James Sexton: Divorce Lawyer on Marriage, Relationships, Sex, Lies & Love

We have been encouraged culturally to criticize people we're in long-term relationships with. Not new relationships. New relationships, you put the person on a pedestal, you're allowed to just... Oh, they're wonderful. But every trope out there in every form of popular media is the wife rolling her eyes at the husband, and the husband being like, ugh, this loathsome harpy that castrated me, as if people are just passive players in their lives. And I think that is an incredibly toxic message to send to people, that this is how we should be relating to our partner. Don't take the piss out of your partner in front of people. The successful relationships I've seen are where people are just cheering for their partner, where they're thick as thieves, where there is just this feeling of, man, they like each other. They got each other's back like you wouldn't believe. Man, you could take sides against anybody. But take sides against their partner? You're going down. And when you see a couple that has that, that's so hard to break. But I think that comes from having a steadfast, no, I don't do that. I don't shit talk my partner, and you don't shit talk my partner to me. Because I think we're just so criticized by the world, the world is so full of criticism, we criticize ourselves so harshly, that having a partner who no matter what is like, "You've got this. I'm with you. Okay yeah, you screwed up. I see it. Look, I'm not going to lie to you about your blind spots. You screwed up. But you know what? People screw up sometimes. You got a right to screw up. A lot of people screw up. Come on, get up. Let's go. I know you have it in you." If you have that person, I feel like that's a superpower.

That's a great question, but it's a question that everybody wants there to be a simple answer. They want me to say cheating or money or the internet, but the reality is... I think it's a lot of little things. It's disconnection. That would be my answer. The reason marriages fail is disconnection. What causes disconnection? That's the bigger and I think more important question because like Tom Wolfe said about bankruptcy, "It happens very slowly and then all at once." Disconnection happens very slowly and then all at once. So most of the time what I think people want is an answer like cheating, but cheating is the big all at once thing. How did we get to the place where cheating was even something you were thinking about doing or that you would think about and then cross the line from thought into action? And that's, I think, the big question. So disconnection would be my answer. Do you think it's possible to introspect looking backwards for every individual case where the disconnection began and how it evolved?

You have a full section in your book on foot fetishes? I do. I do, which is funny because I don't know anything about foot fetishes.

It's tremendously courageous because it's terrifying. And it's only brave if you're scared. If you're not scared, it's not brave. It's just stupidity. It's bravery when you're afraid and you do the thing anyway. And so love is like yeah, it's scary. I don't care who you are. Being in the jiu-jitsu community, I'm around, as you are, incredibly tough people, physically tough people, mentally tough people. But I've seen some of those people taken down by a 120-pound woman, not from a grappling perspective, but they are taken apart by a woman in their life. And vice versa, I've seen men who... It really is shocking how much leverage we give to our romantic partners and how little genuine discussion we really have about it, how much we really are ever trained to think about it. There's nothing in school that teaches us about it. So much of literature and art is an idealized version of it. So little of it is real. And no matter how it evolves, when it ends in tragedy or drama, I feel like what people don't do enough is appreciate the good times, appreciate how beautiful it is to having taken the risk and to having experienced that kind of love. I think when you look at people that are divorcing each other... There's a Edgar Alan Poe quote, "The years of love have been forgotten in the hatred of a minute." I always am saddened, deeply saddened how people seem to forget how many beautiful moments have been shared when some reason, some drama, some breakup leads them to part ways.

The Johnny Depp, Amber Heard thing was a great example of, in a gunfight between those two, everyone was cheering for the bullets. I mean, I don't think anybody looked like a hero. They both looked like what they are, which is humans, really flawed humans who had... It really is like that People Magazine thing. Stars, they're just like us. We watched that and went like, "Oh, yeah. They're just like us. They cannot keep it together." They just have these ridiculous, toxic moments where both of them looked awful in that trial. What do you take away from that trial, just given all the work you've done? I mean, for me... I don't know if you can speak to that... it's probably the first time I've seen that kind of a complicated relationship, even just to say a relationship, laid out in this raw form, the fights of a relationship.

Okay, so speaking of the whole sociopath/empath that is all embodied in one human being that is you, let's go back to some cases perhaps that you've worked on, just something that stands out to you. What's maybe the craziest, most complicated thing you've worked on, is there something that pops to mind? Craziest would be different than most complicated.

It's usually going to be what, infidelity? You do have a chapter called, Everybody Fucks the Nanny. Everybody's Fucking the Nanny.

What would you say now on the flip positive side, we've been talking about the collapse of things, what about success? What's the secret to a successful romantic relationship? My mom used to say that it's hard to define intelligence, but you could spot stupid a mile away. So I'm much better at pointing out where people fall apart because I spend a lot of time with people who have fallen apart in their relationship. So it's easy to then say, "Well just don't do what they do." But I don't know that that's not an oversimplification. So again, I think the answer is connection. I think the answer is affection, presence, mindfulness and presence. I do think, in my personal and professional experience, that most people want you fully more than they just want you in a disconnected way. So if you were to say to your romantic partner, "You can have me for two hours where I'm giving you my undivided attention and I'm really joyful to be with you, or you can have me for eight hours where I'm sort of half paying attention and I kind of want to be someplace else for part of the time." There's just no choice there, it's so obvious.

You yourself are incredibly successful and a high performer, you've dealt with a lot of CEOs and just high performers in all walks of life. What can you say about successful relationships with those kinds of folks? That's a good question. I think-

Well then, that takes us to the question of prenups. What's your view on prenups, prenuptial agreements? It's not popular to quote Kanye West but, "If you ain't no chump, holla, we want prenup, we want prenup." I mean, that's what he had to say meaning.

Okay, so you mentioned infidelity, you write in the book, which everybody should get. It's a great book, it's a great read, it's a window into your soul. You, in this book that there's five kinds of infidelity. Do you remember? Can you explain? Yeah. I mean, what I wanted to say is that all infidelity is not the same, that there's different kinds and some of them are more obvious than others. There's the soulmate, that's the one I think I see most often, which is a person meets another person or rekindles on social media or elsewhere, a reconnection with another person in their life and they go, "Oh my God, this is the person I'm supposed to be with. I'm in love. The heart wants what the heart wants like, I'm leaving you for this person. I have found my true love." That's one type and it's an incredibly common type. And there are plenty of cautionary tales associated with that where people thought that they found their someone, and then it turns out it was no, it was just unfair. And a man who leaves his wife for his mistress just leaves a new job opportunity open.

Yeah, that's a complicated one. Just to actually just linger on that. How often have people with open marriages have been in your office? Well, let's see, and this is one of those from a research perspective, this would be flawed because I see, they're in my office because their marriage is falling apart. So there may be lots of people having open relationships that don't end up in a divorce lawyer's office, so I'd never meet them. But I meet a lot of people, that that was the Hail Mary pass.

We've mentioned some of this, but I'd love to get your opinion on having seen things gone wrong, and having mentioned Amber Heard and Johnny Depp. How much fighting do you think is okay in a relationship, and how to resolve the fights such that they don't escalate to that disconnection? Is there some wisdom you have for that? I imagine you've seen some epic fights. Yeah, I've seen some crazy fights. Even on my phone, I have some recordings, because now there's cameras everywhere. It's like Nest cams and Ring cams. And so a lot of this gets recorded, and people have phones so readily available that they can record and the other person didn't know it. And I listen to the way people speak to their... First of all, I listen to the way people speak to each other and I'm shocked. I listen to the way people speak to their romantic partner, to their spouse, and I'm blown away. I'm blown away.

Can you speak to some recent high profile divorces? The most recent I saw is Kevin Costner. Yeah, Kevin Costner is a great... I mean, I don't know him. I'm not involved in the case.

Yeah. Anyway, what is it? Lie To Me. This whole idea of honesty in relationships is interesting. I mean, clerks with the blowjobs. I don't know how to phrase it eloquently, but there's stuff you should be honest about and there's stuff maybe you don't need to be honest about. So in the law, it is illegal to commit fraud. Fraud is a material misrepresentation of fact, but the law specifically says you are permitted to engage in "mere puffery."

Well, you're a fascinating human being on many levels, but you're also exceptionally productive. You've talked to me about waking up early. We've met today at 11:00 AM and for you that's what? Late afternoon, I suppose. We had to negotiate and come to an agreement because I went to bed at 4:00 AM. And I was up. I get up at 4:00 every day, so now I hear-

You mentioned jujitsu. You're brown belt. What role has jujitsu played in your life? I love jujitsu. I trained martial arts from the time I was a little kid. I think I was seven or eight. I took up Okinawan Goju karate, and I did judo. It was always part of my life. Then I got to college and grad school, and I didn't have time for it, and I didn't do it so much. Then I got divorced. I was quite young still when I got divorced, and I had two young kids. I thought, "Well, I can grow a goatee, and buy a convertible, and do the thing you're supposed to do, and you're a dude with kids close to middle age, or I can try to do something more productive." So I said, "Well, maybe I'll go back to martial arts." So, I took up Muay Thai kickboxing, and they had a jujitsu class at the same school after the Muay Thai class.

Well speaking of which, you're romantic actually. What role... You've seen love break down completely. What role does love play in the human condition? I mean, it's everything, right? Love is romantic. Wars are fought for romantic love. Empires fall because of romantic love. It takes down kings. It takes down... We're all just struggling for it. We're all just chasing it. We're all chasing the dragon. It's like the rush. We all are... So, it's huge. It's huge. I mean, sex and love, which I like to believe are in some way connected, and love and romance, which again I like to believe are in some way connected. I think it's huge. I think It's a... Look, I've always thought most of what men do, including me, we do to get laid on some level. You want to be successful. Why? So, you can have money. Why? So you can have nice things so that you can attract attractive members of the opposite sex.