Divorce Lawyer: The #1 Sign Your Marriage Will FAIL | James Sexton

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
The Perfect Lunch Combo.
That first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends, and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today.

**James Sexton** (0:24)
You can't pretend you meant to get divorced. When you were walking down the aisle, you believed that this was going to work out. There's something beautiful to be found in here. I think that can be an amazing thing. You don't have to wait to get divorced to do that.

**Codie Sanchez** (0:37)
My guest today is James Sexton, one of the world's most famous divorce attorneys, who has seen more than a thousand marriages end, and he's going to share exactly what the relationships do that last and what those do that fail.

**James Sexton** (0:48)
Every marriage ends in death or divorce. The goal should be that when one of us dies, to look at the other and be able to say, this person helped me become the most authentic version of who I am, and they're still my favorite person in the world.

**Codie Sanchez** (1:01)
There's a 70% failure rate. Does marriage still work?

**James Sexton** (1:05)
The question people most often ask me is...

**Codie Sanchez** (1:11)
There's so many interesting ways to go with you. We've become buddies. But one of the parts I find fascinating is inverse thinking, right? So Charlie Munger always said invert to always invert, and that's how you find the truth. And so you've watched thousands of marriages die. You've been a part of thousands of breakups of marriages. And you've also written the book on how to not break up and how to not get divorced. And so I want to start with just the basics.
Right now, you're in a room, two people. How can you tell somebody is going to get divorced or not? What are the most telltale signs?

**James Sexton** (1:48)
I mean, some of it is going to obviously be the way that they relate to each other verbally, like how much they're listening to each other, how much they're talking past each other or over each other. How much grace they give each other. I've always said, to me, the sound of a marriage that's about to end is like, it's a very simple, subtle sound. It's this, it's, what?

**Codie Sanchez** (2:12)
Huh? Yeah, whatever.

**James Sexton** (2:14)
It's a tone of voice more than a content. And the tone of voice says everything. It's like, the what? Like, why are you talking again? Like, what are you, what? Like, like it's, it's the contempt. It's the opposite.
If you think about it, it's the opposite of when we're dating. Like when we're dating, we're interested and we're interesting.
And we feel interesting and we feel interested. And there's this sense of like, tell me about you. I want to know. And let me tell you about me. And like, there's this feeling of this exchange.
And then like, when we're together and it's falling apart, it's the total opposite of that. It's that sense of like, what are you saying? Like, and, and that to me is the sound of it. The feeling of it is a different thing, too. I mean, anybody has ever been out with like, a bunch of couples and one of them, you just, like, the vibe is just, did they get in a fight on the way over here or do they just hate each other? Like, what's going on? Like, and you can just kind of feel it in the way that they're interacting or not, like, looking at their phones instead, while the other one's talking, that they're just not even, what? Yeah, what? Yeah. All right. You know, like, it's a feeling. And I think, you know, again, like, I think studying the opposite is really the thing. Like, when we, we fall in love so fast, and it's such a powerful emotion, it's so intoxicating, it's such a deep connection, and then we very slowly disconnect, and it happens slowly. And it's just one of those things that then you turn around and go, like, how did we get here? Like, we never meant to get here. How did we get here? Like, nobody ever wakes up and just goes, I think I'm going to, like, really fuck my life up today. You know, I'm just going to really just take this fundamental foundational relationship that I've invested a tremendous amount of my life capital in and I'm just going to let it go to shit. Like, I don't think anybody thinks that. And yet, you know, 50% or so of marriages end catastrophically, meaning they divorce. Another 10 to 20% either separate but never file for divorce, go out for milk and never come back, or they just sort of unhappily stay together and under surveys basically say, yeah, I kind of don't think this person adds any value to my life anymore. Which again, why would we sign up for something that fails roughly 60 to 70% of the time, or at least doesn't, it catastrophically fails close to 50% of the time, and doesn't achieve the goal 70% of the time. And yet, we do over and over again.