The Divorce Expert: Slippage Is Tearing Marriages Apart! If Kids Are Your Top Priority & You Spot This You’ll Divorce In 1-3 Years!

James Sexton (0:00)

Every single marriage ends in death or divorce, but it ends. But the majority of them end because of slippage.

Steven Bartlett (0:06)

And what does slippage mean?

James Sexton (0:07)

Slippage is...

SPEAKER_3 (0:08)

James Sexton is back.

Steven Bartlett (0:10)

The world's leading divorce lawyer.

SPEAKER_3 (0:12)

With over two decades of experience, he offers practical, no-nonsense advice for maintaining healthy relationships.

James Sexton (0:17)

We live in a society that presumes marriage is a good idea. You're about to do something incredibly dangerous that fails so much of the time. And I think it has almost nothing to do with love. But if you get married, here's what I will tell you. Have you talked about a prenup? Getting married without one is a fairly risky activity. But the truth is, having a child with someone is the most risky activity in relationships. There's so much stuff a person can do to torture you if they have a kid with you. And what I'll tell you is, the people who are obsessed with their children stop paying attention to their partner, which leads you right to my office.

Steven Bartlett (0:53)

Okay, so if you were to give me one piece of advice to prevent me and my partner ever ending up in your consultation room.

James Sexton (0:58)

If there's a core message to my approach to relationships, that would be the only advice I'd ever give to anybody.

Steven Bartlett (1:05)

James, if you think about the divorces you've seen in court, was there ever a case that broke your heart?

James Sexton (1:10)

Yeah, it was a case that I won that I should have lost. I remember looking at the judge and thinking like, you're letting this happen. She's going to lose because she's poor and she can't afford a lawyer, and he's going to win because he can afford a lawyer that knows how to put a document into evidence. And there's something really wrong about that.

Steven Bartlett (1:37)

James, our last conversation, I think, did almost 10 million downloads and views across platforms. And I can't imagine the amount of messages you get on a daily, weekly, monthly basis from people that are interested in the subject of divorce but also the sort of interconnected subjects of love and marriage and all of these things. When people contact you, what do they typically say?

James Sexton (2:02)

You're absolutely right. I mean, the number of people that contacted me after our conversation, exponentially increased. It also very much broadened the pallet of things people contacted me about. So a lot of my prior work, a lot of my writing prior to our first conversation was very much tied to just relationship issues, divorce-related issues. So I would get a lot of messages from people saying, I'm going through a terrible divorce, I'm dealing with this situation. Even though you can't represent me because I'm in a different state or a different country, could you give me some general advice? So people would reach out with very specific to my career topics. I got a lot of people talking to me about the conversation we had about our dogs and about loss and about the nature of aging and endings and whether it's the ending of a marriage or the ending of a dog's life or our own lives and how the loss of our pets brings us more sharply into focus about the mortality of everything around us. So yeah, I mostly get people saying, oh, you gave voice to something that I'd felt and it was meaningful to me to do that. And I try to write people back and just say, very briefly, I'm so glad that something in my perspective resonated with you.

Steven Bartlett (3:27)

If there was one message that you could give to everyone that messages you, so one singular message, it was a broadcast message and you had to send it to everybody that's messaged you about all of these interconnected subjects, but you could only say a couple of sentences. And you think it's the couple of sentences that would most serve all of them in one go, regardless of what their issues are, because it's a fundamental message about love and marriage and divorce and all these things. What would that message be?

James Sexton (3:53)

I mean, I've always said that I think the core truth I've learned in my life is that the hard thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing. So I would often challenge anybody who reaches out to me about anything that they're struggling with. I would say to them that what is the hard thing to do in this situation, because that's probably the right thing to do. The other thing I would say is that although I really appreciate that someone would reach out to me in the hopes that I could give them some answer, I pretty strongly believe that the only Zen you find on mountaintops is the Zen you brought up there. And so I think a lot of the truth we know, when we hear someone say it out loud, it resonates in a way, but it's because we knew it was true. We already knew it was true. Maybe that person gave voice to it.