

Steven Bartlett
We released it the first time and it sold out instantly. We released conversation cards again, and they sold out instantly for a second time. We've updated the cards, put all the new questions in, and we've introduced a twist on the back of the conversation cards. Now we've got different levels of vulnerability. So level one, these are more sort of surface level questions, and by the time you get down to level three, the questions become a little bit more challenging, a little bit more vulnerable.

And that's really where connection happens. The brand new version, two updated conversation cards are out right now@theconversationcards.com.

You are always one decision away from taking your business to the next level. And a decision that's helped me to transform my business is moving over to Netflix, who I'm excited to say are a sponsor of this podcast. If you don't know already, Netsuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one platform and one source of truth. It's reduced it costs because it lives in the cloud, so you can access it from anywhere. And the cost of managing and running multiple systems because it's in one unified business management suite.

My team and I don't have to worry about tasks being manual and clunky, and it means that I can be more efficient and to focus on more important things like bringing you the best episodes and guests on this show. So I become one of the 37,000 companies that have already made the move over to Netsuite. Netsuite has extended its one of a kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks, so head to netsweek.com Bartlett for a free product tour. Back to the episode.

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

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1: Introduction

2: The Role of Prenuptial Agreements

3: The Psychological Impact of Divorce

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