I hope your marriage ends in death, because someday this will end either in death or divorce. But marriages fail 70% of the time. And so just work on these three things.
You are the most famous divorce attorney in the world. What is the problem to which marriage is a solution?
Me? You're married. What do you want me to tell you?
Listen, here's what I'll tell you. People would answer, 'I'm lonely.' Guess what? There's a special loneliness when you're unhappily married, because you've got sitting next to you your person.
And you feel so alone. I just think there's something really beautiful about our desire to love and to be loved. Like I remember saying once, 'Do you know how much I love you? Do you know I love you because I want you to feel my love.'
How do we determine if we should be divorced?
Or just simply work on the satisfaction.
The first step is always... This is wild. So this is why like you should see a divorce lawyer before you get married. You just did the most legally significant thing you will ever do other than dying, and you think about what cake will we have. Okay.
What are three things that you wish people knew before they got married?
Oh, hey there. Before we begin, I just want to say if you enjoy this conversation, be sure to like it. Be sure to comment about what you appreciated. And be sure to subscribe. It helps us to bring more guests that you want to see. Thank you.
James Sexton, we need to talk.
All right. So, first I have to gas you up.
All right. I'm going to gas you up.
So, we started this podcast a little over a year ago.
I created a list of people that I most wanted to interview. You were on that list.
You were on that list. So, I'm going to say in my opinion, you are the most famous divorce attorney in the world.
I probably am at this point.
Which is a little bit like saying like you are the best looking guy in the leper colony. Like yes, I am the most recognizable and well-known divorce lawyer.
Yeah, I am proud of that. Yeah, I love what I do. I love my job. I love my work. I still spend four or five days a week in court. I've worked very hard to hone my craft as a trial lawyer. I represent, you know, amazing people who trust me with the most important things in their lives, their children, their wealth. And I love being in court. I love the art of argument. I love advocacy. I love being in a courtroom. I love cross-examination. I love everything about being a trial lawyer. And I also love the fact that through sort of, I don't want to say no fault of my own, but through sort of a fortuitous tripping into this quasi celebrity, people know me as a divorce lawyer now.
Yes, they do. Now, I will say this. I hope I never have to use you.
Good. Yes. I hope you don't either. Well, I'll say it even worse. I hope your marriage ends in death.
Every marriage ends. It ends in death or divorce. And when you say to someone, you know, 'Congratulations on your marriage,' what you're saying is, 'Congratulations. I hope this ends in death,' because it's always going to end. And I actually think there's a reason to keep that in your line of sight. Because if you don't keep that in your line of sight, you make the mistake of thinking that love is permanently gifted rather than loaned. And really every day you get up and make a decision to continue to loan your love, yourself, your being, your connection to this other person. But I think we just very quickly go, 'Okay, I've got that covered. I've got this now.'
And I'm just going to focus on other things.
And we just let that gradually fall apart.
So, let me ask you this. I've had a theory, and you tell me if this is nonsense or this is a decent theory, okay? That marriage should be much harder to get into.
But much easier to get out of.
Yeah. So, we share this perspective. It is wildly unpopular. Everybody thinks that barriers to exit is the answer. Get rid of no-fault divorce. Make it harder for people to get out of marriage. And I have to tell you, like, that makes zero sense to me. Like, you buy a house, okay? You have a lead paint disclosure, a HUD-1 that explains the loan, all kinds of documentation that explains the transaction you're engaging in. You get married, you don't even get a pamphlet. You get nothing. You just did the most legally significant thing you will ever do other than dying. You changed your property ownership rights, your rights and obligations related to supporting another person, your estate rights of who inherits what. You've changed so many of your rights and no one even knows they did it. They think about what cake will we have.
They don't think about what I just did from a legal status standpoint. And that's amazing. The first time most people get an education in what happened legally the day they got married is in my office sitting across from me. Which, by the way, the worst time to learn how to fight is when you're in a fight.
Yes. And so it's a very bizarre thing that we, you know, we don't have more barriers to entry.
Yes. And I think there are, if we, you know, if we stopped and said, 'Okay, wait, what would this look like if it made sense?' If we took the problem of over 50% of marriages ending in divorce, right? Which, I mean, think about that number. Like that's the number that catastrophically failed, that ended in divorce. What percentage stayed together for the kids but are unhappy? What percentage stayed together for economic reasons but they're very unfulfilled in that relationship? 10%? 20%? Now you have something that fails 70% of the time.
Wouldn't you take that seriously? Wouldn't you look at that and say, 'We need to be cautious about entering into this.' But we don't.
So why do you think this is? And this is interesting because I didn't even realize that we would go in this direction. And why are we not spending more time talking about expectations? Why are we not even discussing prenups? I don't even know what percentage of people have prenups. I would imagine it's small.
It's very hard to say because they're not filed anywhere.
They're not filed anywhere. A prenup is held in the office of the two counsel who drafted it. It only enters into a record if the marriage ends in divorce. And even then, it's part of a sealed matrimonial record. So, you'd never know. And let me tell you, there are a lot of people that have prenups that you don't know that they have prenups. Like, I've represented some public figures who I watch an interview with them and they're asked, 'Oh, did you guys have a prenup? You're getting married.' And they go, 'Oh, no, we didn't want one.' And I'm, 'Yes, you do. It's in my safe. You signed it on my conference room table.' But of course, attorney-client privilege, no one's allowed to say. And people still feel like if they acknowledge that they have a prenuptial agreement that somehow they're betraying their commitment to the marriage, which, you know, my feeling on that has always been and continues to be: every marriage has a prenup. Every marriage has a prenup. All a prenup is is a set of rules that are going to govern this relationship in the event it ends in something other than death. Because every marriage has a prenup. It's either one that's written by the government and subject to change by the government with or without your permission, and then you can't opt out of it if they change it to something you don't like, or it's a prenup that's written by the two people that allegedly love each other more than the 8 billion other options.
I see. Now, for me, my relationship, my rules. I wouldn't look at a politician like... I've never walked into the Department of Motor Vehicles and said, 'Oh, yeah, these guys are killing it. This is great.' Like, we should make them in charge of my relationship. Like, they're the government. Whatever political party you're with, sometime in the last 12 years you have said the government has gone down the toilet.
Whichever side you're on, because both sides have had gripes.
No matter what country you live, every country has had its moment where people go, 'What did we just do?' So you're trusting those people to write your prenuptial agreement. That seems crazy to me. And by the way, it seems like a wasted opportunity because I feel like the conversation, you know, with your soon-to-be spouse, it's an invitation. Like the conversation around a prenup to me could be the most beautiful and romantic conversation because it's a conversation about how do you feel safe? How do I make you feel safe? Someday this will end, right? And I hope it ends in the two of us passing away many, many years from now.
But if it doesn't, like having the courage to say to someone, 'I want to protect you from everyone who could hurt you, including me.' Including me, because I'm going to hurt you. Like, I hope only a little. I hope I hurt your feelings because I say the wrong thing, I hope. But we will hurt each other. Like, we will love each other and we'll hurt each other if we take a long enough journey together. Like, both of those things will happen. So if I love you, I don't think you can feel loved if you don't feel safe.
Yes. I think a challenge that many people have, because I think about myself.
But I also know I had nothing asset-wise when I started my marriage. So if someone feels like they don't have any assets, is a prenup still important?
Yeah. Because I just think it's a rule set. Like, it's just a rule set. Like, I think it's really just buckets. You're creating buckets and saying, like, it's not like you get a prenup and you set it and forget it and that's it. All you're doing is setting rules and then saying, okay, like the simplest prenup just says yours, mine, and ours. If it's in your name, it's yours. If it's in my name, it's mine. If it's in joint names, we'll split it 50/50. And then every time something comes in, you have to put it in which bucket you want it in whole or in part. Which I think is great because it's an invitation to say, 'Hey, what are we doing with this now? Like, how do we...' And it's an invitation for the person, if you can share honestly with each other, to say, like, 'Oh, that doesn't feel good to me. That feels like I'm being excluded from that.'
When you said mine, yours, ours, that's very clean, right? But I think that historically marriage was for men always ours.
Right. It always was ours because when I was doing some research in the UK, this blew my mind. It wasn't until 1975 that women could open a bank account.
Right. And so we're talking about, you know, our lifetime, right?
So you think about it, it's always been ours from the male perspective.
That could be one. Is that one reason why prenuptial agreements are finally now just being discussed? Throughout history, like marriage has been different things at different times. Marriage was originally sort of the union of families for landownership purposes. And then there was a period of time where marriage became, you know, look at the ceremony of marriage. A woman's father walks her down the aisle and gives her to the husband because now she's the husband's property. Now, I have met some of the most feminist women in the world who are just autonomy, agency, C-suite executives, and they're feminists and they're girl-bossing all the way. And then when you go, 'So at the wedding, like, what?' And they're like, 'Oh, no. My father will give me away.' And I'm like, 'Wait, what is this? Like, this institution is completely outdated. Like, this belongs in a society where women aren't allowed to open bank accounts. Their father owns them and then he hands them off to this person. Are you going to, like, trade five mules also?' Like, but most, you know, we just... I think we just love the idea.
Like, it's just so... And by the way, why wouldn't we?
It's so lovely. It's the most lovely thing in the world. Like, I have been a divorce lawyer for over 25 years. I get misty-eyed at every wedding I go to. It's the most lovely thing. And somehow the minute we walk out of that wedding, we start, I think, like habits of mind that start taking this thing apart piece by piece. And no single raindrop's responsible for the flood. But the flood comes.
But the flood comes to many.
Yeah. Because it's interesting. You talked about what, 70%, 75%?
Well, it's 56% of marriages end in divorce, roughly. But then if you factor out another 10 or 20% stay together unhappily for the children or because they don't want to give away half their stuff, now you're looking at like 76%.
So I interviewed Dr. John and Julie Gottman.
And they shocked me when they told me that their research shows that 80% of marriages are unhappy.
Yeah. So they've spent a lot of time looking at the marriage satisfaction rate.
Yes. Which actually I think should be the metric we're looking at.
Because again, divorce just means catastrophic failure. But really, you don't get married to say, 'I really hope we can stay together even if we're completely miserable.' Like if somebody said to me, 'Oh my, I was married 50 years. We were happy for five of them, but for 45 we were just absolutely miserable, but we did it. We won.' I would look at them and say, 'What did you win?' Whereas if someone, and again, we all maybe know like one married couple or two married couples that are just, they love it. They're happy. They're in it. You see it on them. And I mean, those people won the lottery. It's incredible. Like, their lives are by every metric better because they have each other. And that's why I think, you know, we keep trying, man. Like it's the two-legged dope, man. We just keep fending for it.
But we're not winning because you said so, divorce is catastrophic failure. But what is divorce exactly? Does it mean, is it the division of assets? Is it like technically...
I mean, divorce is technically the termination legally of the marital relationship.
Yeah. The termination of the marital... the undoing of the marital relationship. So it is the termination. Now, what does that usually entail? It usually entails deciding custody and access with children, like who's going to have the kids and when. If there are children, then support, which is child support, which is how are we going to pay the expenses related to our children, and spousal support or alimony or maintenance. Every state calls it something different. And then the third piece of what a divorce is is what we call equitable distribution, which is the division of assets. Figuring out who has what and how we're going to divide it. And a lot of like horse trading is what lawyers do. So we'll say like, 'All right, you keep your 401k and I'll keep the house.' And that's a lot of what lawyers do. So it's basically just the untying of the knot, the unwinding of all the things that happened legally when we got married.
Okay. So now you mentioned your book. I read your book. It was phenomenal. So, this is 'How Not to F Up Your Marriage,' right? Which just came out 2025.
And in it, there was something that you mentioned that I want to look at. So as a divorce attorney, your clients are telling you things that they don't even tell their therapist.
100%. Well, there's no, you know, the two people in your life you should just absolutely never lie to are your lawyer and your doctor, because our only job is to protect you. Everything you tell us is confidential, and that confidentiality even survives your death. So like if your client tells you a secret, when they die, you're still not allowed to tell anybody that secret. And so tell me the truth, and my job is to protect you. And that's why I think I have a lens, an insight that other people don't have.
Yes. And I agree. I agree. Absolutely. So now when people see you though, you think it's too late. Like when they come into your office, when they're wanting to hire you, at that point they're not trying to rehabilitate their marriage.
Yeah. I mean, I've said before that I think by the time you get to a divorce lawyer's office, you are in a very bad spot. Now, that's not to say that because you've consulted with a divorce lawyer, it means your marriage is absolutely over. No more so than saying that once you have type 2 diabetes and you've been overweight for an extended period of time that it's over. Forget it. No, you can, you know, lose weight, you can exercise, you can try to manage your health as best you can and rehabilitate the aspects of it that have now been subject to a challenge. But I think we can all agree that if you can work on these things before they get that bad, like if you can work, it is so much easier to maintain your weight and maintain good health than it is to let your health go off a cliff and then try to crawl your way back up. Like my sister's a dentist and she always said to me, 'If you have a toothache, there's a very limited number of things I can do for you. There's a ton of things I can do to prevent you from ever having a toothache, but by the time you have a toothache, you've caused serious and almost irreparable damage to your tooth. But there's things you could do to never have a toothache.' That's what my writing is about. So, in my day-to-day job, my job is to be a divorce trial lawyer. I handle very contentious, difficult cases because, you know, there are things you do with a scalpel and there are things you do with a chainsaw. I'm a chainsaw.
Like I'm a weapon in court. I'm a weapon. You point me at the other side.
You describe some of that of what you're doing from a weapon standpoint in your book.
Yeah. I mean, I describe what I'm doing as full-contact storytelling. It's really what it is. I'm a storyteller. Like my job is to go in and tell the judge a story about who my client is in the context of their marriage and their parenting. Now, what is interesting about that, because people will say to me like, 'Oh, you're a good storyteller.' I'm a great storyteller, and here's why. It's hard enough to be a good storyteller, but tell a story while someone's trying to stop you from telling a story and they're trying to tell the opposite story. That's what you have to be in a courtroom. In a courtroom, I have to tell you the story of my client. By the way, my job is to manipulate people's emotional state. That's my job. Like, fundamentally, my job is to manipulate people. I want the judge to like my client and dislike the other side. I want the judge to listen to me and trust me and not trust the other lawyer. I want the other side to feel scared, and I want my client to feel safe. So, all I'm trying to do is simultaneously tell a story and tell it in a way that makes all those people feel all those emotions. That's a lot of plates to spin.
Regardless of your client, because I would imagine that you're having people come to you who are...
Listen, I don't wear the white hat. Like I always tell people, I represent my client and I represent the system. I don't always believe in the client, but I always believe in the system. Like that's my role as a lawyer, and I take it seriously. I took an oath to vigorously defend my client within the bounds of advocacy. So I'm going to win or lose a fair fight. And I will tell you, the truth has a way of coming out in a courtroom.
Sometimes despite my best efforts. Like sometimes my job is to throw up smoke and to try to like make red herrings and detract attention. And I think that's, you know, that's the way the system works, and I think it's fair. But, you know, it's combat. It is combat. It's combat. It's chess. It's thinking about a few moves ahead. It's setting up feints so the person will go after that and you can kind of tack around them. It's very strategic, and I absolutely love it.
Yeah. I tell you, every time I hear court cases, well, should I say divorce cases, they're always framed as nasty.
Well, I think that's actually because what I will tell you is, thankfully, the majority of divorces are not ugly.
No, they're sad. They're painful. Like as a divorce lawyer, when you tell people you're a divorce lawyer, the first thing all of them say, 'You must have such stories. You must have such great stories.' Right? And if I said, 'Oh my God, you want to hear one? I've got a great one.' Okay, so there was this couple and they met when they were in their 20s. You know, they met at university, and then they decided that they really liked each other so much that they were going to get married. And they got married, and then gradually they sort of grew apart and realized that they had like different goals and different values and different things that were important to them. And they'd grown, but they'd grown in ways that like moved them away from each other. So they, you know, got together and amicably divided their various assets. And they figured out how they were going to share time with their children, who they loved so much, and that really like they're the two people who love this child more than anyone else in the whole wide world. And they knew that they were someday going to be grandparents together and deal with each other. We're always going to be family to each other forever. And then they amicably resolved things and moved on with their lives. They would go, 'That's like the dumbest.' Like, what was that? Like, boo, right? But if I go, 'And Daddy took a chainsaw and he literally cut her car in half and left a note saying, "Pick which half you want, bitch."' Like, true story, by the way. Yeah, that story is the story people want to hear.
And by the way, the people who talk about their divorce incessantly are people who went through traumatic, awful divorces. Because I'm divorced. I got divorced 20 years ago. Very friendly, lovely. I have two children with a wonderful woman. One of them got married in September of last year. And she's been remarried 15 years to a wonderful guy. We all get along. Like everybody at our son's wedding, we all hung out, took pictures, like had a dance, had a drink, patted each other on the back for how wonderful we've done. They were five and seven when we split up, you know. So my divorce is the least interesting thing about me. Sometimes happily ever means happily ever after separately. And by the way, time has proven that. My ex-wife has been married to her husband for 15 years, far longer than we were ever married, and they love each other. You see it on them. And as someone who knows her and loves her, he's great for her. Like he's that. And if you met him and met me, you'd go, 'Oh, there's... no one woman would love both of these men.' Like he's quiet. He's very calming in his energy. He's very like... we're total opposites, and he's perfect for her.
Do you feel as if because you've gone through a divorce amicably, that gives you additional perspective when it comes to your work?
It does. Unfortunately, it hasn't been particularly useful because the kinds of people that need someone like me can't do that. Like if you need me, it's because there's a fight happening, like a real fight happening. You know, I'm not the guy you hire because you just need to process an uncontested divorce. Like my divorce took like a month and two grand. Like it was, we went to a mediator. We sat down and said, 'Okay, you'll keep this. I'll keep this. We'll do this.' When it comes to things, and then we, by the way, we put the piece of paper away and just made it up as we went along. If she needed something, I was here for her. If I wanted different time with the kids, we were flexible with each other. Like we just acknowledged that, hey, we're family. We're going to deal with each other. We'll figure things out along the way. There's going to be times where it's effortless and easy. There's times where it might be challenging, but we'll just figure it out together.
Okay. Gotcha. But do you ever struggle with the type of person? Because I would imagine that there are people coming to you who might have conducted sexual assault or abuse, and obviously they're telling you everything. You're aware of it all.
Do you ever struggle with representing them?
No, because I genuinely believe in the system of representation that gives everyone the right to due process and the right to an advocate. I get that question a lot. Like people will say like, 'How can you represent this?' And my answer to that is, you know, you're in the wrong country. Like if you're in the UK or the USA, like we have due process. Like people have a right to an advocate. And my job is to be... And again, like I take great comfort in the reality that, you know, the truth has a way of coming out sometimes despite my absolute best efforts to try to obfuscate the facts. Reality is reality. Facts are facts. It's very rare that excellent advocacy can completely, you know, detract attention. Like a lawyer is at best makeup. Like what is makeup? Is makeup a lie? No. Makeup is accentuating the positive, deaccentuating the negative. But you can't take a hideously ugly human being and put makeup on them and now they're gorgeous. Like you do the best that you can with what you have. And by the way, I don't believe that there are just evil people walking around doing evil things. Like I have spent a lot of time with the cheater and the cheated on, the victim of domestic violence and the perpetrator of domestic violence. And I wish having spent time with each of those people, I could tell you, 'Oh yeah, there's just evil people.' And if we just could figure out who they are and segregate them, then we'd be fine. That's not how it works. Like human emotional complexity, the line of good and evil runs through the human heart, and you have to cut out a piece of your heart if you want to get rid of evil. There is evil in me. There is darkness in me. There is selfishness in me, just like there is in all of us. And part of marriage, I believe, the most beautiful part of marriage at its best is you're not deluding yourself into thinking that I'm perfect and I'm good. You're looking at me and going, 'There's beauty in you and kindness in you, and there's weakness in you and there's frailty in you and there's, you know, short-sightedness and selfishness in you, and there's empathy and compassion in you.' And I want all of that.
However, we know because of the Gottmans, right, and these other researchers, that most of us are not happy, low satisfaction in our marriages. So if we are in a relationship and we feel as if there's low satisfaction, how do we determine if we should be divorced?
Or just simply work on the satisfaction.
Yeah. So I think the first step is always identifying what it is that you want, and then identifying how you've been sharing that with your partner. And how do we do that? Like I genuinely believe it's really easy. Like it's really, really easy. Just keep checking in. Like keep checking in. Make it a habit. Make it a practice, not a bug. Make it a feature that, you know, like I mean, think about what would happen in a relationship if from the day you got married you said, 'Every Saturday we're going to spend 10 minutes, and if we're apart, we'll do it via email.'
I want you to tell me three things I did this week that made you feel loved. Three things. And if I'm brave, tell me three things that I could have done better in my connection with you this week. Or if we want to have fun, tell me three things I did this week that made you want to have sex with me. Tell me three things that turned you on. Three moments where you were like, 'I want some of this. This is nice. I'm liking him right now.'
Oh my God, do I want to know?
Like, do I want... And by the way, how much fun would it be? How much fun would it be to hear that? And I have to tell you, you'd be shocked sometimes at the answers. Like because I know what I'm trying to do to make you feel loved, but the things that actually make someone feel loved, sometimes it's totally different than me.
Absolutely. You could be 15 years in your relationship and be completely shocked.
Completely shocked. And now here's the thing. People's pushback on that is, well, you know, like it feels like that would be like... now it's another thing to do, and you don't have 10 minutes a week to do that.
Absolutely. I remember talking to someone, this is the Gottmans as well. They were saying how the six-minute... in essence they were talking about how long a kiss should be. Remember talking to people saying, hey, you know, they're saying you should actually kiss for six minutes, you should kiss six times, etc. They said a lot of the guys would say, 'Well, I just don't have the time. I don't have the time to do it.' And this goes to that question of if you have a partner and you feel as if that has slipped.
You feel that has slipped. That's gone away. How do you determine if you should divorce?
It's a great question. So what you're really asking is if I feel there's distance between my partner and I. We've lost the plot.
That happens, right? That happens. Like I love to read at night. It's how I wind down. I don't like to be on a screen. So I like to read a little bit. And because I'm doing it at night, I'll be a few pages in, all of a sudden I'll kind of realize I'm tired and I don't really know what I'm reading anymore. And then I'll try to stop and go, 'Well, where did I lose it?' And I'll go back and it's usually a couple pages. And then I'll recognize the last thing I remember and I'll go, 'Okay, that's where I'm going to put the bookmark. And now I'm going to close my eyes.' You lose the plot. It happens. What you're describing is a situation where my partner maybe doesn't recognize that we've lost the plot or isn't committed to, 'Let's do some work to reverse this spiral that we're down.' And the way to do that, I think, is little tiny things, like little gestures. I don't think it has to be grand gestures. I actually think if you think about love and when you feel loved by your partner, it's very rarely like these grand gestures.
