Marriage Lessons from Divorce Court - James Sexton - #1059

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
It's Valentine's Day.

**James Sexton** (0:01)
I mean, listen, this is a big day. People get all hopped up and make bad choices. It's technically, it's like the best holiday for my profession because-

**Chris Williamson** (0:08)
The biggest influx of future clients.

**James Sexton** (0:10)
Yeah, there's just a level of confidence out there today. You know what I mean? Like everybody out there is just like hyper confident. There's a lot of proposals happen on Valentine's Day. And the romantic in me kind of is like, oh, this is lovely. And then the professional in me is like, statistically, the likelihood you're going to cross paths with me is pretty good.

**Chris Williamson** (0:29)
For the people that are listening, if you haven't got your beloved a Valentine's gift yet, and you're shitting yourself and you think, oh crap, I haven't done anything. Or if you just want to connect more deeply with your partner or work out if you should leave them, I've put together a list of 50 of the internet's most viral questions to connect more deeply with your partner, some of them are evidence based, some of them are stuff that I've come up with, and then 25 to work out whether or not it's time to leave. You can get that at chriswillx.com/valentines.
That's chriswillx.com/valentines. We were just talking about famous people. What do you see in the marriages and divorces of professional athletes?

**James Sexton** (1:04)
Well, professional athletes are a very particular breed because professional athletes have had a monastic discipline, most of them to a very specific task. So they have going for them in the context of relationship, A, that they are used to putting all of their focus into one thing. How to catch and throw a football, how to shoot a three, whatever it might be. So that becomes a useful skill in marriage because in marriage, that one pointedness can also be very useful and it keeps you from being distracted by all the little shiny objects that happen. So that's helpful. It depends on the type of athlete because I will tell you, like NFL players, they get their contracts early. They usually have a girlfriend who they were with when they were on the come up, and then they get giant contracts very early on because they have such short careers. So, you're talking about getting a couple hundred million dollars when you're in your early 20s. You usually have just married the girl you were dating in high school, and all of that money is now being acquired during the marriage. So, it's all subject to division because you're one person in the eyes of the law on the day you get married. Most of these guys don't know that. Most of them aren't sophisticated enough that they would say, Hey, we should make sure I have a prenup. They don't always have the best people around them giving them advice when it comes to things like that. So, I think professional athletes, depending on the longevity, like MLB players, NHL players, they have a longer career. So, when I...
Yeah, any of the sports that don't have that massive physical injury likelihood, like even MMA fighters are more like NFL players, I mean, except without the amount of money behind it. You really do see that this person is just... When that person leaves their sport, they're really kind of unmoored. They're lost, a lot of them, because they... Especially NFL players, who have such a short career, and there's only so many slots for people to become a commentator, and it's a very specific kind of field. So, like, if somebody was like a defensive lineman, like, he may not be the most articulate fellow in the world because it wasn't required for his profession.

**Chris Williamson** (3:14)
Maybe a bit of CT.

**James Sexton** (3:15)
Yeah, and to have been so, like, focused on one thing, your whole career, your whole life. I mean, these are people who started playing when they were five, six, seven years old, and they made it a monastic discipline. And now, you know, they made a lot of money on it. When they're playing, very easy to be married, because it's very structured. You know, preseason you're here, postseason you're here, during the season you're traveling, they make lots of accommodations. All the leagues make lots of accommodations for family members so that people can travel with them. And they're busy, they're busy all the time. It's being an athlete is a very, it's like, representing professional musicians, like a rock musician who's a touring musician, they got a lot of free time. They got a lot of partying around them. But athletes, to perform at the level that most professional athletes have to perform, you kind of have to keep your shit together. So it's not as bad. What I will say is, their divorce rate when they retire or get injured and have to leave and retire as a function of it, they have no idea what to do with themselves.