I've always said the most dangerous phrase for me, the biggest predictor of a divorce, is when I hear someone respond to their spouse with the following: 'What? Like what?' Just that contemptuous 'What? What are you on about?' And it's fascinating because we all, you know, like you said, you sit down sometimes with couples or you go out with couples and you can just feel on people, you know, when there's this sense of disrespect or disconnection.
Welcome to Propy on Relationships, a special two-part series about love, marriage, and what it takes to make a partnership last. We're joined by divorce attorney and author James Stanton, who's become a bit of a, like almost like a, I don't know, a relationship guru, having seen kind of the other side of what a successful relationship looks like. Together, we're going to try to answer questions about what predicts divorce, how couples maintain both fairness and desire, and what we've learned from navigating complicated relationships. James, it's great to see you.
Yeah, good to see you too, Scott. Always fun.
Yeah, the algorithm is clearly you're... and I feel as if I know you better than I do because I'm getting so much insight into you. I really enjoy your social media presence and your ability to break stuff down. I really appreciate it, man. You know, I think we've run a lot of parallel paths in terms of not only our NYU affiliations, but also our status as divorced men who then had children and kind of been through the whole experience of it, and talk a lot about the intersection between relationships and work and life and balance and how to try to get the whole thing right. So, and also you really saw me through the entire pandemic. I listened to Pivot just nonstop over and over. Between Pivot and the Peloton bike, it was like the only thing that kind of kept me sane. So I feel like I'm in your servitude forever now. All right, let's roll. So neither of us have seen these questions. Question number one comes from Jacob Stab on Instagram: Which is the most important predictor of a divorce and the one for keeping a relationship? Go for it, James.
You know, I think the biggest predictor of divorce is something subtle, and that is just disconnection between two people. I think everybody looks for like the big relationship killers, you know, like people who are in open relationships or people who, you know, sometimes that's the blood in the water, you know, of the relationship being in distress. But I think it's actually much more subtle than that. I think people get divorced and their relationships fall apart the same way that I think Thomas Wolfe said, people go bankrupt very slowly and then all at once. So I think it's a lot of little small pieces of disconnection that eventually just catastrophically lead to the failure.
You have a great story about one of your clients and it involved granola. Do you know what I'm talking about? Can you tell that story?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I talk about in the book too, where I had a client, very put together, beautiful young woman in her 30s, and she was getting divorced, two young kids. He was a successful guy in finance. And you know, you spend a lot of time with people when you go a lot of miles when you're their divorce lawyer and you get to know them really well in a very candid way. And I was just sitting outside of the courthouse with her and we were chatting. I was drinking espresso on a lunch break and I just said something along the lines of like, 'When did you realize that the relationship was over?' And she told me a story about how there was granola, this particular type of granola that she would put every morning in her yogurt and they only sold it at this one Whole Foods. And she said he used to just always buy the granola for her. She never had to ask for it. He didn't ask for like, you know, what Chris Williamson calls good boy points. You know, and we do something for our significant other and we go, 'Oh babe, did you see what I did?' He would just do it. And she said, 'It made her always feel so loved.' And at some point, she said, 'You know, it just the granola just ran out.' And she kept waiting for him to refill it, and he never did. And she realized, you know, yeah, this thing's going down. And I said to her, 'Was there anything like that on your end?' And without missing a beat, she said, 'Yeah, blowjobs.' And I spit my espresso across the courthouse.
And she said, 'Yeah, when you're first dating, I was like, you know, I would give them to him pretty often. Sometimes in the morning it set them off on the right tone for the day.' And she said, 'Then at some point, you know, maybe when the kids came or life got in the way.' She said, 'I just got to the point I was like, oh well, you know, I'll wait till tonight and we'll have sex and we'll both enjoy it.' And she's like, 'But I don't really know why I stopped.' She's like, 'It wasn't like something happened.' And really it stuck in my mind because there was this sense of like there's this atrophy that starts to happen and it starts to create this weird spiral where it's like, well, I don't owe you that. Well, I don't owe you this. And you know what's interesting to me about that as a divorce lawyer is I see the effect of it. But then in this work I do in the relationship space, I find myself thinking, well, you could kind of reverse that spiral, which is I don't have to send a text in the middle of the day saying, 'Hey babe, I was thinking of you.' Or leave a note in the morning that says like, 'Hey, I had a lot of fun watching a movie on the couch with you last night. I married the prettiest girl in the world, but it's nice to do that. It doesn't cost anything. It takes 30 seconds.' And maybe it reversed because what, you know, I said to her, 'What came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it the granola or what ran out first?' And she really couldn't tell me. And so I think there's a lesson there.
Yeah. The research I've seen on an empirical level from John Gottman's Love Lab work at the University of Washington, UDub, is that contempt is a very strong indicator of divorce. And like when you're out with a couple and one is rolling their eyes or just finds everything their partner's saying to be... they can hide their disgust.
Yeah. I've always said the most dangerous phrase for me, the biggest predictor of a divorce is when I hear someone respond to their spouse with the following: 'What? Like what?' Just that contemptuous 'What? What are you on about?' And it's fascinating because we all, you know, like you said, you sit down sometimes with couples or you go out with couples and you can just feel on people, you know, when there's this sense of like disrespect or disconnection. But what's interesting is you can also reverse it. You know, when you're out to dinner with that couple, all you have to do is say to one of them, 'So, tell me about when you guys met. How'd you guys meet?' And you can actually see like a softening happen when they're telling that story because they go back in time to that place where there was still this abundance of optimism and connection. So a lot of my work is really about, you know, as a divorce lawyer for 25 years in the trenches on these things, like I see how it catastrophically fails. And if you want to figure out how to keep something together, like if you want to figure out how to keep your car together, you don't talk to a new car dealer, you talk to a mechanic who's seen them break down, you know? So that's how I try to view this is, look, whether you like it or not, this is just what's sitting across from me in a courtroom and in an office.
The other factor, and it's much more uncomfortable to talk about because it's not aspirational and it just has sexist overtones, but I think there's data to back this up. What I have found is a pretty strong predictor of divorce is economics, specifically when the man in the relationship starts making, stops making money or is making less money than the woman. Absolutely. It's uncomfortable to talk about, but I personally, that's where I have found, and also divorce, the likelihood of divorce doubles when the woman starts making more money than the man. And it's not something we like to talk about because it positions women in an uncomfortable light. I would also argue though what we're missing in that data set is that I think men, when they don't, when they lose their economic vitality, they become insecure and quite frankly unproductive in the relationship. So I would even say counterproductive in the relationship, they become antagonistic to the relationship and resentful. And in other words, it's not just a woman saying, 'You're no longer the baller you were, I'm out.' It's just the economic strain, the lack of self-esteem on the man's part creates real agitation. Your thoughts, James?
Yeah, 100%. I mean, I see it all the time. I see it from both sides because I represent husbands, I represent wives. What it more often is is the cascading effect of a man loses his job, he feels emasculated. He feels like, you know, his role as a provider again, even if both of them are working people, both of them are successful, even if she makes more money than him, when there is that loss or that demotion or some disgrace associated with work, there's this sense of self that gets taken away from a man, you know, and that causes him to have a kind of self-hate that then radiates at everyone around him. Substance use issues start to kick up, he starts to drink a little bit more, he starts to smoke a little more, whatever it might be. And then there's this effect. And again, it's super easy in this world we've created of boys versus girls on the algorithm to say, 'Oh, well, this is a man being insecure over his woman, or this is a woman cashing her chips out at the casino because now he's not making money anymore.' But really, what it is is what did the job loss, what were those second-order effects of that on his internal life and the way that he shows up in the relationship and how he feels about himself. I see it all the time. And I've represented, like I said, both sides of that equation. And it's a really heartbreaking thing to see because, you know, there are so many politicians on the right in particular that talk so much about the sanctity of marriage and wanting to preserve and protect marriage. And yet when we look at the statistics that talk about marriage does better when people have, you know, economic stability and can meet their basic needs, they're not in distress. People who have a bachelor's degree or higher have lower divorce rates. When you start to point these things out and say, 'Hey, maybe creating conditions where there's catastrophic job loss and putting massive strain on marriages might be more worth your attention than griping about no-fault divorce and how it's ruining the world.' So there are real solutions to these problems, but they're part of a serious discourse as opposed to like the boy versus girl thing that works so well.
I've also thought that in a very, I don't know, coarse... I think all relationships are a certain form of transaction. It's just a question of the currency and the cadence. Unless you're family, I would argue there's a really healthy level of what I'll call irrational loyalty within families. And I actually think that's important for the survival of the species. I describe family as people you otherwise wouldn't choose to hang out with.
But what I saw my dad... because we both survived having teenage sons. That's probably why.
