Divorce Lawyer: “Give her a prenup on the 3rd date” - James Sexton

It's Valentine's Day. I mean, listen, this is a big day. People get all hopped up, make bad choices. It's technically this is like the best holiday for my profession because the biggest influx of future clients.

There's a lot of proposals happen on Valentine's Day and the romantic in me kind of is like, 'Oh, this is lovely.' And then the, you know, the professional in me is like statistically the likelihood you're going to cross paths with me, it's pretty good.

Well, professional athletes are a very particular breed because professional athletes have had a monastic discipline, most of them, to a very specific task and so they have going for them in the context of relationship a that they are used to putting all of their focus into one thing, right? How to catch and throw a football, how to shoot a three, whatever it might be. And so that becomes a useful skill in marriage because in marriage like that one-pointedness can also be very useful and it keeps you from being distracted by all the little, you know, shiny objects that happen. So that's helpful.

It depends on the type of athlete because I will tell you like NFL players, they get their contracts early. They usually have a girlfriend who they were with when they were kind of on the come-up and then they get giant contracts very early on because they have such short careers. So you're talking about getting, you know, a couple hundred million when you're in your early 20s. You usually have just married the girl you were dating in high school, you know, and all of that money is now being acquired during the marriage. So it's all subject to, you know, division because you're one person in the eyes of the law on the day you get married. Most of these guys don't know that. Most of them aren't sophisticated enough that they would say, 'Hey, you know, we should make sure I have a prenup.' They don't always have the best people around them giving them advice when it comes to things like that. So, you know, I think professional athletes depending on the longevity like MLB players, NHL players, they have a longer career.

So, when I, you know, yeah, any of the sports that don't have that massive physical injury likelihood, like even MMA fighters are more like NFL players or something except without the amount of money behind it. Um, you really do see that this person is just when that person leaves their sport, there's a they're really kind of unmoored. They're lost, a lot of them, because they're they especially NFL players such a short career and there's only so many slots for people to become a commentator and it's a very specific kind of field. So like if somebody was like a, you know, defensive lineman like he may not be the most articulate fellow in the world because it wasn't required for his profession.

Yeah. And to have been so like focused on one thing your whole career, your whole life. I mean these are people who started playing when they're five, six, seven years old and they made it a monastic discipline. And now, you know, they made a lot of money on it. When they're playing, very easy to be married because it's very structured. You know, you preseason you're here, postseason you're here, during the season you're traveling, but they make lots of accommodations. All the leagues make lots of accommodations for family members so that people can travel with them. And they're busy. They're busy all the time. It's being an athlete is a very it's like representing professional musicians like a rock musician who's a touring musician. They got a lot of free time. They got a lot of partying around them. But athletes to perform at the level that most professional athletes have to perform, you kind of have to keep your [__] together. So, it's not as bad. What I will say is their divorce rate when they retire or get injured and have to leave and retire as a function of it. They have no idea what to do with themselves.

Because look, you said for better or for worse, you didn't say for lunch, you know. Oh, and this person went from being as busy as busy can be. Meaning they are from the minute they wake up until the minute they go to sleep, their day is accounted for. What they eat, the workouts they do, everything is tracked. Every metric, like everything is to nothing. Like the silence is deafening when these people retire and there's really no, you know, it's like when guys come back from war, the VA is like, 'Okay, we got to watch this guy. We got to make sure we have support services for him. We got to help with transitions back to employment. We got to help make sure that the person's not dealing with post-traumatic stress in any way that could be dangerous to them or people around them.' Athletes retire, there's very little support system put in place for them. And you assume, hey, guy's got, you know, $20 million, $50 million, he's going to be just fine. It's actually like giving them a loaded gun. You know, like they have too much money, too many people around them, and now they feel like the thing they devoted their entire young thriving life to is gone. And if you think that, you know, coaching a high school basketball team after you've played in the NBA is going to be satisfying, you're kidding yourself.

Well, I think the dissatisfaction that you feel in your own look, I think most discord in relationships, romantic relationships, is a function of your relationship with yourself and the fact that you are feeling restless, you are feeling unsatisfied, and it's incredibly easy to take that out on the people around you. I think we all know, you don't have to be a professional athlete to know that when you have a difficult day, your partner's right there. They're definitely doing something that could annoy you. It's probably something that when you were first dating you thought was adorable. Like they snort when they laugh or they, you know, chew with their mouth open. And when you were first dating, you were like, 'Oh my god, that's so cute. She does that.' And now you're like, 'Seriously, are you going to breathe through your nose like that all day?' Like because you're angry. You hate yourself at that moment. You hate your choices at that moment. So I think that's what's a function of it's the proximity.

I mean, it's who I see almost every day, which is I'm in New York City, so I'm finance like everybody in finance. So, hedge fund guys are a nightmare to have on the other side. They're also a nightmare to have as a client because they have no risk aversion. Like, for these guys to be at the level that they're at, they like give me a quant guy any day. Like quant guys, they'll do the math. They'll look at the risk versus reward. They'll figure out exactly how many hours you've taken to do something and how much it would be and they'll tell you like with exact numbers like okay if the offer ends up here then offer this and they give you like a whole road map that you go this is incredible like you know but you know like hedge fund guys you know guys who were traders back in the day now that's sort of shifted a bit with technology those guys have no risk aversion whatsoever and they also you know they're risk tolerant they're aggressive I mean I think if we did these guys blood work I think they'd have a lot of testosterone running through their blood because they have that intensity and like they're just not risk averse and they're ready to like go to war.

Well, it's not bad to face from a, you know, getting paid by the hour. Like they're going to go to trial. Like they want to roll the dice and go to trial. See, usually what is the thing that disabuses people of the desire to go all the way through litigation because every divorce gets resolved? It gets resolved by, you know, mediation, negotiation, or litigation. And litigation is really what my specialty is, which is courtroom law. Like, you don't most people thankfully don't need someone like me. Like, you know, most divorces are done with a scalpel. I'm a chainsaw. Like, my job is to go in and to go at your spouse, you know? So, I'm there to cross-examine this person. I'm there to like really do the courtroom piece of things. So thankfully the majority of divorces you don't need someone like me but when you do it's because you have an adversary who is really coming at you and the courtroom is an amazing place to sort of equalize that force and it's sort of an embodiment of you know the world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door, you know.

I think the biggest thing people don't understand is that everyone has a prenup. Everyone, every person who's married has a prenup. It's either one that was written by the government and can be changed by the government at any time without your notice and that once the government changes it, you can't opt out of this anymore. So, it's a contract that one person can change and you can't do anything about or it's a contract written by the two people that claim to love each other more than the other 8 billion options in the world. Because what is a prenup? A prenup is a contract. What is it a contract of? It's a contract of if this marriage ends because every marriage ends. It either ends in death or divorce. So technically like when someone gets married really what you want to say is I hope this ends in death. It's weird like that. But I really hope your marriage ends in death because every marriage ends. It ends in death or divorce. So if your marriage ends in something other than death, if you don't want to talk about divorce, great. If our marriage ends in something other than death, then what will be the rule set that governs how we divide our assets, what we owe each other? What will that be? So, every marriage has that. It's either done by the government or it's done by the two people.

Well, the government creates laws like the domestic relations law, the family court act. Like every state, every country has its own laws that govern the dissolution of a marriage. Just like they have laws that govern intestacy if someone dies without a will. Just like they have laws that govern criminal, like what is criminal conduct and what isn't. So, you know, we don't realize or think about the fact that when you marry someone, you are doing the most legally significant thing you will ever do other than dying. It is the most legally significant. It has wide range effects on your property ownership, your participation in the title system, your rights and obligations when it comes to spousal support or child support, your inheritance rights. I mean, it has massive repercussions. By the way, you don't even get a pamphlet when you get married. Nothing. Not even a brochure that says, 'By the way, here's all of the things that just happened legally when you entered into this contract with us, meaning you and this person and the state.' Because it's really the state. Like you're getting you're meeting someone and saying fundamentally you're my favorite person out of 8 billion people, you're my favorite person, you're the one I like the most, you're the one I want to be with and spend time with and hold hands with and when the bad things are happening we'll support each other and when good things are there we'll share it together and you're my favorite person and this is going so well let's get the government involved which to me the threesome with the government which if you've ever been to the DMV like I've never gone into the DMV and gone like, 'Oh yeah, yeah, these people should be in charge of everything. This is [__] great. This should be the third party and most This is the best and brightest the world has to offer in this building.' Like, so let's let them make the rule set.

I mean, every state has its own wacky proclivities. Um, and each of them have their own. And see, the things that would be weird to me are evidentiary rules. Like there's rules in New York State that if a person is a Department of Social Services or Child Protective Services worker, the concept of hearsay doesn't apply to them. So hearsay meaning hearsay is defined as a statement made by someone other than the declarant while testifying at trial and it's offered into evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted. That's the Black's Law Dictionary definition. But basically what it means is you get on the stand and say what someone else said to you for the truth of it. So like if we're trying to prove that this can is white, you know you get on the stand and say, 'Well, I was talking to Brian and he said that the can Jim was holding is white.' Okay. So I can't now confront Brian and so you're testifying to what someone else told you for the truth of the matter. There's a reason why we call it the right for confrontation. In every jurisdiction, you're allowed to confront because otherwise trials would be like, I talked to this guy who talked to this girl who once said Brian cheated on his wife and that's suddenly evidence to prove that Brian cheated on his wife. So that is a really sacred rule in the legal system. But in New York, we have this rule that says that if a child protective services worker's done an investigation, anything they say quoting people is not hearsay. So they can come in and say, 'Well, I talked to the teacher who said that she heard from someone that, you know, the children were being beaten and that's evidence as if that person got in.' And you can never cross-examine it because it's third party evidence. So every jurisdiction has some weird ass rule like that. There's plenty of states that have weird rules, like weird laws on the books. Like there's plenty of jurisdictions in the United States where consensual sodomy remains a crime. So sodomy meaning like oral sex, like sex other than penetrative penile vaginal sex is a crime. So including gay sex but also heterosexual [__] are illegal in some jurisdictions. Now hand jobs would be consensual sodomy. Yes. Because it would be a hand job. Well, first of all, hand jobs I mean hand jobs are outdated technology. It's like a Betamax. Like who even does that?

Fingering. I think you could make a solid argument but hand jobs really why do you need a third party for that? It feels like you could do that yourself. What am I being a grownup just use your mouth conservation? I didn't look I think wow this is a hot debate. I did not expect we were going to have this one but I think a great question that everybody should ask is when was the last time you just got a hand job or just got fingered like that is okay that I think tells you a lot about what's going on in your life. There is a cornucopia I got to make plans this weekend. There is a cornucopia of different things that you can There is. Yeah. And look how much visited. You know what? There's a lot of things that like I loved them when I was younger and I haven't had them in a while.

I probably same night I had a hand job. [laughter] So there I mean the Papa John's hand job combo when you got 20 bucks in your pocket. That's about as good as it gets. That's Wow. You know what? I'm going to get a Papa John's and a hand job. That is well done.

I mean, you know what? But that's a throwback jam. You know what I mean? Like you put on Nelly 'Hot in Here'. I'm into it. So you like go back to the '90s. Go back earlier than that.

So, there's no way to track that because selection effect. Well, yeah. Well, and also because prenups aren't filed anywhere. So, a prenup is a contract. It's usually you have a copy of it in your safe. Uh, your spouse has it in their safe and the two lawyers have it in their safe. And people lie all the time about having prenups, particularly celebrities, because I have seen celebrities being interviewed about their forthcoming wedding and asked explicitly, um, did you guys decide to do a prenup? And they go, no, absolutely not. And I'm like, it's in my safe. They signed it at my conference room table. That's absolute [__]. But attorney-client privilege protects it. It's only going to be filed somewhere if you divorce and matrimonial files are sealed files. So the public can't just view them. So if you've ever seen any people's divorce papers it's because somebody leaked them. So prenups there are what I will tell you is I have a theory and it's kind of unfalsifiable but the theory is because I've been a divorce lawyer for 25 years. Probably done I've done hundreds if not thousands now of prenups and usually a prenup is a very friendly transaction because it's a negotiation but it's not the kind of hardcore negotiation you have at the end of a marriage. It's much more these are two people who like each other. They have an abundance of optimism. Theoretically you're catching them in a moment where they like each other a whole lot because they're about to get married. So at the end of the transaction they still feel really good about you and it's not an expensive thing. You don't burn a lot of money doing a prenup. Like the most expensive prenup I think I've ever done was probably $10,000 to $15,000 which the retainer to start a divorce is $25,000 to $50,000. So, you know, it's not a big profit thing for lawyers. And what I will say is very few of the hundreds if not thousands of prenups I've done, I think I've only done three divorces for someone who I did a prenup for. So that would beg the question, are they going to a different lawyer for the prenup divorce? Right? They did their prenup with me, but they're going to go to someone else for the divorce. If that was something people did, I would have people coming to me getting divorces who had prenups done by someone else. Yep. That doesn't happen. So this leads me to believe my theory, which is that people who get prenups usually don't get divorced. I think and I actually think that makes sense to me because the level of like open, vulnerable, brave conversation you have to have to negotiate and discuss the terms of a prenup. If you have that and you have that ability to like say to your partner something that might upset them in the short term, but is important in the long term for both of you to feel safe, I think that that's a very useful skill and probably bodes well for the relationship. I see a lot of people that get that break up in the prenup process.

Personally, I think third date. Like, I think I'm not kidding. I think that there's plenty of ways to safely enter that discussion. Talk about celebrity that's getting married. I wonder if they have a prenup. Oh, Travis and Taylor. I wonder if they're having a prenup. Start getting the temperature of this person as to well I would never have a prenup or saying oh I'm sure they do it's a smart I mean they're both smart business people why wouldn't they have a prenup like start to get the feeling of what this person's you know or are they just dead silent on it which tells you something that silence so that's phase one. Phase two is as soon as you start talking, listen, what should you be talking about? Do you want to have kids? Do you not want to have kids? How do you feel? Are you a dog person, a cat person, or I don't like pets person? Um, where do you want to live geographically? How important is your family to you? When your family, your parents became elderly, would you want them to move in with us? These are the big life questions people should be asking when they're considering whether or not they want to marry somebody. So, I think a question like, hey, you know, how do you feel about things like a prenup? How do you feel about, you know, how the state handles when people end their marriages? I think that's a useful dialogue to have.

To me, you can't feel loved if you don't feel safe. I mean, genuinely loved if you don't feel safe. And I say that because I've represented countless victims of intimate partner abuse and domestic violence. And I say it because I've represented people who in their relationship felt like intimacy was going to get weaponized against them and in fact did get weaponized against them. And to really love someone well, I think you have to be incredibly vulnerable. I think you have to give yourself, you have to show this person your soft spots. Like there's no other way. I mean, it's part of what I think makes love so brave because it's only brave if you're scared and you do it anyway, you know? And I think that to love anything is insane because to love anything is to basically open yourself to the inevitability of losing it, whether it's a pet or whether it's another human being. Like you're basically saying, 'I'm going to let you hurt me. I'm going to lose you someday, but it's going to be worth it because I'm going to have this time with you. I'm going to have this connection with you.' But I think that part of feeling love is feeling safe. And I think a prenup is about how do we both feel safe? If I'm wealthy and you're not, if I'm the Goldman Sachs partner and you're the beautiful yoga teacher who I've fallen for, there's a tremendous polarity there. That's probably really beautiful. She's probably going to help him calm down and breathe and live life a little bit. And he's going to help her be a little more focused and help her be a little more serious. And maybe he has the resources to help her. This is the tale as old as time. Like this is, you know, the nature of male and female couplings. So in that dynamic, I don't think there's anything wrong with him saying, 'Hey, I want to feel like if we split up, you're not going to just literally come at me for every single thing you possibly can get.' And she should be able to say, 'Hey, if we split up, I want to feel like I'm not going to be so far behind in the race.' Like because you know you can't be running a marathon and at mile 10 take a half an hour break and then jump back in and ever catch up with the people ahead of you. Like you've lost and we call that in the law a diminished lifetime earning capacity. So there's, you know, I'm making choices where I can keep being a yoga teacher and not worry about the fact that okay I've got to like make money so I can buy a place someday or whatever it might be. So I'm going to trust you. So again does that mean you're entitled to half of every single thing I have? Most people, if they're being honest, would say, 'Yeah, I don't know that I'm entitled to that, but I think I'm entitled to something. Or even if I'm not entitled to it, wouldn't you want me to feel like safe and loved?' You know, and that's the time to have that conversation. Like, the worst time to learn how to fight is in a fight. Like the worst time to learn what happened legally when you got married and what your rights and obligations are in the event of a divorce is in a consultation in my office when you're getting divorced. But that's when most people learn it.

Well, I think what I'm pushing and if there's something that I can say at the end of my life I did, I hope it's that I normalized prenups. And I hope that the phrase that really entered the lexicon is every marriage has a prenup. I think that is the best entry point is to essentially say all a prenup is is a rule set. And the rule set should be clear to anyone before they enter anything, right? Like I want to understand the rules before I get on the road. I want to know what's the speed limit. What side of the road do we drive on? You know, before there's anything I do, I like to have a little bit of information about what it is I'm about to do. I think the prenup conversation is a conversation about saying, 'Hey, I trust you. You trust me. We have an abundance of goodwill towards each other. Let's right now while we're this crazy about each other, say, how can we make each other feel safe?' Because here's the thing. I have been in love and I think I have the self-awareness to say to a woman, you know, I want to protect you from people that hurt you, even if that someone's me. Like, there's a chance I'm going to hurt you. Like, there's a chance I'm going to make you sad. There's a chance I'm going to disappoint you. There's a chance this isn't going to work out. Like I wish I knew no astronomy when stars appear, but like I've seen I've lived too much life and seen too many people have their hearts broken and I've had my heart broken and I've broken someone's heart. So I know that's a possibility. But I love you enough to know that if I'm in a relationship with you, there's an assumption of risk and that is we might hurt each other. So if anyone would hurt you, I want to protect you, including me. So what do you need to feel safe in this relationship? That to me feels like the entry point.

They are, but the question of enforceability is very challenging. I mean, look, I love it. I love when people I think people should have more open conversations about the nature of the economy of marriage. Like, I get looked at funny when I refer to marriage as an economy, but sounds a bit sort of sterile and disable, but it doesn't have to. Like, an economy is really any exchange of value. It's a system that has an exchange of value within it. And so I think part of the reason why we've lost the plot a little bit in modern relationships is that we've stopped looking at them as an economy. Because to dare say, well, you bring warmth and comfort and I bring resources is like, well, I could bring warmth and comfort. Well, I could bring resources. Okay, you're right. We can all be the exact same generic cog in the capitalist machine. We can all decide we want to be girl bosses or boss bosses or whatever we want to call it, where we can all stay home and change diapers. This is something we can all do. Great. Is that what we want? Do we want a world where everyone's doing the same thing even if they don't? Like, I love to cook. And if she loves to cook, great. Maybe we'll take turns cooking. But if I love to cook and she doesn't love to cook, why should it be, well, why should I do 100% of the cooking? Because you like to [__] cook, so just cook. Like, what is that about? It shouldn't have to be that we both have to do the exact same thing or else there's an inequality between us. I'm interested in equity in a relationship. Does either person feel they're being taken advantage of? Giving way too much consistently, taking too little consistently? Because again, there's going to be times in any relationship where you're giving more or getting more. You know, you have family tragedies, you have things that happen, you have stress going on at work, you're going to be taking more in that moment.

I think so. Well, no, here's what I'll say. I think that it is I do understand the question. I think that establishing a baseline is really important. And so establishing a baseline of look, here's what we're feeling and thinking right now. Throw a dot at the dartboard. That's kind of in the region of what we're aiming for because here's the I think there are two fundamental and somewhat contradictory errors that people make when they're getting married or cohabitating for the first time. And they're going to sound like a contradiction, but I don't think they are. They think that this is going to change the person. You know, he drinks too much now, but like once we get married, he'll settle. You're in love with the potential or right and that somehow marriage will change or cohabitation will change things. You know, he's got a wandering eye now, but once we move in together, you know that she runs around and she's a bit of a party girl, but you know what? Once we get married, she'll settle down. So, thinking that marriage will change this person is a mistake. Similarly, thinking marriage will prevent this person from changing is also a mistake. That marriage is going to build walls around this thing and it's going to stay this wonderful because like think about it. There's you, there's me, and then there's we, right? And you were you and I was me and then we met each other and all of a sudden we're like man we got this thing together and then the we is like this warm wonderful lovely place. We've all been there and it actually gets so big it threatens to eat the you and the me completely which is kind of a shame because now like the thing we fell in love with the you and the me like it's been subsumed entirely by this creature of we. So I think that's an unfortunate thing we should probably be on the lookout to prevent happening. But if you think about like what brings people together is once they're together now they go okay well this is so good I have to like build something around it and maybe if I wear this ring you know that'll be and it's like okay look maybe if you like wear you know like this crystal it'll keep you protected like it's not real like when my kids were little I would take rather than explain to them at 10:00 at night that monsters don't exist I would go okay hold on and I'd go get some powder from the thing and okay this is anti-monster powder and now no monsters can enter your room. And they'd be like, 'Oh, thank God.' And they'd go to sleep. [laughter] And so, but again, like that's a very human thing. Like, okay, this is all What do you think a wedding ring is? But anti-monster powder. That's all it is. Story myth. Yeah. Yeah. That's uh so I think that we think that things if we can bolster it the right way that this thing will stay safe and it won't. It'll change. But all I'm suggesting is if you talk about baselines now you know, hey, we were having sex twice a day, six days a week, early days. That's what you do. I get it. Okay. You probably wouldn't get much done in life if that stayed the same 10 years in. And it might be exhausting. Sounds like a lot of cardio. So what you might say, hand job could be the answer. God, Papa John's and a hand job. All right, I'm on it. Happy Valentine's Day. So I think when you think about it that way and what you start to see is okay, we've moved off the baseline. Now the question is that's not necessarily bad. It's just we've noticed it. Did we notice this? Okay, good. We've noticed it. Great. Do we have to talk about is there anything to talk about? No. Okay, great. Like is it because maybe it's our hormones have shifted or maybe, you know, we're just at a different place or maybe we got a baby now and but if one of us feels like, yeah, I kind of missed that or I feel things are a little different. Great. Now, we're having a conversation because we've measured our baseline. Again, like measure what matters. I think that that's a smart thing to do.

And uh I think that's bad for my business model.

I don't think there's anything unromantic about that. I have to say when you say that I think there is something incredible.

But that's because you're showing up and you're saying, 'Hey, look, this is what my vision of the future looks like, right? I'm wondering whether or not you're going to be the dance partner to bring this to life. And if you're not, that's going to be a shame. But this is the thing that I really want. And maybe you're going to teach me some things about myself that I don't know, that I didn't know that I wanted. That's wonderful. But right, first off, and I really love what you said, which is if you're the sort of people who can talk about these things in a transparent way, the fact that you can have the conversation is maybe as valuable as the outcome of the conversation itself.' Absolutely. You being able to have this sort of transparent, open, egoless, kind of shameful, vulnerable conversation. Hey, this is what my inner world looks like. I really like quiet mornings and if I've noticed that sometimes you kind of you're like real up and about on a morning, you like to play music and sing and dance and stuff. I find that kind of difficult to deal with. And, you know, it happened on the first night that we stayed over together and I'm just is that an every night thing or like were you just so excited for me? And I don't want to say but maybe I'll be moving in that direction but look this is my set point. This is where we're starting off at.

It's not really a mystery. It's mostly because good times are a poor predictor of how you'll handle bad times. And handling bad times is a much more important contributor to the success of a marriage. But as a species, as a culture, we have not truly internalized this. It's the lows, not the highs, that make or break a relationship. A painful lesson over the last 20 years of relationships is that in the medium run, it's exciting to feel hyped about people who seem to relate strongly in specific ways. But in the long run, it's really how you handle misunderstandings, conflict, confusion, disagreements that go the distance. Yeah.

I [snorts] think it's absolutely true. I mean, I think Wittgenstein said that to know a thing, know its limits. When you push it beyond its tolerances, its nature emerges. I think that we have to see it's the same reason why I always thought those shows like The Bachelor were hilarious or Love Island or any of them. I think they're funny because, you know, yeah, we get along really well in Paradise. We get along really well when someone has put together a beautiful date for us with incredible food and a lovely time. Like, of course. Yeah. How are we going to feel when we're home and one of us has a head cold and is in a bad mood? Like how is that going to look? Because look, you're going to see your partner without makeup and without Spanx most of the time. And when we're dating, we have Spanx on our personality. Like everything is sort of a compressed, very, you know, stylized version of things. And so I think there's tremendous value in seeing how does the organism handle stress. What do when we're both stressed, what does that look like? But I also think that can be very romantic because again for me and I talked about this on Andrew's show, you know, I don't think our greatest fear is that we won't find someone to love. I think our greatest fear is that we are not worthy of love. That we believe that we're not worthy of love. I think that I know for me I have in my life felt if you say you love me like you say you're my friend but if you saw the ugliness in me if you could hear the thoughts in my head the weakness in me all the parts of myself the [__] I need to work on because I'm presenting to the world the best version of myself as often as I can. And I really believe, like I'm not religious, but if there was a devil, I believe that the devil's principal function would be to convince us that we are so bestial that God couldn't possibly love us. Because I think our realist fear is that we're not worthy of love because we're awful. Because we're in here and we hear all the things we think and feel and all the weakness in us. And there is something about the thought of someone seeing all of that and saying, 'Oh, no. I love you.' Like, 'I love all of that.' Well, maybe I even love you more because of it. Right? I love you all the more because you're so human. You're so real. And by the way, I have all of this in me, too. Like, and so maybe we'll see it. We'll see each other's blind spots because I can't learn everything I need to know about myself from myself. So like I need people to see my blind spots. So there's something to me about in this increasingly performative social media culture that we're living in, we're encouraged all the time to present the best version of ourselves and sort of put our greatest hits out there while everyone else, you know, is living their gag reel. And then when we're loved, like, do you feel that love really? Do you feel it? Or do you just go, 'Oh yeah, they bought it. They bought the character that I'm selling to them.' So, there's something about conversations where you have to say, 'Look, this is what I'm scared of. Like, this is what scares the [__] out of me. Like, this is the part of me I don't understand. This is I react this way when this happens. I don't know why this turns me on. Am I gross for that?' Like, why does that turn me on? Like, I don't, you know, like all the And to be able to say that and have the other person go, 'Oh, I get that.' Like, I got my stuff like that, too. Maybe not the exact same stuff, but I got my stuff like that, too. And to have that person see all of that and love you anyway. To me, that's love worth having. That's love worth signing on for.

I think good disagreement I argue for a living. So, I would say that good disagreement is substantive. It gets to the merit of the position. It gets to the substance of what we're talking about. You know, it's not about the pasta. It's not about the dirty dish in the sink. It's about what the dirty dish in the sink represents, which is you're not really paying attention to my feelings. You know that I like things to be orderly and you weren't willing to take a few minutes to do this thing. So, I would like to get to the substance of the argument. I think the most important...

thing in romantic relationships and marriages is, do not ever weaponize intimacy. Like intimacy, not meaning sexual intimacy. Intimacy by definition is the ability to be completely yourself with another person. So it's what we were just talking about, the sense of like showing this person all your soft targets, you know, and if you then use those to hurt the other person when they've upset you or as leverage when you want them to do something, that's a villainous thing to do because a, you can't take that back, and b, that person has shown you that part of themselves. Like every single couple, any person who's listening to this who's in a relationship, there is a sentence that you know you could say to your partner that would have them shriveled up in a ball crying.

That you know that a person's terrified of the fact that they're becoming like their mother or their father, or that they're... I mean, you know, the film A Marriage Story, there's actually a great scene. It was Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. And it should have been called A Divorce Story, but there's an amazing Academy Award level scene where they're having this awful fight and they just do that. They just unload in like weaponized intimacy. He's like, 'You're exactly like your mother. You claim you hate her, but you bring everyone down in all the same ways.' And they just run and they're saying things that you can never unsay, you know? But they're the things that like you only would know if this person opened themselves to you the way that you have to to have a deep connection to someone, or if you just had a ringside seat to their most vulnerable sad moments. And so that kind of thing, I don't think you can ever really recover.

Don't engage in weaponized intimacy. The other thing I would say is also, again, the worst time to learn how to fight is when you're in a fight. So just, I think when you're in a relationship or starting a relationship or getting serious enough in a relationship that now you're saying your boyfriend, girlfriend, or whoever it might be, I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, 'Look, we're definitely going to get in an argument someday. Like, we're going to get in a fight someday. It's probably going to be my fault. I'm going to say something dumb. I say dumb stuff all the time, so I apologize in advance, but I'm going to say something. It's going to happen. We're going to get in an argument.'

Like, should I give you a minute so you can calm down? And then, right, should I never say calm down? Should I change the subject and be silly and pick you up and hug you and spin you around? Should we have a code word that it's like, 'Hey, let's take a break because this is going wrong and then we'll meet back in 10 minutes'? Or are you the like, 'We've got to get this worked out tonight because I can't go to bed angry and we have to figure this out because it's going to ruminate and get really bad'? Like, whatever it is, let's just talk about what that should look like and let's have some way to step back from it.

You want as quickly as possible from that to say, 'Honey, can we just have a quick...'

Very powerful. But the danger, I would say in response to that though, there's a chapter in my book called Hit Send Now and it describes a way of approaching this kind of a thing. But it would not do it that quickly because here's the evolutionary biology basis of that, I think is a strong one. But I would also push back and say that even if you in advance agree when that happens, we're going to have a code word or something we can say that means we got to go out and talk about this for a minute so it doesn't turn into long-term memory.

The act of verbal engagement on that is going to... because I argue for a living. I like to think a lot about how will people react to what is being said and I think you're setting it up for a defensive reaction in your partner. Now look, if in advance you sufficiently have enough goodwill between the two of you that you agree anything I say, we're going to really try not to hear it defensively because we have this, right? But that's an aspirational goal and it's hard when in the moment someone's just said, 'I didn't even mean it. What do you mean? I was just making a joke.' And we've got friends in the other room. Like we can't spend a minute, you know, too long doing this. Hit send now. What I talk about is send an email. I know that sounds impersonal, but the thing about sending an email is I can be thoughtful in the way that I put it together and there will be an understanding between us that if the subject heading is Hit Send Now, that this is one of those emails that I just want to say this, you don't have to respond immediately. I want you to just... So again, in your partner reading it, they don't have to immediately engage like they would in a verbal discussion. So this is a feeling of, okay, I want you to digest this. I'm going to have written it, which means I'm going to have been careful about how I wrote it and rewrote it and paid attention to what I was saying. And now you're going to hear it and read it and digest it. And because I think the value of it is it prevents these little things from turning into much, much larger things.

Yeah, the principle is the same. The speed is the problem because I find that what happens is people get so wildly defensive that, you know, and I see this all the time with, well, you know, we're not having sex as much as we used to. Okay, what is that? Well, you're not home as much. Well, I'm not home because I'm working. Well, I'm working because you spend so damn much money. Well, I spend so much money because you're never around. And now it's like the truth's at the bottom of a bottomless pit and we're all just getting no closer.

Well, and there are ways to... Look, I think a lot as a trial lawyer about how do I tell... It's full contact storytelling what I do for a living. So, when I think about what's the way to say this, think of the difference if your partner says, 'Why aren't we having sex as much as we used to?' Or, 'Man, it sucks we're not having sex as much as we used to.' And your partner saying, 'God, you know what I was thinking about yesterday? I drove past that restaurant. Remember we went out to that restaurant when we were first dating and then we went back to my apartment and we literally stayed in bed for a day and a half. That was so much. What a... God, I think about that sometimes even now. You know that I love when we're that physically close.' Okay. Now I have primed the pump. Like now I have reminded you of when we were deeply physically connected. I have brought you back to that place. I've praised you for, 'God, remember how good that was. Remember how that... boy, I still love that about you. I love that feeling of when we're physically connected.' Now, if I say, 'You know, I know I've been running around a lot lately and busy at work, but we got to really make some time to like just spend some time rolling around in bed together because I still think you're just the hottest thing in the world.' Okay, that is going to be perceived completely differently than 'Why aren't we having sex like we used to? You know, you haven't given me a... you haven't given me a handjob in ages.'

Yeah, for Papa John's for a handjob. [laughter] This is... I'm going to get sued by Papa John's for this one.

How'd you meet? Tell me how you met. Tell me what the first date was like.

And if you do the, 'So, how'd you guys meet?' Within five minutes, there's a softness that hits both of them because it just puts them back to who they were, who they were to each other when they were interested and interesting.

I mean, my answer to almost everything is just talking. I just think the more that you can talk about... I think when you can talk about how you're talking about things, I think that when you can like almost have a meta commentary happening of like, 'This is so weird, isn't it? It's scary. Oh, isn't this interesting what we're doing right now?' Like really being able to talk about it almost in a detached fashion, a narrative fashion. I think there's a lot of value in that. I think there's a lot of value in talking about like formative experiences that this person has had. And I think there are a lot of fun games that can be played around that. You know, there was an article some years ago, I forget who authored it, but it was about like 30 questions that can make two people fall in love.

There you go. So I would say that those kinds of entry points, there's a lot. There's a card game now called Tales, which is very interesting. Steve from Diary of CEO has a great, you know, the Diary of CEO questions. Like, there's a lot of really great like supplemental tools. That is a fun game. Like, that game of like you're a mystery to me, I'm a mystery to you in some ways. We've just started this relationship. We know we like the look of each other. We know we like some things about each other. There's an energy and electricity between us. So, let's start playing in the world of ideas a little bit. Let's start playing in progressively showing because look, what is dating but progressively showing more of yourself to another person. And what have we lost in sort of hookup culture? We've lost that progressive revelation, that teasing, that sort of playing of like, I'm going to show you a little and then I'll show you a little more and I'm going to give you a little and then I'll give you a little more. And there's this feeling, okay, and I'm going to earn a little and then I'm going to earn a little more and I'll be rewarded for my efforts by a little bit of sweetness from you. And that's a fun dance that people have been doing for a really long time and we gave it up in exchange for... I'm not sure what we got out of that. Roy Baumeister says, 'Courtship is the period during which a woman works out if she can do better.'

Which I think is...

But it also sparks something in men that I think we like, something that...

That drive to win, man.

I don't know. I feel like...

Even listen, I've trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu for 20 years. You think I like having sweaty balls in my face? No, but it's... I get tapped 15 times, but I tap a guy once and it's enough for me to go, 'All right, I'm getting somewhere.'

Oh my god. Listen, [groaning] I've built a law firm and represented some of the wealthiest people in the world. When I got my brown belt, it was the most exciting... I was the proudest accomplishment of my life. The amount of hours and injuries that it took to get there, 15 years worth of training to get there. So, to me, there's something about that fight, that prize, that hunt. So, you know, that old school idea. And by the way, women loved when there was this courtship piece and there was all of that. And again, men loved being held a little bit to a standard and having a sense of... And by the way, it solves this body count issue that everyone's so caught up in because it turns into something that, no, no, there has to be some gatekeeping and there has to be some sense of earning something. So I think there's tremendous value in that. And I think that if we were early in relationships to start really like progressively showing the other more both physically and emotionally, right? And having maybe even that path coming up at the same time, like as I'm seeing more of you, like if I've seen you with your panties off and I don't know how many siblings you have, we're doing things out of order as far as I'm concerned.

You know, I could not possibly agree with anything more. That approach would probably be very bad for my business model. And the truth is, I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a researcher. I have facilitated the demise of thousands of unhappy marriages. People lie to their therapists. People lie on surveys. People lie in studies. They don't lie to their divorce lawyer. They don't because there's no reason to. You have attorney-client privilege attached and I have to really know everything to do with their...

Well, they lie to themselves and then they lie to me because they're lying to themselves. But because I see so much data on this person, I see their credit card receipts, their text messages. Like I really go in there on people. Like you have to if someone's going through custody litigation or an ugly contested divorce, you get to see everything really. And so, having now listened to thousands of people, men and women, the abuser and the abused, the substance use disorder and the person married to the person with substance use disorder, I've argued every side of every issue in a divorce. I've spent time with, you know, perpetrators of domestic violence and victims of domestic violence. I've spent time with every possible permutation. And I will tell you if only there were good and bad people in the world, like you know, if only we could just find the evil people and segregate...

Right, through the souls, through the heart of every man is the line of good and evil. And so I genuinely believe that if we were to say, look, there have to now be standards. There has to be a code. Like I was raised with the idea that men have to have a code, like that a man is supposed to have a code. And all of the men I aspired to be like, which were mostly from literature, they were always samurai. They were always Natty Bumppo in Last of the Mohicans. You know, it was all this idea of like the man who was the protector, the provider. He had a code. He had the things he would do and the things he would not do and nothing was going to pull him from that. And so I genuinely believe that there is a hunger right now in men for that. This sense of what am I supposed to do? Tell me the mission, like tell me what is expected of me and what is not. And that women were the gatekeepers when it came to sex, they were gatekeepers. You had to earn this. You had to earn it not by, you know, 'give me the money and then I'll give it to you.' It was really more about the characteristics that made you someone that had resources, that is that you were disciplined, focused, that you were someone who was serious about things. Listen, I'm a 53-year-old man and if you read the comments on my videos, like it's shocking to me how many women are like gaga over me. And trust me, it's not looks, it's the fact that I look like a serious person. Like I wear a suit. Like, you know how many 53-year-old men are running around in hoodies? Like I... But, you know, listen, it's fine, but the truth is there is something about old school masculinity that is very appealing to women because this suit is a statement. I'm put together.

I take this seriously. That's what this says. I take this seriously. It's why you would wear this to a job interview or a funeral and you wouldn't wear it to the beach, right? You wear it because you're saying, 'I'm here. I'm wearing this because I want you to know I take what I'm doing seriously.' And if you put this on when you're getting together with a woman, you're saying, 'I take this seriously. I take the world seriously. I take my place in it seriously.' So I think the combination of, again, because I don't think it's a mystery or controversial to say that every man wants a good girl who's only bad for him and every woman wants a bad boy who's only good for her. Right? So the combination of a suit and sleeves of tattoos, it's not shocking that women would find that attractive. It's Clark Kent, Superman rolled into the one thing. So, I don't know why we're not saying to young men again, like this is what we should be focusing on is the mission, becoming the best version of yourself, cleaning yourself up, putting yourself together, and saying to women, women, listen, you've always been the gatekeepers of sex. You always have been. So, you have to start taking that role seriously. And you have to start holding men to some kind of a standard. And I'm sure that I'll get pilloried by people in the red pill space in the manosphere who are going to say, 'Oh, well, men have to accommodate themselves to women.' Okay. Yes. Yes. That's how it works when it comes to sexual gatekeeping. That's how it works. Unless you want to be the kind of person that, you know, sneaks in the back door and steals things and puts on a false face of what it is that you really want and you want to be disingenuous. You're right. You can make a lot of money stealing. You can make a lot of money in a grift. Should you be proud of that? I don't think so.

You got Steve in so much trouble. [laughter]

I'm beyond the pale. We've got a...

We've got a Mexican Hitler, Hitler saluting Nazi as the current leader of the men's movement, but me and Steven are beyond the pale.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Unpopular. So, it just goes to show how much of a third rail this stuff is. It's weird because a lot of these topics to me almost, not what we're talking about today, but a lot of the other stuff, birth rate decline and things. It's like me being a comedian doing a trans joke. It feels so hacky. And I've been talking about this for six years. Is it not accepted that these are some of the contributing factors and it's a big problem and nobody is laying it at the feet and blaming anyone, but here are some of the... You say that in a certain group and people almost roll their eyes at how tried it is, like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, get on to the...' Like, what's the most interesting thing that's coming out?

Scott Galloway rang me a couple of weeks ago. He rings me on the Saturday morning and...

He's always talking about...

It's oops, I didn't know I was sexy.

He's also just had some...

cosmetic surgery recently. So he rings me and he goes... the voice is the exact same as that of someone who's grieving, who someone's just died, and he's like, 'Hey buddy, how's it going?' [laughter] I was like, 'Well, it was fine until you called.' And he's like, 'Oh, blah, blah, blah, something.' Anyway, um...

The gentleman sphere is Richard Reeves, it's Arthur Brooks, it's yourself, it's me, it's Scott Galloway, it's Alex Hormozi, it's Chris Bumstead, it's Rob Henderson, it's Matt Murphy, it's that.