How Not To Ruin Your Marriage - World's Leading Divorce Expert - James Sexton

23:20Then I think very often within the first five to seven years, there's the presence of the first child, right? And the first child creates a tremendous bond between two people. They see each other in a different way. It creates some stresses too. It creates some fatigue. It creates a three-year-old, I can tell.

23:36Francis Foster:Okay, so you know very well. Yeah, yeah. But it also, in addition to creating fatigue and stress and those kinds of things, it also, you fall in love with a different version of your wife. She's not just your wife now. She's also the mother of your child. And you watch her with your child and you kind of go like, oh, look at how our child loves her and how much I love the fact that she loves this child. And I'm sure she feels the same way. She looks at you and she says, oh, like, it's not just my husband now. This is also, you know, like my little, you know, my child's father, you know, like, and that's a very, like a new person you're falling in love with again.

24:08After a few years of that, you know, around the kids three, five, maybe goes off to school. Now we start to have, again, because this is a multivariate equation, we start to have a loss of identity because now the child is not as dependent. I mean, what other species other than humans come out that half-formed, that helpless, right? Like we come out completely half-formed and hope whoever's waiting on the other side is going to fill us in, you know? So this is something that there is an extended period of time you're just coming out the other end of where, you know, this is a helpless creature.

24:41So, you know, after that passes, and now this child has a little bit of autonomy and agency and kind of is doing its own thing a little bit, there is a sense of a little loss of identity. There's a little loss of the hands-on nature of that project. That can start to create in people a sense of distance from each other or of reconnection to each other if it's handled the right way. If it's handled the right way, it can be an opportunity to say, hey, this organism's not as dependent on us now in that time that we used to have together that we've lost. We can reconnect during that time. But very often people do other things with it.

25:13They say, oh, you know, I've been putting off getting to the gym because, you know, I haven't lost all the weight or got my body back to where it was. So they go to the gym. Now they're in a different social circle. They're interacting with other people who don't know them as a mom and who know them as an independent woman or a man. And suddenly we have opportunities. We have opportunities for new connections with people that start to create in us a dissatisfaction. Add to this what I consider the greatest amplifier in the world and the greatest help to the practice of matrimonial law that we ever didn't need, that is social media.

25:45Because in social media, you're watching everyone's greatest hits while living your gag reel.

25:52Francis Foster:Right. So you're comparing your relationship and all of its flaws and all of its chaos with the curated, perfect images of everyone else's marriage and parenting. So, of course, you're going to be very dissatisfied with yourself, and you're going to feel like you're not doing as well. So I think that that is where those things start to strain. I think once kids go off to, you know, once kids get some autonomy in the form of, you know, a car or a license or go off to university, that's another opportunity for people to disconnect. Once the children have, you know, for example, completely gone out of the household, now they finish university, maybe they marry themselves or they become autonomous.

26:33That's another stress point. So I think it's always transition points and stress points. I think, you know, for some people, we have what we call the midlife crisis. I think it happens later than midlife. I think it happens in the late 40s, early 50s. And I don't think that many people live to 100. So it probably should be seen as the life stage of when people's children aren't as dependent on them or where people are solidified enough in their career that it's kind of set it and forget it. And it's no longer as much of a challenge, their career. They know how to do what they do. And it's not, you know, you're not out there like hunting the way that you were of like, I got to eat what I kill.

27:07Like you've got an abundance. If you've done it right, you've got some money put aside. And now you start asking questions about like, what's the point of all of this? Your body's starting to change in ways that are not the desirable way. There are ways that are your back hurts a little more and, you know, everything feels a little bit more. I'm there. I've got the gray hair for it. And you start to say, you know, hey, if I have a limited number of days, is sitting next to this person, you know, who we've heard all of each other's stories and they no longer find my jokes quite as funny because they've heard them all, is that the best life has to offer?

27:40Because I think love, if you think about love is is not just something we experience in our feeling towards the other person i think if you think about you know when you first met your wife it wasn't just that you fell for her you fell for who you were when you were with her you know how you felt about yourself when you were with her like how seeing yourself through her eyes like the wonder she felt towards you and the adoration and admiration that she felt for you, how it made you feel about yourself. I mean...

28:15Francis Foster:You're making me hard, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, I think that's a piece of it, you know? And no one's a hero to their butler. Right. Like, familiarity breeds contempt. There's no way around that. I'm not saying we don't have bonds with people we spend a long time with, but there is something about having, you know, a person who you have a physical and sexual relationship with who just thinks you're amazing. Totally. Thinks you're the most handsome man in the world and brilliant and funny and smart. and we've really culturally i mean not just in the us in the uk everywhere we've made it sort of cute to talk about your spouse like oh my husband is just such a lovable idiot you know and my wife is like yeah the most loathsome harpy ever to castrate a man you know and it's sort of like quaint like that's an acceptable way to the person you've chosen over eight billion other options that's the person you're going to take the piss out of on a regular basis and around other people.

29:11Like, that seems very odd to me, but it is something that I think in early days, anything that person does, it's kind of cute. You know, if she snorts when she laughs, you know, you're like, she snorts when she laughs. Ten years into the marriage, when she snorts, you're like, is there something wrong with you? Why do you do that when you laugh? You know, it's just the nature of how we are.

29:32Francis Foster:So these transition points is such an interesting thing. I mean, my wife and I are desperate for some time together because our son's been full on. And we both look forward to that, I think. I'll go back home and check. You better check. She hasn't come to my office, so that's a good sign. That is a good sign. How does a couple really navigate those transition points effectively? How will a couple think about those periods and prepare for them, perhaps? Yeah, so in my book, what I talk a lot about is... Tell everybody the title. Well, if you buy it in the UK, it's called... If you buy it in the USA, it's called How to Stay in Love.

30:15If you buy it in the UK, it's called How to Not Fuck Up Your Marriage. Which tells you everything you need to know about the US and UK. And it tells you why I've always enjoyed UK humour better than US humour. From Douglas Adams to the young ones, I was bred on it. But yeah, there's a chapter in the book called Hit Send Now. And it's about this, I don't think, particularly radical concept. But it's about, you know, whenever you send an email, you know, if you're sending a heartfelt email, something that, you know, you're going to quit a job or you're going to tell someone something you're afraid to tell them.

30:49I've always said there's something odd about when you hit send. But it's like, well, it's out there now. Like, take it back, you know. And so that inspired the idea to me of, you know, one of the things I like about email is I can be very thoughtful in how I compose what I'm saying. I can rewrite it. I can leave it in drafts until the next morning and decide, does it still say what I want it to say? And when I receive an email, I don't have to automatically acknowledge I received it. I don't have to immediately respond to it. I can digest what it's saying, and I can give my response the same thought, maybe, that this person ideally gave to the draft itself.

31:23So I had this idea of why couldn't you in your relationship do something similar to that, work that into a sort of day-to-day or week-to-week practice, of really, before the fire becomes fire while it's still smoke, just sort of putting things out there. And it doesn't even have to be only sort of negative things, although the negative things are normally born... Like, no single raindrop's responsible for the flood. But the flood's made up of nothing but raindrops, so it's all these little things. And, you know, if you've been married for 20 years, then you know the feeling of sitting with your spouse and you're at the kitchen table and you're having a, you know, a heated discussion about the best, you know, traffic route to take to get to the place you're going that afternoon.

32:08And, you know, 20 minutes later, it's like, and I never liked your mother and she's never respect. And you're like, wait, wait, where did that come from? How did we get to that? How long have you been holding that in your back pocket? But that's what happens is there's these little things that build up over time. So I think the antidote is to those kinds of catastrophic failures, as silly as it sounds, is very basic communication. It's very basic and early communication. If something blips on your emotional radar, what is the harm in saying to your partner, look, I just want to say, when we were talking the other day and you made that little joke about my sister, maybe you were just joking, but for a second it sat kind of weird with me because I like the fact that you like my sister and it felt like what you said maybe it means that you don't or something.

32:55So if I misunderstood you, I'm sorry. And then it's an opportunity for this person to say, oh, no, no, I was just kidding. Or to say, but again, it's not in the context of the conversation because that can bring out something defensive in someone. And it also gives you a chance to think about how you parse it. Because if, for example, and I'm not using your relationship as an example, but if you were to say to a spouse, when you have a three-year-old, if you were to say to your spouse, you know, we don't have sex as often as we used to. You know, we got a three-year-old running around all the time.

33:22Like, it's understandable. But we don't have sex as often as we used to. That invites a defensive dialogue. Well, of course we don't. We've got a three-year-old running around and I'm exhausted at the end of the day. And you've been traveling all the time interviewing James Sexton. So, I mean, you know, what am I supposed to do? Whereas if you were to... She's spoken to my wife, Glenn. I mean, I can neither confirm nor deny attorney-client privilege. But if you said to her, you know, gosh, I miss you so much. Like, I miss feeling even just physically close to you. You know, I love when we're so, like, connected to each other in that way.

33:51You think she's not going to like hearing that? And then that parlays into a conversation about, oh, remember when we did it? God, I would love to get back to that, where we could do that. And I know I'm not around as much, but man, when I'm around, I really want to make a point of making sure that we stay so connected because it means so much to me. Who's going to argue with that? It's all really about the framing of the dialogue. And I think that that is what the idea of Hit Send Now is. It's the idea of making a deliberate practice of that, of telling your partner hey i want to love you well and i want you i know you want to love me well right i want to be good at this i want to be good at us this is important to me so i want you to feel free to tell me when i get it wrong i'd even love it if you'd tell me when i get it right like you've been married 20 years i bet if you said to your wife or if i said to your wife tell me 10 times that you've felt loved by him 10 things he's done that made you feel loved five or six of them you could probably guess i bet there'd be a few that you would go really i didn't even know you noticed i did that or i didn't even notice that i did that like and i bet the same is true if i said to you when do you feel loved by your wife but don't you want to know like is there anything you'd want to know more like what a wonderful thing to know when you because don't you want the people who you love to feel your love well when do you feel it like and when do you not feel it what are some things i do that make you not feel my love because i know i'm not doing them intentionally you know so so what can i do how can i get better at this you know you're we're constantly refining like it astounds me that you know my my book is a relationship book at its core and if you walked into you know someone's home who's married and they had the seven habits of highly effective people or the power of habit by charles durring or they had you know any of those tony robbins you know any of those books you go look at this jim's so successful but he still wants to keep the point on the sword sharp like i love it you know he's always self-help no no in britain you see really you see a relationship book and you go oh what's going on at home with jim you know yeah instead of saying oh look at this Like his relationship means so much that he wants to stay good at it.

36:13He wants to continue to. There's just something about acknowledging that we might not be great at this as a species that feels like you're acknowledging you're doing something wrong or your partner's doing something wrong or you've chosen incorrectly. I don't understand why that is. You know, it's so many interesting points that you've raised. And one of the myths that I want to explore, and maybe it's not a myth, maybe it's truth, but it's misrepresented on the internet, is the classic one that all angry men use online, and there's lots of angry men, who say the line, 80 % of women initiate divorce.

36:4978%. There you go. 78%. People love weaponizing that statistic. Yeah. I think that I understand why people try to weaponize that statistic. They're trying to present the suggestion that marriage is like a casino that women get entry to being very good looking and young and youthful and then they get in there they watch the man accumulate a big bank of chips and then when the guy's high up enough they go all right i'm cashing out and then they go okay if that was the case i would be the first to say it believe me i i say lots of things that i get accused of misogyny because i talk about a lot of gendered things and again these aren't my opinions this is what i'm observing i represent men.

37:30I represent women. I've been representing men and women for 25 years of practicing matrimonial law. So I'm just reporting who's sitting on the other end of the chair and what I see in the course. People lie to their therapist all the time. They lie to their friends all the time. They don't lie to their divorce lawyer. There's no reason to lie to your divorce lawyer. I'm going to find out. I have subpoena power. I can look at all your records. Like there's no reason to lie to me. My only job is to protect my clients. So you can tell me the truth. I'm here to protect your secrets and advocate on your behalf.

37:56So I get a very, very unfiltered view of things. So if women were just saying, oh yeah, I've cashed out, I'm doing great. Like I got into this thing and now he's not doing well and I'm out, or he's doing so well that I can now afford to take half his shit and I'm gone. The truth is, I don't think that's why that statistic is what it is. I think that there are probably an equal number of women that are as dissatisfied in their marriage as there are men, because men, you know, men represent 30 something percent of commencement of divorces. Something I have seen many men do, and I think I've in a 25-year career only seen maybe two women do, is go out for milk and never come back.

38:36They just leave. They just go, yeah, I'm done. Or they go away on a business trip and then they send their wife an email or call her and say, yeah, I'm not coming home. I've met someone else. I'm sorry. That tends to be a male thing. Okay. It's not a female thing. Part of that is that men are still primarily the wage earners and breadwinners. So they have the funds with which to go and get themselves an apartment or to do whatever it is that they need to do to just leave. But very often when they do it, they just go and then they don't make any arrangements. They don't say, oh, and here's how the electric bill is going to get paid.

39:11And here's how the mortgage is going to get paid. And here's how the children's school tuition is going to get paid. So then the woman comes into my office or an office like it and says what do i do he left he says he's not coming back the bills aren't getting paid he's been the breadwinner i've been home taking care of kids for the last 10 years what i can get a job but i'm only going to make minimum wage i'm not going to be able to pay all of these expenses and i don't know what's going on and i say okay we have to commence a divorce action and then they say well no i don't want to get divorced and i said well it doesn't matter if you don't want to get divorced you need a court order and the only way to get a court order is to commence an action and the only action you have to commence is an action for divorce.

39:49You can't commence an action for the guy left. There's no such thing. It's a divorce action. So then you have to file a divorce action. So that's where a lot of that statistic comes into play. If I saw a trend of a large number of women in the world who were just deciding, you know what, I'm just going to cash out on men. I'd be the first to say it. I know I have lots of friends in the red pill space that would be thrilled. I could write a book about it. I'd sell lots of books because there's lots of people that want to hear simple answers to complicated questions. And if I could offer it to them, honestly, I would.

40:25I don't think that's the case.

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43:02Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. You know, I've got a lot of female friends and when they break up with their relationship or they get divorced and I ask them why, they always say the same things. He wasn't checking in. He wasn't appreciating. He wasn't listening. He wasn't making the effort. He wasn't taking the time. I checked out and then it was a couple of years before I made the break. Yeah. Is that what you find? Yeah, all the time. I think that's a very, very common fact pattern that you just described. What I would add to it is very often it's he checked out, he stopped paying attention to me.

43:45Look, I think attention is for women what sex is for men. You know, women, men want sex and will give you attention in exchange for it. Women want attention and they'll give you sex in exchange for it. You know, and so it's an economy. And again, I think that's a very fair economy, which is why the chances of you getting laid, if you say to your partner, you're the most beautiful woman in the world, you're just so wonderful. You know, I'll digress for a second. My son texted me the other day and he said, Dad, can you send me some money? And I said, you know, son, I just looked at my texts. I haven't got a text from you in a week.

44:21I said, let me give you a bit of advice because I feel like I'm a financial booty call for you. I said, and I have no problem with the concept of a booty call, but if you're going to be a man, let me tell you something you need to know about a booty call. If on a Friday night you text a girl at 1 a.m. saying, hey, are you up? I was just thinking of you. She knows why you're texting her. If you haven't texted her in a week, she's not necessarily going to be receptive to that text. But if on Wednesday you think, you know, I'm going drinking on Friday. I should send that girl. And you send her, hey, I just heard a song.

45:02It made me think of you. Hope you're doing well. The chances when you text her on Friday at 1 a.m. and say, hey, are you up? What are you doing? There's a part of her that's going to go, I know why he's texting. But, you know, he did text on Wednesday. Like, he is clearly interested in me. Your chances are going to go up. I said, if you texted me on Wednesday and said, hey, dad, how are you doing? Hope all's well. Just wanted to say hi. We should get lunch sometime soon. Now when you text me and say you want some money, I'll be very quick to send you that money. But because you didn't warm me up at all with any kind of foreplay, the answer is no.

45:34So I think that that's a bit the attention piece and the sex piece. Something men need to figure out is pay a little bit more attention, give a little more compliments to your spouse, and the receptivity towards what it is that you need is going to be much more receptive, I believe, in the long term. But I do think that ultimately, you know, when it comes to women falling out of love, when they feel unseen, unappreciated, and we live in a society, by the way, that is constantly, there's a barrage of attention coming at women. I mean, any woman goes on Instagram, she's instantly, you're a queen, fire, you know, all the million texts, whereas men, who cares, shut up, go to work.

46:12Like, there's not a lot of that coming from us. Dating apps, the same thing happens, you know. So I think that there's a tremendous amount of affirmation coming from all directions for women. This is why I've always said, by the way, that I think the, I don't know if in the UK you have the concept of the hall pass. You have the concept of the hall pass. So everyone has like a celebrity that you say like, oh, you know, if I get to sleep with this celebrity. Nigella Lawson was mine for a long time. And a woman's might be Harry Styles. Here's the problem with that equation. the chances i'm not i'm using them as examples i don't know either of them the chances of like like a male celebrity like a harry styles meeting my girlfriend at an airport lounge and her saying hey do you want to run off in the restroom and have a quick shag and him saying yeah why not is probably higher than if i ran in a jello lawsuit and i said you know uh just so you're aware, I'm allowed to have sex with you if you'd like to.

47:14Then she's going to go, really? Because women walk out the door and it's just, they're barraged by penis options. You know, whereas men, it's not quite so simple. So I think for women, the flow of attention that's coming from random places, the amount of cultural messages telling them how wonderful and amazing and how girl boss, we're just girl bossing them right into the sun. That's coming at them constantly. So I don't know how many men can really keep up with that. But if you don't keep up with it at all and you just have a sort of learned helplessness where you go, all right, look, I can't possibly give her enough attention, so I'm just going to give her none whatsoever.

47:47I think that's when the disconnection happens. And that's when very often infidelity happens with women. I've always said men cheat more, but women cheat better. Like women cheat bigger. Women cheat in ways that are like the soft place to land, the exit out of the relationship. And culturally, by the way, women get away with cheating in a way that men don't. If a man cheats on his wife, he's a piece of garbage who couldn't keep it in his pants. If a woman cheats on her husband, it's, you know, she was desperate for love and attention. And this was her journey. And she needed to figure out who she was.

48:24And she needed to learn that the relationship was truly over. And only by crossing that final threshold of being with another person did she really solidify in her mind the distance that had developed between she and her spouse. she's the hero of that story, even though she's the one who cheated.

48:39Francis Foster:Do you think there's some truth to that, though? You kind of did a satirical take on it. I think there's truth. Look, I think the truth is at the bottom of a bottomless pit. And I think as someone who gets paid to tell people stories, I will tell you that, you know, most people, if you really listen to their story, there's some element to it where they're a sympathetic character. I mean, I'm skeptical anytime someone tells me the story of their life and they're the hero of the story. I prefer when someone tells me the story of their life and they have heroic moments and they have weak moments and then, you know, that gives a credibility to the story.

49:18But yes, of course, there's something to that. But it's equally true that, you know, that the man might be in a position where, yeah, she just has continually beat me down emotionally and egotistically and she's so constantly getting praise and attention, and I really am just this person by the side. And meanwhile, I take such good care of her and our family. And, you know, I have a barrage of attention from women, but I've always ignored it. And then finally, I got so lonely that, you know, that the attention of this other female just started out as something that was kind of innocent, and then it turned into something less innocent.

49:49But it really taught me how disconnected I had come from that and how hungry I was for the connection physically and emotionally to another person. That's a real story. It's a truthful story. It's a fair story. Again, the answer in both of those situations, if we're being moral and truthful, is to go back to our partner and say, hey, I'm thinking of sleeping with this other person. That's how far apart we are now. Can we fix this? Because if we can't, let's end it. And if we want to fix it, okay, then we got to fix it because it's broken right now. We don't want to do that. That's hard.

50:25Francis Foster:But that's exactly the right thing to do. It's exactly the right thing to do. It's the only thing to do. It's the moral thing to do. I mean, but it's understandable that people don't do that, right? I mean, my sons are adults now, but when they were growing up, I said to them, look, I don't have a lot of wisdom to offer you because I think a lot of the wisdom that's out there isn't worth very much. But the most wise thing I've ever been taught and the most wise thing I have to impart to you is that the hard thing to do and the right thing to do are almost always the same thing that's such a good point about life in general but in relationships in particular because in a marriage the hard thing to do is to tell your spouse how you're feeling honestly and candidly the hard thing to do is when your spouse says something critical of you or something you don't want to hear but need to hear to hear it from love, to hear it as, yeah, this person wants to tell me the truth.

51:21They love me enough to tell me an uncomfortable truth. Like that's the, that's the hard thing to do, but it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do if you want what you purported to have wanted when you married this person, which is I want it to be you and I, the two of us, a team together, connected, holding each other's hand in this terrifying, uncertain world. And we will have each other. Because I tell you, I believe very deeply in the romantic love of two people. I really believe in the, I won't even say marriage, because I think marriage and love are, you know, correlation isn't causation.

51:57And I don't really know that there's even much of a correlation between marriage and love. But I don't think I can learn everything I need to know about myself from myself. I need someone who sees my blind spots. And I want to have someone who I can help see theirs. And we can ideally at the end of our lives, I mean, there's no greater blessing I could offer your marriage than to say that I hope at the end of your life, your spouse says, this person helped me become the most authentic version of myself, the realist version of myself. And that you can look at her and say, you helped me become the best and most authentic version of who I am.

52:36Like that, what greater blessing could you offer someone's marriage than that? James, and there's some other stats that I want to look into as well, because I'd be very - We go from love to stats. Just right in there. Just typical man. Typical man.

52:51Francis Foster:But what about this? But what about the numbers? Yeah. Go on, man. Go on. So I read this stat that I think it's around a third of men leave their wife or initiate divorce when they have cancer or they get diagnosed of a serious illness. The man gets cancer or the woman? The woman gets cancer. Right. And on the flip side, another stat that I read was about, I think it's 30 % of all women initiate a divorce when the man loses his job. Yes. How true is that? Yeah. Or are there myths surrounding it? And is it just stats that we actually need to explode? The cancer one I can't speak to. I will certainly say that in my experience of watching the demise of thousands of marriages ringside, that I do think men sometimes hit the eject button faster than women when challenges occur, which is always a bit surprising to me because I do think the masculine ideal is one of meeting challenges and the warrior concept.

53:58And so I've always found that sort of baffling, that when things get hard in a relationship, that a man would not want to deal with the hard aspect of it is a little strange. But I can't speak to the veracity of that statistic. I can tell you if the statistic about job loss is only one third, I'd be surprised. I think it's probably actually much higher than that. My experience is that when men lose their job, there is a tremendous high divorce rate that comes with it. The only thing that I have seen as reliable of a tracker of a coming divorce, other than a man losing his primary wage earning function, losing his primary job, is the death of a child.

54:46The death of a child is almost always the death of a marriage. that when people lose a child, the statistics are very, very grim. Over 85 % of people who lose a child end up getting divorced, partly because I think they remind each other of this very painful reality of having lost a child. But men losing their job is a tremendous tracker as to divorce. I think, again, there is a school of thought that would like to say that that's that women are cashing out the chips and, oh, well, he lost his job, he's no longer useful. I think the rate of increased substance use issues that comes with a man losing his job, I think Scott Galloway could speak very intelligently to this, that the things that happen to a man as his place in the society, in the ecosystem of the world, that when a man loses his job, he is losing his manhood.

55:40He is losing his function as a wage earner. He is losing the way he defines himself. I mean, within the first 10 minutes of meeting a man, oh, so what is it that you do? You know, it's I mean, it's ingrained in our cultural zeitgeist as to how we interact with each other. I mean, in Japan, you hand your business card to someone and you take their business card. It's sort of fundamental. So what is it that you do? You know, so I think when a man loses that, he's losing his identity. Very often substance use issues come up because a person starts drinking more to cope with the stress and depression that comes with having lost their job.

56:10So it's also a powerlessness that men have to experience when you lose your job. I mean, very often you're talking about people who work within the context of a corporate structure. So when they lose their job, it's through no fault of their own, but also they're utterly powerless. And now they can't provide for their family. They feel powerless. They feel impotent. They feel awful. And that's going to impact the manner in which they interact with their spouse. So, again, if a woman files for divorce because they're, oh, you lost your job? Sorry, I'm out. That is probably different. But I don't think statistically that's what's happening.

56:41I think what's happening is a man loses his job and then some time passes. And during that time period, very often, that man increases the amount he's drinking. He's angry. He's frustrated. He's lashing out at his spouse. These are all things that have a concomitant effect. So then when she leaves, oh, you're leaving me because I lost my job. No, I'm leaving you because you lost your job. You've been sitting around the house depressed. You're screaming at me and at the children constantly. And you're drinking 10 times more than you used to. So if you want to say it's because you lost your job, yeah, that was the first domino that fell.

57:13But plenty of people lose their job and don't add all of those, you know, injuries to the insult, right? So I think that is, again, one of those, I wish, I'm constantly looking for patterns. I'm constantly older man, younger woman, younger man, older woman. Like, I'm constantly lived together before didn't. Same religion, different religion. Do Jews do better at marriage than Christians? How are Muslims at it? Like, I'm constantly trying to look for patterns. If they were there, I'd be the first person to say it. But I really don't, I think we are multidimensional organisms. Human emotional complexity comes into this, and it's an ecosystem, you know?

57:51And like any ecosystem, like you take the lizards out of the ecosystem, you don't have the same ecosystem, less lizards. Because the lizards ate the insect, and the insect ate the plant, and the plant was something that this other animal ate, and now everything's screwed up. We have a whole new ecosystem. So a man loses his job, or a baby is born, or a person gets diagnosed with cancer. It's not just, we have the old marriage plus baby, or we have the old... I mean, I'm sure when you look at your marriage, it's not, it was our marriage plus baby. It's like, before baby, after baby. Correct. Everything is different after that, because it's an ecosystem.

58:27It's a non-additive system. So you have to think about the problems in marriage that same way, which is why when you're saying to people, here's how you fix marriage, or better yet, maintain it. Because it's a whole lot easier to maintain it than to fix it. It's like it's a whole lot easier to maintain a healthy weight than to gain a ton of weight and then try to lose it. So my books, my writing, all of my speaking on this is all about how do you stay in love? It's easy to fall in love. Any idiot can do it. But now we're in love, how do we stay there? because once we go off the cliff and we fall out of love, it's much, much harder.

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1:00:10Francis Foster:Call 866-885-1948. That's 866-885-1948. Or go to americanfinancing.net slash trigonometry. It's a really profound point. And there's another thing I want to talk to you about, which angry men talk about. And it's not just angry. What Reddit groups are you hanging out in? You're really. I'm too right-wing for Reddit. I was going to say, yeah. No, I'm joking. But it's a very serious issue, and I've seen friends go through it, and it really, really has a profound impact on them, which is the family courts. And they say family courts are biased in favor of the mother. You know, as a man, you're going to always get a rough deal.

1:00:52It feels like you're always trying to prove that you're not an asshole, and you're going to get completely cleaned out by lawyers, etc. What are the truths? What are the myths? What's the gray areas? Yeah, I mean, look, that is fair comment. I will not say that all courts... Look, courts are made up of people. I mean, our legal system... I jokingly say our legal system is the worst one in the world except for all the other ones. But you're absolutely correct that there are a gigantic number of men that get an incredibly raw deal in the family court system. Why? I think there's a very complex myriad of answers to that question.

1:01:32I think you have to start with the fact that under her skin is under her sovereignty, right? So a baby is born from a woman. Maybe it's a controversial thing to say that, but I don't think it should be. It shouldn't be. But you are, you know, in New York, this is a controversial thing to say. But women have babies, and women theoretically feed babies, right? So there is a bond between a mother and an infant that is undeniable. And I don't think that we devalue men. I don't think it's misandrist to say that there is a very special and unique bond between mother and baby. 100%. She carried him inside.

1:02:06She has carried this child for nine months, the sound, the scent, all of the things. There is a bond between mothers and children that is beyond something that men, particularly when they're in those what we call tender years or those very early infant years, very hard. And look, I say that as a father. When my kids have a very deep relationship with me, they always have. But when they get sick, they want their mom. When they are scared, they want their mom. They love their mom, especially when they were quite little. When they were afraid of the monster in the closet, they needed dad. And I was very quick to come in with the anti-monster powder that was actually just baby tallow, but they didn't know it.

1:02:40But the reality is that, yes, we serve different roles to some degree. And the woman's role with a child early on is very profound. So we're starting from that place. now courts are made up of people and for a long time like many institutions of power i mean early in my career 25 years ago the bench was predominantly white heterosexual men it was old white men it was old men with gray hair like it was great because i would go in and i would wear my suit and i was very sort of i looked like the kind of guy they used to have a beer with when they were young i kept my hair short and i kept my face you know nicely shaved so that i would please that type of a person.

1:03:18That has changed dramatically. Like judges now, primarily women, very often women of color, very often lesbian women of color. There has become, you know, again, the bench, particularly in New York where I practice, resembles society now. And it almost has overcorrected in the same way that like every bank commercial, the bank officer is black, you know, the couple is biracial or gay or gay and biracial. Like, we've just created this world of like, oh, yes, this is the imagined world that we all would like to live in. And the bench is starting to look like that. Now, again, what has that created?

1:03:54Well, it's created opportunities for the court system to view gender differently, to view male and female roles differently. We also now have marriage equality. So, you know, you have two men with children, two women with children. So there's no mother or father. There's now just two parent one and parent two. So a lot of that has changed. I will tell you, it's gotten better in recent years because when it was primarily old white men, they were looking at it and going like, well, mothers, sacred mothers, mothers are the greatest. My mother was the greatest, you know, and their fathers were like my father.

1:04:30My father went to work every day. I didn't make my mother did all the heavy lifting of parenting. My dad kept the lights on and he was there to discipline us every now and again and go out back and play catch and things like that. Taught me how to fish. But is he, you know, the person who on a day-to-day basis, what happened at school? Are you okay? And your friend got in a fight with you? Oh my gosh, that must have felt. That was my mom. That was all my mom. And that was okay. That was their respective roles. So a lot of the former bench, that's how they viewed society. That's how they viewed, you know, again, they're humans.

1:05:03These are like, judges are just people, like there's a school of thought that says, you know, what do you call a lawyer with a 50 IQ? Your honor. Because I make per year about 30 times what a judge makes. So if I'm an intelligent lawyer, unless I'm incredibly deeply committed to the furtherance of justice, which not that many people are that deeply committed to that, that they would give up a 30 X pay increase. you're not getting the best and brightest people in the world on the bench no offense to the judges i appear in front of i'm sorry guys but the truth is you're not getting the best and brightest you're getting people that you know kind of want to move the meat through the machine they want a nine to five job they want guaranteed health care they want all the things that come with being a judge so i i think it is very easy to think that the way it was 30 years ago is the way it is i don't think that's the case anymore.

1:05:57But there are certain basic realities, you know, like if early on in a child's life, a child spends a tremendous amount of time with mom, mom is going to be very resistant to dad having a big role in the case party's divorce. By the way, a lot of divorcing men don't spend a lot of time at home before they're getting divorced. Why? Because they're unhappy. so they don't go home. They just stay at work later or they go out to the bar after work and they don't go home. So they don't end up spending much time with the kids, but it's not that they don't love their kids. It's that they just don't wanna be with this person they're unhappy with and it's unhappy with them.

1:06:36They don't want their children to be exposed to like the passive aggressive relationship between mom and dad. So they stay out of the house longer. And what happens when they get divorced, he gets weaponized against them. Well, he was never home. He never helped the kids with the homework. And the guy says, well, wait, give me a chance. Like, yeah, I didn't go home. I didn't want to go home. It was tense at home. We didn't really like each other very much. But now we're getting divorced, and I don't just want to be the fun parent. I want to do the heavy lifting. I want 50 % of the time. I want to do the fun part, and I also want to do the part where I, you know, make sure the homework gets done and that they eat their broccoli and brush their teeth.

1:07:10And I understand when women go, well, he's never done that before. Right, but when would he have had opportunity to do it before? So, again, it's a complex thing. And anytime someone says the system is rigged, you know, that's such an easy way to claim defeat rather than fight any kind of a battle. It's just go, oh, well, it's just the game's rigged, so I'm not even going to play.

1:07:32Francis Foster:And James, I'm curious what happens when people come in and sit down with you. What percentage, broadly speaking, would you say of people who are, I mean, it sounds like the way you've presented it is kind of the vast majority of people get married with good intentions. of staying together, and then it doesn't work out because they probably didn't do the things that they did initially to make it work, right? So there's none of this like planning and manipulation or whatever. But by the time they get to a divorce, are people in a different place now and they're kind of like, F you, or I'm going to make you pay for the X, Y, Z?

1:08:08Sometimes, yeah. I mean, I would say I get a number of varieties. So I get what I would call the tire kickers, which are the people who come in and say, I'm not ready to do anything yet, but I can smell that things aren't going right. And I'd like to just know what my rights and obligations potentially are. I love those people. I prefer those people. I think it's really good for a person to come in when they're having some problems and they say, you know, I want to understand, like, what will it look like if this goes in that direction? Why do you love them? Because I think they're being proactive.

1:08:39And I think they're asking a question they probably should have asked before they got married, which is what legally is going to happen when I sign a marriage contract and what effect does it have on my rights and obligations? Like most people have absolutely no idea what they did legally when they got married. It's the most legally significant thing you're going to do other than dying. And you didn't even get a pamphlet. You didn't get anything that explained to you what it was legally that you opted out of the title system. Like that's amazing. Like if you buy your wife a Rolex watch, you bought yourself one half of a Rolex watch.

1:09:09Like you're one person in the eyes of the law. But no one ever explains that to you. We're just talking about what cake you're going to have. So I think that it's valuable for someone to come in and say, I'm thinking about this direction, or I'm afraid my spouse is thinking that we're heading in this direction. What could it look like? And then they can make informed decisions about how hard they want to steer out or into that, right?

1:09:33Francis Foster:Because hopefully one of those possibilities is to work harder on their relationship. 100%. And nothing I would ever say to someone in that setting would ever be to hasten the demise of their marriage. It would always be, you know, you're here for information and I want to share that information with you. I want you to understand your potential rights and obligations, what paths you might take, whether you go to a mediator or an arbitrator or go through litigation. And I'm also going to use that as an opportunity to say, look, are you in individual counseling of some kind where you can sort of process these things?

1:10:01Are you and your spouse, have you ever tried speaking to someone together. Have you ever thought about talking together with a counselor or clergyman or someone who might be able to help you navigate the challenges that you're having? It's totally okay to have challenges in a relationship. People have challenges all the time in relationships. I even have people who come in and say, that said I want a divorce. I caught him cheating. I intercepted a text message, came up on my iPad that was supposed to go to his iPhone because we had the same iMessage logged in. I mean, I owe Steve Jobs a tremendous debt of gratitude.

1:10:29He has the integration of Apple devices has created more people finding out about their spouse's affairs than anything else in the world. But they come in and they say, look, I want a divorce. You know, I just found this out. And I if I immediately said, great, we'll file, I'll file it right now. I would be, I think, doing a very irresponsible thing. What I often say is, OK, if we want to file for divorce, we can file today. We can file tomorrow. We can file next week. I'm not retiring. Don't worry. But let's just take a breath. Let's talk about what your paths might be, rights and obligations.

1:10:58And then let's see, because there are lots and lots of people. They don't talk about it very often. There's lots of people that have issues of infidelity that happen in a marriage, and they make it through it. They move through it. They figure out a way. They forgive. They forget. Sometimes the forgiving is in the forgetting. Sometimes they forgive, but they don't forget. But they try to make some changes, and so it doesn't happen again. So I try to give them a very honest assessment of things. So that's one type of person who comes in. And again, sometimes it's just, hey, things aren't great.

1:11:25I see some storm clouds coming. I want to know my rights and obligations. Sometimes it's the storm is here. I caught them cheating or I'm cheating and I just got caught. OK, that's a little more serious. But again, doesn't necessarily mean it's over, but it's good that it's fragile. We can agree it's fragile. So let's talk about what your rights and obligations might be. Sometimes people come in, they've been served with papers. You know, their spouse is moving forward with a divorce. OK, let's talk about you've been served with papers. Here's what you have to do legally to defend on that. And here's the paths that we might take from here.

1:11:56so it's very rare that someone comes in and it's like a professional hit you know like they've like i've been planning this for six months i've got here's the bank statements here is that every once in a while someone does come in and they're very organized to the point where it begs the question like wow how long i mean are those more women or men more women yeah of course women do that's why i said women are more tactical in their thinking and they're more patient in some ways i mean their prefrontal cortex develops way before ours does so it could be a function of that But, yeah, I mean, I've had women...

1:12:27I had a woman come in last week who... Her husband has been cheating for about eight months, and she has had full access to his messages and texts and emails for that entire time. And she's just been tracking it in real time. Oh. And she's just, like, every lie, she's tracking it. And she gave me this whole timeline. And I'm just looking at it. And, you know, I had two thoughts. One was, this guy has no idea. He has no idea that he's completely exposed. Two, other people's infidelity is hilarious. Like, there's just nothing funnier than reading someone's messages to their... Because we all think we're so interesting and sexy and fascinating, but it's just completely goofy.

1:13:10All the like, you know, like, oh, baby, I missed you so bad. Like, when you read... Like, I'll tell you this. We have, like, dramatic readings of it sometimes at lunchtime in my office. Like, in the conference room, we'll all get together and we'll, like, you know, we'll have one of the female staff members will read the female part and one of them will read the mail part and they're like baby when i was inside you last night it was the greatest feeling ever you know like we're just reading it out loud going do these people have any idea but ultimately you know um she what i thought was scarier is that she has managed to just continue to act like nothing's wrong for six months with this guy i couldn't do that i could you couldn't i couldn't do it for a day no i'd be like six months like and i mean explicit stuff explicit stuff which by the way I will tell you as a divorce lawyer you end up having to see a lot of naked pictures of people and it's never people you'd want to see naked pictures of it's like it's like being in a nude beach it's never people there that you'd want to see naked but James this is a question I really wanted to ask because I don't think we we we talk about divorce do people regret divorce do people look back have you ever seen that where people go you know what she was or he was the love of my life and yeah i you know it was a heat of the moment i said what i said we did what we did but actually we kind of threw it away i think what you're describing is people regretting the demise of a relationship i think divorce is burying something that's dead most of the time and it's not man i regret that we buried that it's i regret that it died you know i always tell people i don't make it rain i sell umbrellas i think that there are a lot of people that say you know we could have done better we could have done different you know i i i'm a divorced man myself i've been divorced for 20 years from the mother of my kids and a very friendly divorce she's a lovely lovely human being one of my favorite human beings in the world she's been remarried for 15 years our oldest son just got married a couple of months ago and we We had a wonderful time, all of us at the wedding, her family, my family, all of us together.

1:15:15And I have to say, like, there are many times where she and I, even though she's very happily married, will say, like, man, we really screwed that up. We screwed it up. If sheer power of will could make two people love each other forever, we probably would've. But we just got a lot of things wrong. And then sometimes you're so far from center that you just kind of go, yeah, it was the right thing to do. And I think our divorce was the right thing to do. I think that her very happy marriage, you know, is proof of that. I think our sons are very well-adjusted, happy young men who had a great, you know, relationship with both of their parents.

1:15:51And she and I have had a great co-parenting relationship. We both moved on to have really fulfilling relationships. But is there something very sad about it that it's like, oh, we probably could have done better, you know? Yeah, of course. But we didn't know that at the time, you know? And I don't think anybody takes glee in the demise of a relationship. I think most people, when they marry, they have good intentions. But things fall apart. The center cannot hold. It's the nature of things. And one of the things I've... There's a line, one of my favorite poems is a poem by Joseph Brodsky. It's called A Song.

1:16:29He wrote it when his wife died. And the refrain of the poem is, I wish you were here, dear, I wish you were here. And one of the lines is, I wish you were here, dear. I wish you were here. I wish I knew no astronomy when the stars appear. Because I think that there's something very magical about the stars until you learn astronomy. And then you're like, oh, that's actually a dead light that's hitting us now. I think that all of us, if we look back on our relationships that weren't successful, or even our relationships that are successful, we look at it and we go, you know, I could have done better.

1:16:59There's almost nothing I've done in my life that I don't look at and go, oh, I could have done better. you know the first three years of your child's life i bet there's some things that you go i wish i'd been a little more patient when that happened or i wish i'd handled that differently and i think that's a sign of a mature human being to say you know oh i could have done better and i wish i had done better but we did what we did you know we made the choices that we made i think that the hard thing to do and therefore the right thing to do is while you're in the relationship constantly subject yourself to that vigilance rather than later look back and go what could I have done to keep this together while you're in it what can I do to keep this strong what can I do to help this person feel loved and seen what do I need from this because I think the most dangerous I will tell you in 25 years of practicing divorce law and seeing very candid versions of people I I think the most dangerous lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves.

1:17:58I think we constantly lie to ourselves about what we need and what we want and what will make us happy and what won't. And I think that if we could be more honest with ourselves, it would be the starting point of being more honest with our partner. You shouldn't have to rearrange your life to deal with hair loss. With HIMSS, expert care is right there when you need it. Simple, online and personalized. HIMSS provides access to prescription hair loss treatments with clinically proven ingredients like finasteride and minoxidil. These treatments can stop hair loss and regrow hair in as little as three to six months.

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1:19:29Francis Foster:It's a really, really interesting insight into human nature. And I suppose the question I wanted to ask is, do you think sometimes divorce is the easy option? And maybe also do people then try to go for a divorce and they discover it actually isn't that easy at all. It might be the conclusion of their problems, but actually it's very painful and traumatic and especially terrible for kids. Yeah. I mean, I think you're always trading one set of problems for another. If you're unhappily married, you have one set of problems, but you don't have another. If you're divorced, you have one set of problems, but you don't have another.

1:20:07If you're single, one set of problems, not another. Married, one set, not another. So I think life's about picking the set of problems you're interested in having and then moving forward with that set of problems and trying to live your life within that set of problems right i think that sometimes the process of divorce is something that reminds people what they mean to each other so i have seen a lot of divorces that start and then stop and and i don't find that that surprising i mean i find when you're in the midst of death you know or illness you're the most acutely aware of the value of life and good health.

1:20:44You know, I think, you know, when you get over being sick, you find yourself going, oh, I'm going to take better care of myself. And then you forget. Yeah. And then very promptly, you go back to like, yeah, whatever, you know, because that's human nature. But I do think that sometimes we have to come right up to the edge of losing something to see the value that it has in our life. Sometimes physically separating from someone is something that makes you feel their absence in a real way. So I think that's a piece of it. um i do think that there are people that never recover from their divorce i think that there are people who the wound of it and the process of it because divorce can be incredibly ugly i mean it's it's intimacy weaponized like if anybody knows your soft targets it's your wife like it you know to you know personally i think to love anything is insane like it's insane it's it's just not rational to love anything because to love anything is to accept the inevitability of losing it like you get a dog greatest thing in the world having a dog you're going to lose that dog like that dog is going to die before you most likely they have a really short lifespan personally i think it's worth having it you know but you are when you decide you're going to love that stupid dog.

1:22:06You have decided you are going to open yourself up to the inevitability of that pain. So I think there's a tremendous amount of bravery involved in loving anyone or anything, because to love anything is to say, okay, I'm going to accept the pain of losing this, because you will lose your wife. You'll lose her to death or you'll lose her to divorce. I hope you lose her to death. What a bizarre thing, right? Like in what world do you say as a courtesy, I hope your marriage ends in death. But I do. I hope your marriage ends in death because the other option is it ends in divorce. So I hope it ends in death.

1:22:42So there is something about saying, okay, I'm going to fully accept the risk of this. And some of that risk is that if you let this person see authentically into who you are and what you're afraid of and what really hurts you and what your soft points are, they can weaponize that against you if they want to. Like, we all know, anyone who's in a relationship, even like the two of you are in a relationship with each other, I guarantee you each have a sentence in your head that you could say to the other one that you know would make them, like, go home that night crying. Like, anyone you're close with and know and care about, you know what they're insecure about, you know what they're afraid of, you know what they're ashamed of.

1:23:27So you have in your head, you've got it in the chamber there, You've got a thing that you go, you know, if I ever heard it, I would say this to that person. And by the way, you probably would never want to say it to that person. Because when you love someone, you wouldn't want to hurt them. Even if they hurt you, you wouldn't want to hurt them like that. You know, like, but I guarantee you know the thing you could say to your wife. And your wife knows the thing that she could say to you that would reduce you to just absolute tears. That's the risk. But you have to take that risk if you're going to have a relationship.

1:23:58That's why I think to love something is brave. It's insane, but it's brave because you're saying, I'm going to expose the possibility of being hurt by you. But because of that risk, divorce is brutal. It's just, it can be brutal because even the friendliest divorce is a shift of this fundamental relationship, this foundational relationship. And it feels like everything is on the line. Like where you live, when you see your children, your basic finances, the person who you thought was your person and you were theirs, like all of that is falling apart. It's what drew me to being a divorce lawyer.

1:24:38I was a psychology major as an undergraduate and I wanted very much to maybe be a therapist. And then I realized therapists have to listen more than they talk. And that wasn't much. But I realized that, you know, there is something incredible about the opportunity because a divorce you know the barn is burned down and now I can see the moon you know like everything's fallen apart and now what and to be part of the architecture of a person's next chapter to me even after 25 years it's still the most like humbling amazing beautiful thing to be part of to help be part of the architecture of someone rebuilding a life when it feels like everything is everything is lost everything's at risk

1:25:19Francis Foster:I mean, your point about loving is so true because, I mean, children are the best example of this. Yeah. Because you bring a child into the world who you love more than anything that you've ever loved. But obviously, you know, I remember speaking to a very good friend of mine after having a child and said, I've got some fears now that I didn't know were possible. Oh, yeah. Not even that, like your heart is walking around. Right. Exactly. Like it's just walking around and like everything is putting it at risk. Right. And like you can handle it yourself. Like I can handle my pain. Like but my kids pain.

1:25:57Like oh. Like the terror that comes with that. But it also creates these opportunities to like you know. I mean again like the you know I remember you know my sons are adults now. But I remember my now 28 year old. He's a lawyer too. When he was like five, maybe, he had terrible pneumonia and he was so sick. He had 103 or 104 fever. We kept calling the pediatrician and they kept saying, okay, if it goes up to 105, you got to get him to the hospital. And he was laying in my lap and I was the most scared I've ever been in my life. Like I had never felt terror like that. And I was 22 when he was born, so I was probably like 27, 28.

1:26:39and he was sweating and cold and like kind of like so feverish that he was out of it and he kept sort of kind of going in and out of consciousness and i remember having this big ridiculous smile on my face and going it's okay it's okay buddy you're okay you're okay don't worry don't be scared it's okay it's okay and inside i was screaming i was just screaming inside like i i can't handle this i'm not ready for this i'm not qualified like i want my fucking mom Like, I don't know what's, like, this is bad. Like, I don't know what to do. Like, I'm terrified he's gonna die. Oh my God, is he gonna die?

1:27:13But I was like, okay, no, you don't get to do that. Like, you need to be, you need to be, it's okay. It's okay, it's okay. And now it's what, 20 something years later, he survived, he's fine. I can still feel that feeling. That's the terror that comes with real love. Like, that's the terror that only loving something more than you've ever loved yourself like to me it's worth it to me it's the greatest thing because the love and the pride and the joy like the you know that same seven-year-old you know i i sat with a hundred people when he got married a couple of months ago and watched a beautiful young woman who he went to law school with stand there and in front of all these people say these vows and they wrote their own vows and she was like you're the strongest man i know you're the bravest man you make me feel so safe and i i was weeping because i thought like we did it like we did it this is what we wanted to do we wanted to create a man like that and we did we did we found we created one that a brilliant woman she's a lawyer to like goes yep that's my guy that's the one i want and what an incredible thing now if you want that you've got to have that terrifying moment you've got to have all those and all the other terrifying moments that i'm sure are soon to come you know or will come down the road so yeah i think i think love is the greatest thing in the world but i think it is an absolutely insane terrifying thing yeah it's the best i i was gonna ask

1:28:48Francis Foster:as someone who's watched thousands and thousands of people not not only watch but participated in the process of them getting divorced and often acrimonious circumstances how did you feel watching your son get married? I felt, I think the same way anybody else does. I felt I'm cheering for them. I felt choked up by it. I felt an abundance of optimism that's probably totally misplaced. You know, they have as good a shot at happiness as anybody. And, and I, you know, I've been pilloried. Matt Walsh gave me a whole ration of crap for this because I, I said that, that marriage is like the lottery, you're probably not going to win.

1:29:30But if you win, what you win is so good that it's worth buying a ticket. Now, he harped on the fact that you can't do anything to improve your chances of winning the lottery, but you can do things to improve your chances of staying married. That wasn't my point. My point was, you're probably not going to win, statistically. But that if you win, it's like winning the lottery. like that. So I look at my son as he was getting married and I thought there is a 50 plus percent chance that this will end in divorce. But I hope it doesn't, because if it doesn't, the value it will add to his life will be phenomenal.

1:30:10And if it does end in divorce, I hope it ends in the way that his mother and I's marriage ended, which is with love and with respect for each other and with care for the children that may come of that marriage. And again, I think happily ever after can mean happily ever after separately. Divorce doesn't have to be a failure. Things can end, and they can end with love and with dignity and with respect. We could stop viewing divorce as failure, and we could start viewing it, viewing love and romantic love like chapters in a long book. And maybe you have, you know, people you dated and those are some chapters and then you find your one true love and then you live out the rest of your story with that person.

1:30:59I hope that's what happens for you. I hope that's what happens for my son. I hope that's what happens for every married person I know who's happily married. But it may be that sometimes marriages need to end and when they end, that there will be some other love, some other chapter that's waiting for you that you wouldn't have got to if you hadn't been through this dark chapter or difficult chapter or chapter that was bright and then ended in some negative way. It's a unique and rare thing, the kind of acrimony. Like when I, I don't go to a lot of parties, but you know, when I do go to a party and people say, oh, what do you do for a living?

1:31:34So I'm a divorce lawyer. They go, oh my God, you must have stories. And if I said to them, yes, you know, there was this couple and they fell in love and then they gradually you know learned that the venn diagram of things they had in common is getting smaller and they grew apart emotionally and then they decided that it would be good for the two of them to potentially end the relationship so they parted amicably divided their assets and they both spent time with the children in different ratios the person would go like well that's the most boring ridiculous story ever like what that's not interesting at all they want to hear like and then he took a chainsaw and he cut the car in half and he said you can pick which half you want that's the story which true story by the way That's what people want to hear.

1:32:11The people who talk about their divorce are usually people who went through a really ugly, traumatic divorce. Like, my divorce is one of the least interesting things about me. And one of the least interesting things about my ex-wife. But people who've been through a really ugly divorce, it scars them. And it becomes fundamental to their identity, and it becomes something they talk about. Just like, you know, people don't talk about the prenup that got upheld. They talk about the prenup that got set aside. You know, so people tend to talk about... People don't talk about all the planes that flew and landed safely.

1:32:40They talk about the one that crashed. But thankfully, that's the Menard. You know, what you were talking about through a lot of this, it really reminded me, actually, of one of my teaching days, because you're talking about hope. I remember when I was teaching year three, which in the UK is seven and eight-year-olds, and we used to do this thing called philosophy for kids. So for half an hour, 40 minutes, once a week, we'd do philosophy, basic philosophy with the kids. God, I love the UK. And I remember I sat down with the kids, seven, eight years old, and the question was, I put on the board, would you rather own a dog and have it die or not own a dog and never experience and have it die but never experience what it's like to own a dog?

1:33:29Put your hands up. Every single kid in the room put their hand up and goes, I want to own a dog. Of course. Of course. It's something that's so deep within us. Yeah. It's the hope. And you'd ask the kid, and they might not be able to articulate it, because deep down, we all know that the most special thing, the thing that we all desire above everything else is love and connection. Yeah. And if you deny that and you say you're not going to get involved or you don't want to get married or all of these things, what you're denying yourself is the shot. Yeah. And that's all any of us have. It's the shot.

1:34:05Well, and that's, you know, I believe that marriage is the triumph of faith over reason. I think it really is a faith. It's an act of faith. It's an act of saying, I believe in the possibility over reason, over logic, over statistics, that the connection that I feel for this person, that my life will have value or deeper value because of this. and I think, you know, proof denies faith. Like there's really no way to prove that a love is going to last. There's no formula. Like you just have to have faith. It's an act of faith. And I'm a person who I think that our lives would be very empty if we didn't have faith in some things.

1:34:45And I think faith in love, like love is all around us. Love is everywhere. Like when people say to me all the time, well, you're a divorce lawyer, do you believe in love? And I always think it's such a funny, like it's like, do I believe in gravity? Like gravity exists whether I believe in it or not. Like, love is everywhere. It's all around me. I feel it. I experience it all the time. And my life would be poorer for it. It's the only thing. Like, I think every single thing we do, we do to find love, feel love, feel worthy of love. Like, everything is tied to love. And I think that, you know, love is, it's all around us.

1:35:21It's, you know, I think love is in some ways like the greatest insight into God for any of us. because, you know, Jesus said, you know, the kingdom of God is within you and all around you. Well, I think love is within you and all around you. And the question is, is how much of it will you open yourself to? I don't think you can let yourself be completely open to all of it. I think that we have to, to do it properly and with depth, we have to connect to another person and say, okay, I'm gonna commit to connecting to you in this deep and profound way. That's why I think pair bonds really work. And I think maybe that's why we were designed the way we were designed physically.

1:35:56you know what's why life is born of the connection of a man and a woman it has to be a metaphor for something it has to be has to have some meaning i have faith in that so i i genuinely you know everybody harps on the statistic that roughly 56 percent of marriages end in divorce but the more interesting statistic to me is that 87 percent of people who get divorced are remarried within five years of their divorce. That's an insane number. That means you've tried it. It failed catastrophically. The wheels came off and 87 % within five years go, all right, let's give it another shot. And I think to me, that's not a statistic of how stupid people are.

1:36:44I think that's a statistic of how deeply we need and want this. And I think that's something worth fighting for. It's something brave. It's the hard thing to do. So it's probably the right thing to do.

1:36:54Francis Foster:What a great way to end our brilliant conversation, James. It's been absolutely awesome, man. It was so much fun having you on. We're going to go to Substack, where our audience are going to get to ask you their questions. But before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before James answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our sub stack. The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this. What's the funniest story you've had as a divorce lawyer? Do you think it's fair that someone poor can marry someone rich, have a two-year marriage, then claim a large chunk because they can?

1:37:29Divorce reveals who people really are. What's the biggest surprise you've seen in human behavior during that process?

1:37:35Francis Foster:What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

1:37:44I think we're not, I mean, I know it's very popular to just, you know, crap all over social media these days, but we're not talking about the antagonistic effect that social media is having on relationships, on marriages in particular. I think that there's a chapter in my book called, if we were going to invent an infidelity generating machine, it would be called Facebook. I think you could amend that now to say meta Instagram, but I think we're not talking about the fact that, again, not to sound like Jaron Lanier, but I think we need to give a really serious look at what impact social media is having on our perception of our relationships, our perceptions of each other as romantic prospects, our satisfaction with our sex lives.

1:38:31I think it's having a profoundly negative impact, and we're not looking at it because we're busy looking at the effect on the individual, not on the couple.

1:38:40Francis Foster:The only thing I would say about that, and obviously that is a thing that people do say a lot, and I think there's a lot of truth to it, is it's also about the way you use it. And I think we should also remember that because I can tell you, I'm someone who, like, I was never an Instagram person. It just isn't my medium. But because of, you know, what we do and blah, blah, blah, I'm on it. all I see on my Instagram, literally all I see is really cool parenting stuff that makes me more connected to my wife. And it's like, oh, oh, we're not the only people that are struggling with this stupid thing that this person's managed to make funny.

1:39:16So you've got an algorithm that's, that's figured out, you know, what's going to resonate with you in a positive way.

1:39:22Francis Foster:And I imagine it's also because like, when I see something I don't like, I'm like, don't show me more of this. Right. Right. So I think what you're talking about is having an active relationship with it. So when I was in graduate school at NYU, my mentor and his research assistant was Neil Postman, Dr. Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Television, Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology, a number of other books before he passed away. And one of the things that Neil used to say all the time is that there is a difference between watching a program on television and watching television.

1:39:54Because watching television was you just sat back and let it feed you. Right. TikTok, your YouTube algorithm, whatever that might be. Whereas watching a program. So what you're describing is someone having an active relationship with their social media and their algorithm. So I don't want to see more of that. Meaning I don't want to be around that. I'm not going to like stop showing me women in bikinis. I don't need to see that. Like if I hang around a barbershop long enough, I'm going to think about getting a haircut. So don't do it. And oh, yes, I want more of this because that feeds good things within me.

1:40:27Great. You're describing a person with discipline. I think the majority of people probably lack that level of discipline. And so they're getting carried in directions that, again, I don't know that they would be, you know, when we apply technology to an efficient system, you magnify the efficiency. And when you apply technology to an inefficient system, you magnify the inefficiency. I think the same thing is true. When you apply social media to a functional relationship where the person is committed to the relationship, you can amplify the efficiency and the commitment. When you apply it to someone who's having challenges in their commitment and in their focus on the relationship, it can amplify the lack of focus or the distractions from the relationship, and it can amplify the antagonistic things to that relationship.

1:41:12So I think, again, teaching people to curate their use of social media differently once they're married could be a very useful thing. But again, we don't have like premarital classes. We don't, you know, you want to get a driver's license. You got to take a little test. You got to do a road test. You get married, let's go get married. It's no waiting period. Just go ahead and marry you. 50 bucks. Elvis will do it for you in Vegas. Like, but maybe we should be, you know, people on the right in particular, there's a lot of people talking about how we should get rid of no-fault divorce, how there should be more barriers to exit.

1:41:47And I've always felt that that's got it completely backwards. That's like saying, you know, oh, there's a lot of people with broken bones in hospitals. We should just close all the hospitals because then people wouldn't get so many broken bones. Like, I think you're mixing it up. I think we should have barriers to entry. I think it should be a little harder to get married. Like, if you want to get married in the Catholic Church, you go to pre-cana. You have to go and you learn about marriage. You learn about contraception. You learn about, you know, there's usually Catholic happily married couples that will talk to you about, hey, here's our city.

1:42:14The men will be put in one room and the guy will say, hey listen you have to learn to do this with your wife and that with your wife and the women will say hey listen men are like this you got to watch out and there's a lot of that there's none of that outside of the religious context i mean that happens in the jewish rabbinical context there's you know people will take time to say hey men this is what you need to learn about your wife women this is what you need to learn about your husband and being a wife and how to deal with a husband you don't have anything like that in a secular context in society so maybe something like that would be useful that's the thing maybe we're not saying is that premarital education barriers

1:42:47Francis Foster:to entry might be a good idea well it sort of sounds like pre pre-relationship education really because all of that stuff is going to be useful for for any relationship for any relationship yeah which is interesting because you know if you ask me how much use did i have for like you know algebra or like how to divide uh fractions it wasn't a lot no but if you gave me some education in like how to talk to women or, you know, how to, you know, navigate conflict within the context of a romantic relationship. Because you can't win an argument with your spouse. It's not possible. It's not possible.

1:43:28If you lose, you lost. And if you win, you lost. Because you've upset your spouse. You've made them feel like a loser. That's not helpful. So you can't win an argument with your spouse. Someone could have taught you that in fifth grade. Someone could have taught you that. And like, we could do a better job of teaching people these life skills, these real things. But we don't. I mean, maybe it may explain the popularity of my work to some degree. Is that we're consuming so much. I've always wondered. I'm like, why do tens of millions of people, are they interested in what a divorce lawyer has to say about love and relationships?

1:44:01But I think it may be for some people the first real education that they're getting on how to facilitate the demise of a happy relationship. and you can reverse engineer from that something about how to keep us together you know i'll finish with this it's so funny the stories that you're telling just remind me of when i back to my former career i remember there was a little boy he was 11 years old and he got in an argument with a girl she started it and she said something nasty to him and he went well you're fat and then she burst into tears all her friends swarmed around it exploded everything and I literally had to remove him from the room because it kicked off I had to get somebody else to come and take care of the girls the boys were oh and I had to take him outside and he looked at me went what did I do what did I do what did I do I said Jaden something you're gonna need to know and I'm saying it to you not as a teacher.

1:45:02I'm saying it to you as one man to someone who will be a man one day. Man to future man. Don't ever make a comment or make fun of a woman's weight. And he went, yeah, but she said, I go, it doesn't matter. You will never win this. And I'm telling you right now, if you learn one thing from me, learn this. Never make fun of a woman's weight. Even if you're right, you will always be in the wrong. I'm willing to bet that that lesson stuck. and i'm telling you right now it's a lesson that like any man should probably learn fairly early in life like and and it's also useful in the in the gender context to realize that like there are things you're not going to be allowed to say that a woman might get away with saying like if she called you fat it would probably be okay but you calling her fat is going to you're the villain i guarantee it in this story you will be the villain no matter what vile things she said to you before So, yeah, I mean, these are lessons that we all know this stuff is true.

1:45:59But where's the context where we're going to say it out loud to each other? And I don't think the place to learn it is when you've already unpinned the grenade. I mean, he learned it the hard way. That's kind of what I'm trying to do is just say to people, like, if you're in my office, it's already too late. Like, I'm trying to get you out of my office. I'm trying to steer you in the direction that the thought of divorce is just, you know, something that fleetingly passes your brain when your spouse does something particularly boneheaded. But the rest of the time, it's something you would never consider.

1:46:29So I hope to put myself out of a job. I suspect I probably won't.

1:46:34Francis Foster:It's been great having you. It's a blast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where James is going to answer your questions. Sitting before you is a married man who's only ever been with his wife and Francis the forever fornicator. As a divorced man, who of the two do you envy the most?

1:47:06Don't forget to click the link in the description of this episode to grab the special CyberGhost VPN discount. It's completely risk-free, so check it out today.