James J. Sexton - If You’re in My Office, It’s Already Too Late: A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Staying Together

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For Mom, Casey, and Nate The Great

She insists shes in love with mewhatever that is. What she means is she prefers the senseless pain we inflict on each other to the pain we would otherwise inflict on ourselves .

P ADDY C HAYEFSKY , Altered States

Negotiations and love songs are often mistaken for one and the same.

P AUL S IMON , Train in the Distance

Everything in this book is factual. Names and identifying details have been changed to preserve my license to practice law.

This is a how- not -to book.

How not to fuck up a good relationship or marriage.

If youre married, the goal of this book is to keep you out of my office. Better still, the goal is to help you have a marriage in which the idea of coming to my office would only ever be the most momentary of fantasies when your spouse does something boneheaded.

If youre not married, the goal of this book is to keep you from heading toward the mistakes and bad choices that my clients and their romantic partners have made that brought someone like me into their lives.

As a divorce lawyer who has facilitated the demise of more than one thousand unhappy marriages (and counting), I observe the things people typically do to ruin their relationships, to stifle their happiness and that of the person whose well-being they once cared so much about. Year by year, couple by couple, I cant help but take it in. Im not a therapist, but almost every day at work, women and men describe to me, in total candor and painful detail, all the behaviors that they or their partners engaged in to turn a relationship born of the best intentions into a steaming pile of shit. The miscommunication, the noncommunication, the deluded communication, the self-absorbedness, the changing when stability was called for, the not changing when evolving was called for Ive had a ringside seat to countless ruined or doomed-from-the-start relationships.

After two decades of performing this profoundly intimate service for so many ex-spouses-to-be, as well as for people in myriad other relationship permutations (e.g., living together; having a child in common), the sheer bulk of these observations has turned into a wisdom of sorts. Not long agoabout the time my own marriage was dissolvingI started to think that there was practical value in sharing what I had learned; that people in marriages and other romantic relationships who really want things to work in the long term might be at least as well served by the not-tos as by the words of those who claim to know the secret of creating a strong or good relationship, those mystical truths that fill so many magazines and books.

Let me say right here: In my practice, I have not gained insight into what makes a relationship good, and I wont really opine on the subject. It may be, quite simply, that from where Im sitting, there appear to be countless ways that something can be good but a finite and more easily identifiable set of ways things go bad. In my professional life, I do not see the good marriages, the great marriages, the solidly pretty okay marriages. The people in those marriages never set foot in my office. I know thatjust as an oncologist is aware that not everybody has cancer, though everyone who comes to see him does.

No, everybody is not fucking everybody. (Most divorce lawyers adopt this dark worldview pretty quickly.) No, not everyone is cheating their spouse out of money or trying to use the kids as leverage to minimize child support obligations. I am guessingthough I believe this is an educated guessthat in the good relationships, the ones I dont see, many of the recommendations I make throughout this book are already in use, resulting in incredibly rewarding, enduring unions. I know this: In twenty years of practice, I have nevernot once, not evermet a person who was cheating on their spouse and who also appeared genuinely in love with that spouse. I have never met a happily married personnot oncewho was involved in massive financial impropriety. If you know youve got something special, you dont out of nowhere start behaving in ways to jeopardize that.

But do you really want insights into love and romance and successful partnership from a divorce lawyer? Yes, and heres why: The therapists and womens magazines and television and radio experts (Im looking at you, Drs. Laura and Phil) who claim to offer the keys to a great relationship have shared them for decadesand somehow my business and that of my colleagues is still booming. If theres a shortcut to the happy marriage, somebody would have found it by now.

Maybe we need a different approach to the challenges of marriage, commitment, long-term happiness, monogamy, and the rest. Because as a species we certainly seem to suck at it. Maybe if we focus on how we break things, we can figure out how to keep them from breaking.

* * *

I did not set out to write a how-not-to book. My original aim was to give a candid, witheringly honest look into the world and perspective of a divorce lawyer, especially the parts of that world that most people dont normally see and hear, much as Anthony Bourdain showed us what being a chef is really about. Not the make-believe. I didnt want to hold anything back.

The more I wrote, though, the more I realized that there was utility, not just drama, in the unique view I had of relationships:

Virtually all the unions I see are damaged beyond repair.

I have heard the stories of these relationships in their entirety, from promising beginning to unhappy end.

I am given virtually unprecedented access to even the tiniest details of these stories. (In many ways, I am privy to more of a persons true life than any therapist: I am told what you tell your therapist + your accountant + your best friend + your financial advisor + your parole officer + your spiritual leader + [if youre a parent] your childs school guidance counselor or shrink.)

I am tasked with an act of reparation/improvement that demands yet more brutal honesty (if I am to help my client build the best next steps).

I thought, Why not leverage what Ive learned to provide value for the many, many people who will never set foot in an office like mine? I was motivated to do this for two reasons, the second of which youll laugh at: One, Im a realist and, two, Im a romantic. (I am. Ill explain more in Chapter 1.) A new book emerged, though it still includes just as many of the revealing (and, I hope, entertaining) details of the life of a divorce lawyer.

I have not watered things down. As I just wrote, Im a realist. Show me a divorce lawyer who is not a realist, and Ill show you someone who is no longer a divorce lawyer.

What I say may sometimes sound pugnacious, nihilistic, perhaps offensive. I believe it takes great courage and hard work to make a relationship last, and to make a good relationship even better. I believe its preferable to confront what may not be working so that you can make your strong marriage or relationship stronger (or yourself stronger). I believe this is far better than the illusory comfort provided by not confronting issues, pretending there are none, and letting that denial gradually and inevitably drag things down, then trying to yank the relationship back up to where it had been. I believe in living in the real world. A friend once emailed me a clip of an episode of Real Housewives of Some American City, and one of the wives, to prove how solid and secure and divorce-proof her marriage was, boasted that, In our house, we dont use the D-word. My honest opinion? Thats just fucking stupid. The existence of divorce is out there whether you acknowledge it or not. I may decide we wont use the C-word in our house, but it doesnt mean no ones getting cancer.