The Most Important Divorce Advice You Will Ever Hear (From #1 Divorce Lawyer)

The pain isn't optional. There's going to be painful steps you have to take to make it through a divorce, but the damage is optional.

You're not protecting your children by not getting divorced. What you're choosing is what lesson they're going to learn. Divorce ends a marriage. It doesn't end a family.

Thank you. It's so good to be here again.

Divorce is so common, increasingly more common in terms of what we'll talk about later as being sort of the passive divorce where people stay married, they don't do the paperwork, but they just have checked out of the marriage. So really what I hope everyone will walk out of here with today in a very tangible way is the realization that if a marriage can be saved, there are some points where that can happen early on in the process. But if it can't be or it shouldn't be, and those are two different things, there are ways that we can manage what's happening here. A lot of people treat a divorce like the weather, like it's something that happened to them, and that's not true. It's a process, and it's a process you have a tremendous amount of control over. So hopefully people are going to walk out of this conversation with real clarity as to the levers that they have control over and the things that they should be looking at. And if you're thinking about it, I think you'll see a key distinction between is this broken or is this unattended? Because those are two different things. Is my marriage broken or is my marriage unattended? Because they're not the same and they require two different skill sets to deal with.

If someone's in a divorce, meaning they've started one or they're right in the thick of one, I think at the end of this conversation, they're going to spend less money on that divorce. They're going to hurt their children less. They're going to do less harm to themselves, and they're going to work better with the counsel that they have. If someone's been through a divorce and they're listening, I think it's going to help them frame where to put that in the Wikipedia page of their life and where does it fit in their self-narrative and in their sense of who they are and what second-order effects has it been having and what second-order effects in a positive way could it have? What are the lessons that they learned from it? What are the scars they carry? And how do we see that? How do we notice it? And how do we use it for our benefit and the benefit of the people around us? And if someone's listening who loves someone who's divorced or going through a divorce or their parents have divorced or one of their children is divorcing or one of their friends is divorcing or someone who they're in a new romantic relationship with went through an ugly divorce. I think I've now just described the entire world, right? But I think for those people it's going to be how can you be part of the structure of this person you love's life? How can you be a support to them? Because you know it's a table. There's this person and their spouse and the lawyer. And then there's this other leg, your friends, your family, your community, the people around you. And the thing about tables is if one leg is off, it doesn't matter how nice and straight the other three legs are, that table's going to fall down. So, I guess when we're thinking about divorce, what I want to say to people more than anything else in this conversation is the pain isn't optional. Like, there are going to be painful conversations to avoid divorce or there's going to be painful steps you have to take to make it through a divorce or how to place it in your life afterwards. But the damage is optional. The damage is optional and there's a lot you can do. So hopefully we'll walk out of this conversation with a feeling of a little more control.

So, I'm going to push back on the word inevitable because I think there's two ways we can look at it. When is a divorce necessary and when is a divorce likely? And those are two different things. So, you know, sometimes happily ever after means happily ever after separately. So, I'm a fan of that. I think there are times where divorce is likely and it's really worth thinking about where am I in that timeline of the likelihood of divorce. But I want to say right at the outset, there are times where divorce is necessary. I actually think there's five specific categories where divorce is necessary. One, abuse. Okay. Abuse, physical, emotional, financial, threats when it comes to the children and their care. Okay. You can't be loved if you're not safe. So situations where there's abuse, divorce is likely necessary. The second one I call the false self. And that's when there's like one person in the marriage and one costume. Like there's one person being themselves and there's one person who's just pretending to be something that they're clearly not, right? They're pretending to be a good husband, pretending to be a fidelity person, pretending to be a reliable person, and in fact they're just not. And there's some revelation that happens where you realize, wait a minute, I'm not actually married to this person. I'm not. There's one person and one costume in this marriage. Okay. The third I call the stolen reality. And that's where someone has decided they're going to author your life without your consent. Like that's when you find out that the entire 401k was liquidated for their gambling debts after it's been done. It's when you find out that they have a second family. It's when you find out that they've been in a relationship with another person for the last three years. Like that's a situation where you go, 'Okay, what I believed was my reality was a fiction and now I'm just getting caught back up to speed as to what's going on in my own marriage.' And you'd be shocked how many times that actually happens to people. And I have a ringside seat to it when it does. The fourth one, it's kind of like an unrepentant repeat. Like somebody cheats, somebody says something terrible in the middle of a fight. You know, anybody who's been married to someone for more than five months, [laughter] they have what I call the nuclear codes. They have like a sentence they could say to their partner that they know would reduce them to tears. And like the nuclear codes, you can't use them more than once and you shouldn't use them at all. Like the only way to win that game is not to play. But everyone, you've been married 30 years, there's some sentences you could say to him, he could say to you that would just hit all the soft targets. You can't love somebody and not let them see where your soft targets are. So it's like weaponized intimacy. So when I talk about the unrepentant repeat, it's someone who has just engaged in some awful behavior, but the apology has become something they're fluent in. Like it's just something that they, you know, 'I can't believe I did this. I'll never do it again.' Six months later, 'I can't believe I said that. I'll never say that again.' And it just becomes a cycle that it's not ending anytime soon. It's just going to keep happening.

And you know, the fifth type of marriage that I think needs to end is, I would call it, the shrinking marriage. And that is a marriage that forces you to just become less and less and less of who you are until there's almost no sense of who you are left anymore.

You know, the other thing I said in our first conversation was the two wonderful things to say at the end of a marriage when hopefully it ends in death is to say, 'You helped me become the most authentic version of myself and you're my favorite person.' And I think a good marriage is one that helps you become who you are. So the opposite of that, one that requires you to be something other than who you are in a real and increasingly frequent way, that's a marriage you need to have end. But see, leaving a marriage that can't be made safe isn't failure. I think it's not a failure at love. It's defending love. It's defending the love you have for yourself. It's defending the love that you have for your children. And it's defending even sometimes the love you have for this other person who may not realize that they're not the most authentic version of themselves either by virtue of this connection that isn't working anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. So the first is what I would call the pre-contemplative. You know, that's I'm less happy, but the thought of divorce hasn't entered my head yet. And I kind of haven't connected the two. Like, I don't know what's going on in me, but I'm just like not happy anymore. Like, things just feel heavier than they used to. And I haven't connected yet that, oh, it's my marriage. Like it's this fundamentally important relationship in my life in the ecosystem of my life and you haven't made that connection yet. So that's stage one. Stage two is the contemplative. That's when the word divorce starts to enter your brain where you start to go, huh? And the danger of that is it's a private trial that happens at 3:00 a.m. with no defense counsel present. Like you're just laying in bed going, you know, maybe I mean he really did do that. That was really unpleasant. And you know, I did really enjoy it when he was away that one week. And it's a trial you're having in your head with no defense counsel present for the other party. But it's real. It's where you start to make this connection between, hey, my unhappiness and the status of my marriage might be tied to each other in some way. The third stage is I think where you decide, okay, this is it. Like I think this has to happen. Like I would call that the moment of decision. And that is where like okay the deciding I'm going to do this is over now it's like timing logistics and fear that's all like when will I do it cuz you know my business has a busy season. Busy season is right after kids go back to school and right after the holidays like January 2nd gyms and divorce lawyers offices are full because everyone's going to lose 200 unwanted pounds this year in the form of their spouse or at the gym. One of the two. And so I'm going to reinvent my life. Again, as if you couldn't reinvent your life on the 15th as easy as you could on January 1st. But this is a moment of decision. Now again, also the holiday ceasefire is over. Everyone's kind of had to keep it together. Sometimes even the happiest marriage can be strained after having family over endlessly and the company holiday parties and all the stuff that you had to do and all the debt you accumulated buying your children whatever the latest gadget is and trying to get your spouse a thing that you thought they'd like and then they didn't like it as much. You thought they'd like it and even if they did like it as much, you didn't feel as good as you thought you would. So, it's one of those things that everybody's feeling not great January 2nd and that's a time where a lot of people come in and when the kids go back to school, there's a summer ceasefire that seems to happen where everybody's like, 'All right, listen. The kids are home. It's kind of a quieter pace now. The kids are back at school. Structure's coming into play. We got to get moving here.' Then there's the actually taking steps stage. Like the fourth stage is taking steps. You're actually doing the thing. You went and talked to a lawyer. You've hired a lawyer. Like the private thing becomes public. Like you're starting to let people know, yeah, the marriage is ending. The marriage is over. We're in a divorce proceeding. The fifth thing is you're in it solidly in it. Like the real deal of divorce, the meat and potatoes of it. A process that makes otherwise logical people sometimes unrecognizable. Like you're really in the thick of it. You know what Walt Whitman called the hour of lead. You know, where the heaviness of reality is on you and you're just trying to get through it. And then the sixth stage, you just got out. It's over. You know, the paperwork gets done faster than your nervous system. I think everybody has this attitude when they get divorced of, well, I've been going through it for a year and a half, so yeah, I'm over it. It's like, no, no, no. When the papers actually get signed and everything's officially done and you paid that last bill to the lawyer and now you close the door to the thing, that's when grief begins. That's when healing really begins. And that's the part where a lot of people just want to move on to the next thing and they'd rather get a dating app before they get a therapist. And that's backwards. So those are really the six stages.

Yeah. The hard part about this is it looks like nothing. It just doesn't look like anything. Like it's just that's the problem. It's just nothing. There's just a malaise kind of happening. It's not fighting. It's not anger. Anger still implies priority. Like it's flatness. Right? Like it's not a marriage that's broken. It's one that's been unattended for so long it doesn't look like a marriage anymore. It's like roommates running a daycare center or just roommates with a dog in common or it's just people that are just it's a machine running a program that doesn't make sense anymore, but this is the program that we picked. You know, and I said it in one of our other conversations that a lot of people get married because marriage is a tradition. And to some degree, tradition is the wisdom of the people who came before us and the lessons they had to teach us about what has value. And tradition is also pure pressure exerted by dead people. So if you're married because well yeah we're married like that's the thing you do. Like we're married like okay but like you're not are you paying attention to this anymore? Does this have value to you anymore? What do you do to add value to it? What value do you derive from it? Is it by default or is it by design? What is this marriage? The pre-contemplative stage for me is like nobody's asking questions of each other anymore with an actual question mark in it. The conversations are all about logistics of the day and nothing to do with each other. Like if you sat down in front of your partner and said for 10 minutes we have to talk, but it can't be about our jobs, our kids, or something logistical related to our house. Would you just stare at each other with the sound of crickets happening? Like is there anything really between you? Because when you met there was you and me and then we and then sometimes the we becomes everything and the you and the me is completely gone. So the question is when you're sitting across from this person, what's still there? And to me the most divisive sound starts to appear and that's this sound. What? Or all right. Yeah. Like it's just this sense of, you know, contempt, this sense of like your partner's an inconvenience here. What are you saying? Yeah. All right. Whatever. You know, that's to me the sound of the smoke.

You can have 10 awkward minutes or so of conversation with your partner or you can let it start to become a flood and then you're going to end up with therapists or mediators or lawyers involved. So I think there is value in looking at your marriage, sitting down with your partner and saying, 'Hey, can we have a conversation about us?' Like let's look at what we do because look, you've written books. I've written books. What's a book? Books is like people doing things and saying things, right? Okay. So, this is a story we're writing as a couple. What do we do every day? Why do we do it? Why do we do it that way? Why do we put the mugs in the cabinet where we put them? Is it just cuz the first day when we moved in, we just put them there and then we just left them there cuz it was like, oh yeah, that's where the mugs go. Or was it like, oh, why are the mugs there and the coffee maker's over there? Like, we never stopped and just went, yeah, because your brother put the mugs up there when he helped us move in five years ago. Because it's just, oh, that became where the mugs go. Like, there's so much of that in people's marriages. Like, why don't we eat dinner in this room instead of that room? Why don't we put our phones over here when we talk to each other? Why don't we go on Saturdays anymore to the farmers market together? Why did we stop having sex on the couch? Why did we stop? Like why did we stop? Again, there might be very reasonable answers. There might be really good ones, but would it take that much to stop and go, hey, let's look at our life together, our day-to-day. Because again, doesn't matter what I know, matters what I can prove. I want to see the evidence. Let's look at our day-to-day life. Let's take a week in our life. Why do we do this this way? Is it by default? Is it by design? If it's by design, great. You're a step ahead. If it's by default, should we maybe do it different? Would it feel different? Would it feel better? Would we feel better? Would it maybe put us in a better place together? And I think there's tremendous value in that. There's an invisible contract that happens in marriages. Why wouldn't you say it out loud? You're bound by it already. Why wouldn't you say it out loud and decide we're the two people to this contract? We can renegotiate at any time we want to if it's not working for either or both of us. So that's what when you take action in the pre-contemplative stage, you can actually do something. Worth the conversation you're avoiding is the cheapest today it will ever be.

The price tag of silence in a marriage can be my bill. It can be millions of dollars or it could be 10 uncomfortable minutes with your spouse or one uncomfortable afternoon. Like the price of that conversation with your spouse is the lowest today it's ever going to be. Just say to your spouse, 'Hey, are you happy? I want to do a good job of making you happy, and I feel sometimes like we're kind of passing each other.' Or, 'You know what? I heard this idiot divorce lawyer talking on Mel's show the other day, and you know what he said? He said something about how people don't talk about why they do what they do. And I thought, you know, I really want to do a good job of being married to you. Like, I really do. Like, I know you do a really good job sometimes of being married to me. And I just thought it'd be really good for us to have a conversation about that sometime.' Like, I don't know a lot of people that would go, 'I'm not doing that. I got something else to do.' Like, okay, by the way, if your partner would say that, I'd like to know that. I'd like to know. It's worth knowing. If your partner says, yeah, I can't spare 10 minutes for this marriage. I'm sorry. I got the games on. Like, okay, if that's how you feel, divorce may be necessary at that point. Yeah. So, the conversation is the cheapest now it's ever going to be. So, have it now. Have it while it's raindrops. Don't wait till the flood.

Yeah. Yeah. And that in and of itself is more evidence about where things are.

So when you're contemplating divorce there's a list in your head of the problems in the marriage. What I would say is take some steps when the list is at like three or four. Don't wait till it's at like 32. That's what a lot of people do. Like a lot of people wait until this thing is like bleeding out before they go past the contemplative stage. Contemplative stage is where you're really taking a fearless inventory of what's really going on in this marriage. Like what are the problems that we're having? What impact is it having on me? What impact is it having on this person? What impact is it having on our children? Let's be really honest with ourselves about what's going on here. And I think having that conversation with yourself is important because sometimes there's an element of grief happening that people don't look at. So things change in marriages all the time. We talked about this last time how I said one of the two biggest mistakes people make is thinking, 'Oh, nothing's ever going to change. Things are so great. We're getting married and everything will stay the same now because marriage is going to be the moat we dig around this relationship that protects it from the world and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.' And then the other mistake they make is saying, 'Oh no, this person will change. Like they drink too much now, but now that we get married, they're going to get their act together.' Or, 'Oh no, this person's really inattentive, but once we're married, they're really going to pay attention to me.' Or they have a wandering eye, but once we get married, they won't have a wandering eye anymore. So these are two mistakes that seem like opposites, but they're both legitimate mistakes. Now, the truth is I do think sometimes change happens, right? In 30 years of you and your husband being together, think of how many losses, how many victories, how many little deaths and how many huge changes, physical changes in both of you, your children, everything, your environment, where you live, economics, so many things. And by the way, some completely forces beyond your control. Pandemics, economic crisis, all kinds of things happening, right? Okay. So, if you're in the contemplative stage now, I just want you to pause for a second and think about the last 18 months. What's happened in the last 18 months that you're feeling this way that could be impacting? Because here's the thing, like when someone is grieving something, the loss of a parent, a child going off to college, loss of a pet, a change in their employment situation, sometimes it resurfaces 18 months later in a different costume. Like you just start blaming cuz who's around you all the time but your spouse. And your spouse is a whole lot easier to get annoyed at than like fate or God. Like who am I mad at? Your dog dies. Who are you mad at? God. Like it's hard to be mad at God. You don't have anyone you can yell at really, right? But your spouse not being supportive of you, not helping you through this process, just not being there for you, creating an environment where you can feel like you can cry if you need to or making you feel self-conscious or feeling like you have to carry their emotional load of their life and you have to keep their chin up because they're not going to be able to handle it. Okay, again, look at what's going on and say, okay, wait, how much is the marriage and how much is because... the answer might be, yeah, marriage, but look at that 18-month lead-up period and pay some attention to what's gone on in your life that might have impacted what's happening.

Well, I'll tell you first who you shouldn't confide in. Not social media. Run screaming from social media. Don't lean on the group chat. Do not lean on your kids at any age. I don't care if your kids are eight or 15 or 40. Don't lean on your kids when you're in that stage. Don't say to them, 'Do you think I should get divorced?' These are not the people you should be talking to. So I would say one, a therapist individually. Get a mental health professional. Hire a therapist. Again, one that genuinely challenges you. You know, anytime I meet somebody and they're like, 'Oh my god, I love being in therapy.' You're doing it wrong. If you love it 100% of the time, you're doing it wrong. I'm not saying you shouldn't every once in a while have one of those sessions where you go like, 'Yeah, I've made some progress. This is good. Like, we're doing a good job.' You know, but a lot of the time it should make you kind of uncomfortable because the only question worth asking when you go into therapy is what is it I'm afraid to feel? What is it I don't want to feel? And why am I so afraid of it? And what would happen if I felt it? And what is it I don't want to look at? And why? Why don't I want to look at it? Why is it still there? Why am I still carrying it around? Why has it become a backpack that's holding me down? So, the first thing in this situation and in the contemplative stage, get a therapist. Get a therapist who's going to get to know you and give you a very honest perspective on things. And then I think you need like one friend, like one, but it's a person with no skin in the game and who's proven that they can keep their mouth shut. You want that one friend. And then a lawyer. Go see a lawyer. You don't have to, when you go see a lawyer, you don't have to hire a lawyer. Like I can tell you how many people come in and they meet with me and they go, 'Okay, I'm ready to hire you.' And I'm like, 'Okay, I'm not retiring anytime soon.' Like you come in for information, learn about your rights and obligations potentially. Learn about how the law works because most people, by the way, like again, you buy a house, you get a HUD-1, lead paint disclosure, all these things. You get married, you don't get a pamphlet. Most legally significant thing you're ever going to do in your whole life other than die. And you don't even get a one-sheet. You got nothing. Like the first time people learn what happened legally when they got married is in my office when the whole thing's falling apart. Why not go to a divorce lawyer sooner rather than later? Attorney-client privilege attaches. No one can know that you saw me. If I see you on the street, I'll pretend I never met you. Like go talk to a lawyer and just say, 'Hey, listen. Things are kind of... I just want to know what would this look like? What might the issues be?' And then you can give me the ingredients. Tell me here's what's going on. This is what we have. These are the accounts. This is our day-to-day routine. This is who takes care of what with the kids. And I can say, 'Okay, here's the different paths you might take. Here's the different...' Like good lawyers, experienced lawyers, I want you out of my office. I do not want to make money on you. Like I want to send you to a therapist. I want to send you to a mediator. I want to send you to a process that is going to not be me because I'm a weapon. I'm a weapon. Like they're going to do it with a scalpel. I'm going to do it with a chainsaw. Don't do it with a chainsaw. There is nothing you can do with a scalpel that you should do with a chainsaw. That's insane. So, a good lawyer is going to explain to you upside, downside, all the different paths. So, again, what is all this? We have the psychological ingredients with our therapist. We have someone we can confide in in the form of that one friend who's a vault for us, who's going to be able to listen and they've proven to us that they're trustworthy. We have a lawyer who's going to tell us what's going on. And then the fourth most important person to talk to, your spouse potentially, like your spouse, and that's the scariest conversation, but it's actually sometimes the cheapest way to do things. Like sometimes people don't realize, okay, we had the pre-contemplative conversation. What's going on in the marriage? How are things? Maybe now is the time where we start to have the, 'Hey, listen. I'm really feeling like something's going to have to change.' Maybe we don't have to say the word divorce yet, but we can start saying, 'I feel like this is either the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, and we still have a chance.' So, what can we do if anything? What outcome do you want? That's counsel. The friend, the lawyer, the therapist who says when you say, 'I'm thinking about getting divorced,' and they go, 'Okay, what do you hope to get from that? What's the outcome you want?' That's counsel. 'Take him for everything he's got.' That's entertainment. That's someone just using your life as their entertainment or to work their stuff out.

That's insane. But people will come into my office, they'll do the consultation, they'll retain me, we'll file the papers, their spouse hires counsel, and then they'll come in and they'll say, 'Yeah, so we're going to sit down with the kids tomorrow night and we're going to talk to them.' And I go, 'Why?' They go, 'Well, you know, we just want to let them know.' I'm like, 'Okay, so I'm your 10-year-old. Where are you going to be living? Where is mom going to be living? Where's the dog going to live? When am I going to see you? What days will it be? Are we still going to go to Cape Cod in the summers? Are we going to do that?' Guess what? You don't know the answer to any of those questions yet. Not one. So, if your job as a parent is to, one of your jobs is to help your children feel like there's some sense of control in a terrifying world, the worst thing you can do is say to them, 'Mom and dad are splitting up. Kind of don't have more information than that for you at this point, but we'll get back to you in the next couple of months.' Like, that's a cruel thing to do. So realistically, can you start shaping your family dynamic in a way that might transition more easily to divorce? Sure. Start spending some more time with your kids separately as opposed to together. Maybe going away for the weekend with the kids for vacation separately. So it's not as foreign. You can say, 'Well, remember when we went and that was...' it'll be like that from now. Or, 'Oh, remember when dad was away for work for that week? Remember that was... well dad was. He comes back. You always see him.'

Well, I like the way you parse that, which is tell your spouse. Because people often say to me, 'How do you ask for a divorce?' And I always tell them, 'You're doing it the wrong way if you're asking for a divorce.' I would say, one, be certain because you can't unring this bell. Like, once you tell your partner, 'We're getting divorced.' You can't really unring that bell. So, don't say it on a whim, right? Don't have that conversation at night. Don't have it when anyone's been drinking. Don't have it on a holiday. Don't have it at a restaurant. People think that having it at a restaurant's a good idea. I don't know what movie somebody said, 'Oh, when you have a difficult conversation or break up with someone, do it in a restaurant because they can't make a scene.' No. What they have to do is publicly keep their act together because people are watching. It's cruel. It's cruel to do it in a restaurant. So, don't do it in a public setting like that. Again, don't do it when anyone's been drinking, using cannabis, anything like that. Any altered state of mind. Don't do it at night. I don't think that's the best time to do those kinds of things. Don't do it on the holiday. Say it in the first 10 seconds. No preamble. That's it. Like, don't have a preamble. Like, say it once and clean and then stop talking. 'I have given this a lot of thought and our marriage needs to end.' Okay, that's hard. Those are hard sentences to say, but they're clear. They're not a question. 'I think maybe we need to...' I understand you're trying to be compassionate. There's nothing compassionate about giving someone false hope. If you've decided the marriage is over, the marriage is over. So say it in the first 10 seconds. No preamble. Then stop talking because reasons invite rebuttal. So don't give a bunch of reasons because if you say, 'Well, you know, listen, we don't talk like we used to because you're never home and you're working all the time.' Now we're having a debate about the demise of our marriage. We should have had that already. We could have had that in the first two phases. If you've decided now this is over, it's over. By the way, own your share first.

You know, it's like the movie 8 Mile with Eminem. You know that scene at the end where the final rap battle and he gets up and he's like, 'Yeah, I'm a bum. I do live in a trailer with my mom.' He says all the bad things about himself and he goes, 'Here, tell these people something they don't know about me.' I love that. I do it in the courtroom all the time. Same thing in this. Own your part first. Listen, I'm not a good husband to you. I'm not doing a good job of it. I don't feel I can be. It's pretty clear to me. It's become increasingly clear to me that I'm just not who you need to be married to. And I'm not capable of making you happy in a way that you deserve to be happy. Own your piece of it first. Apologize for your piece of it first. 'I know I never meant to hurt you. I'm certain of that. But I also know that I have hurt you. And for that, I am profoundly sorry. But I'm not going to double down on that pain by continuing to hurt you.' Like clear, concise, precise, honest, even if it's a little painful. And then I think, you know, have a 48-hour plan. I know that sounds kind of cruel and tactical, but like know where you're going to stay. Maybe if this person needs space, give them some space. Know where the kids are going to be. Make sure they're out of the blast radius. Like try to give thought to the fact that you're about to have a big moment. And I think it's smart to plan about that. Like it's page one of what your children's memory of this is going to be. So I think it's really important if you have kids and even if you don't, like how things end sometimes can shape how we remember them in their totality. I don't think that's always fair but I think it's true. So I think clear, clean, precise, but don't invite reasons. Don't invite rebuttal. You can't unring this bell, but this is not a request. This is not a negotiation. I'm telling you a decision. That's it.

Yeah. There's blindness and there's willful blindness. You know, there's the blindness of oh my god, I had no idea. And then there's the blindness of I would have if I was looking and I intentionally didn't look because I didn't want to see what I knew I would see if I looked. So, I think those are different things.

Well, you know, blindness really is that I just didn't see at all any of this. And I think that rarely happens in marriages. I think willful blindness is I wasn't looking. And I wasn't looking because some part of me knew what I would see if I looked and I knew it was something I didn't want to see. I knew if I checked your messages, I would see messages I didn't want to see. I knew that if I looked at where the money was going, I wouldn't like to see where it was. I knew that if I asked, 'Are you happy? Do you really love me or not?' You know, I've shared this before. My ex-wife and I, our marriage ended because we were sitting at the kitchen table together. The boys were very little boys. They were four and six. They were upstairs asleep. And we really cared a lot about each other. And we were sitting at the kitchen table and I'd made her a cup of coffee and myself a cup of tea. And I looked at her and I said, 'Can I ask you something?' And she said, 'Yeah.' And I said, 'Are you happy?' And she just looked at me and she went, 'Do you really want to do this now?' And I said, 'I don't know. I think it's as bad a time as any.' And she said, 'Not really.' And I said, 'I'm not either.' And she said, 'Well, what the hell do we do?' And I said, 'I have no idea.' I said, 'I know I love you.' And she said, 'Yeah, I know I love you, too.' And I said, 'But I don't think this is working.' And she's like, 'I think if sheer power of will could make two people love each other, we would love each other forever. But yeah, I don't think this is working.' And it was the start of a very difficult chapter and moment. A lot of tears, moments of anger, moments of regret, but it was also the start of something that needed to end. And it started that end started with a question. Are you happy? And I think I knew I was asking that question because I knew the answer, you know, and she knew I was asking that question because she knew I knew the answer. And the answer she'd given me was, you know, yeah, I'm not happy either. And she said to me, she's like, I'm Irish. I'll stay miserable forever. But the truth is like I was going to be the one to ask it because she wasn't going to be the one to ask it. So I would say that I think blindness to it is sometimes a very convenient lie that we tell ourselves that there's nothing to look at. But anytime somebody says to me, 'Don't look in that drawer.' That's the only drawer I want to look in because that's the drawer there's something interesting in.

So staying in a marriage for the children isn't something people are actually doing a lot of the time, you know, because your children are in the marriage with you. And the question is not are their parents divorced. They're not going to remember whether you stayed or not. They're going to remember what your marriage looked like. Like they're watching everything you're doing. Like my dad sat there when I was a kid telling me, 'You definitely shouldn't smoke. It's bad for you.' while smoking a cigarette. [laughter] And you will be surprised to learn in high school I started smoking cigarettes because I could hear him. What he did spoke so loudly I didn't have to listen to what he was saying. And I think that's what you're doing. You're modeling for your children what marriage should look like. Would you want your children to have your marriage? That's a very hard question and a really important one for the pre-contemplative and contemplative stage. If my daughter's marriage looked like this, would I be happy on her wedding day? If I could look at a crystal ball and see this is what my son's marriage was going to look like...

to look like 10 years in, would I want him to get married? Or would I say, 'Hey, maybe you should rethink this.' Okay, you do that for your kids because you love them. Well, love yourself. Love yourself enough to look at it and to say, 'Is this what I want to model for my children? Is this how my husband is treating me? Is this how I want my daughter to believe a man should treat a woman? How my wife speaks to me? Is that how my son should think his wife should speak to him or how she should relate to him? Is this the love we want our children to see?' Because the truth is, what am I modeling? And can I change it in this marriage? Is it possible to change it? You're not protecting your children by not getting divorced. What you're choosing is what lesson they're going to learn.

So, can they learn the lesson that two people can end a marriage and still have affection for each other and still love their children and co-parent in a productive way? That's a valuable lesson to teach someone that things end and that sometimes when they end it's okay because things are supposed to end and make room for new things because every new beginning came from some other beginning's end. Like, isn't that a lesson worth teaching children? So high-conflict family dynamics, whether they end in people staying together and gutting it out for the kids or whether it's a conflict-filled post-divorce life where people have a contentious co-parenting relationship, yeah, it's bad for kids. It's bad for kids to have loyalty bonds and parents who hate each other and who weaponize their affection for the children against each other. Yeah, it's terrible for children. That doesn't have a lot to do with divorce. That has to do with how you approach divorce. That has to do with how you approach your co-parenting relationship.

But staying together, quote unquote, for the kids is very often, 'Yeah, I just don't want to do this. I don't want to go through the pain of this.' There's never a good time to do a really difficult thing. But the question becomes, do you want to wait until your children are teenagers, until your children are already dealing with their own challenges there, or do you want to do it earlier on in the process when, again, we don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish? Like, talk to somebody whose parents got divorced when they were three. They're like, 'Yeah, I know. My mom lived here, my dad lived there. I don't really remember my parents being married to each other.' So I think that divorce is never free for children, ever.

But the question of what relationship you're modeling for your children, I think, is the key question, more important than is divorce good or bad for kids? Well, the measuring stick of stepping outside your marriage and saying to yourself, 'Would I actually be excited if my daughter was in this marriage?'

Or would I want her out of it?

Would I be excited if my son was married to a person that treated him the way I'm being treated, or would I want him out of it? That's your answer.

Yeah. It should be where, first of all, where are the kids and where are they going to be? Are they at grandma and grandpa's? Are they someplace that they're out of the blast radius? That's ideal because no one's going to be feeling great after this conversation. And it's good that the kids are out of the way of it. Two, you don't necessarily want to go back to the same location with this person. You are the least qualified person to help someone navigate you breaking up with them, ending that relationship. You're not going to be able to do that. So, don't try. And putting yourself in physical proximity to that person is inviting more conversation. So, again, don't kick them out of the house. Stay someplace else. Maybe they don't want to be in the house because it's going to make them think about you and the situation. No problem. I'll stay in the house, take care of the dogs, you can go to a hotel. Like, create options for a person.

Make copies of some of the important financial documents or at least know where things are. Like, consider the possibility that this person might react poorly. And if they did, what would you be cut off from access to? So, do I have some money, some access to money either to get counsel or if I haven't already ideally talked to a lawyer before I drop that bomb, you know, what do I have available to me? And also get yourself, again, get yourself out of this person's path. Like, let this person calm a little bit or fester a little before they come. And just, it should be very logistical, that 48-hour period. It should be very much about how do we keep the kids and each other out of the blast range for everybody to start internalizing that this thing just happened. Look, there's punctuation marks in life. Your kid is born, you get married, you know, some big thing. This is a punctuation mark. Everything that comes after this is everything that comes after this. So, everything that happens is from now on at that point. So, you have to really see it as that and treat it with that kind of reverence.

Because you don't actually know how somebody's going to react.

And it's very rare in a marriage that both people have equal access to the financial information and equal interest in it. You know, it's very often that like, oh yeah, you know, she likes doing the investment stuff and I don't really, I'm not into that, so I just put my checks in the thing and then she does all that. Okay, you don't know where any money is then, you know. And again, I'm a fan in marriages. Like, I don't think marriages should be we have to do the exact same things. Like, if I love to cook and you don't love to cook, I'm not going to say, 'Well, I'm going to give up cooking half the time, which I love, and you should have to cook half the time, which you hate, so that we can be equal.' No, I'll cook. I love to cook. Like, that's great. But there's something else. Like, you should know how to cook something. Like, if I go away for a weekend, you shouldn't be like, 'What do I do now?' Like, there has to be some sense of okay, you might not be like really into how do we do our trades and what's our exact asset allocation? Where is our money roughly? How much of it do we have? Roughly how much is retirement and roughly how much is liquid? Like, what's the name of our financial plan? Or do you have life insurance? Who's it with? There should be some basic snapshot that you have so that if something, again, even if you're happily married and never going to get divorced, your spouse could die. So you need to have a general sense of where your assets are and what they look like.

Yeah. So look, a divorce ends a marriage. It doesn't end a family. And you're restructuring a company that you're going to co-own for the rest of your life. So the sooner that you think about that, the better. I often will tell clients, like even if they have a two-year-old, I'll say to them, 'Listen, there's going to be a wedding. It's probably like 20-plus years from now and what we do at this table is going to dictate what that wedding looks like. Like, we're going to create the architecture of that wedding.' So like, not every hill should be the hill you're willing to die on. Identify pretty early on in this process what are the goals. Write them down. Give them to someone you trust and have them read them back to you when you lose sight of that because you'll lose sight of that from time to time in this process.

I mean, I think it's a really important thing because I think having not gone through it,

I will just tell you my impression,

no.

So what you need is a very interesting and prodigious amalgam. It's kind of a