James Sexton: belief

Transcript context

…The following is a conversation with James Sexton, divorce attorney and author of How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Staying Together. As a trial lawyer, James, for over two decades, has negotiated and litigated a huge number of high conflict divorces. This has given him a deep understanding of how relationships fail and how they can succeed, and bigger than that, the role of love and pain in this whole messy rollercoaster ride we call life. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s James Sexton. What is the most common reason that marriages fail? 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?…

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