How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

by James J. Sexton

It’s hard to find love but, as most of us know from personal experience, once you find it, it’s even harder to keep it.

It’s relatively easy to stay married. Just don’t get divorced. It’s similarly easy to stay in a committed relationship. Just don’t break up. But that’s not what we all are really searching for.

Love is loaned. It isn’t permanently gifted.

it’s easier to stay in love than it is to fall out of love and find your way back.

If you know you’ve got something special, you don’t out of nowhere start behaving in ways to jeopardize that.

I was motivated to do this for two reasons, the second of which you’ll laugh at: One, I’m a realist and, two, I’m a romantic.

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 don’t use the D-word.” My honest opinion? That’s just fucking stupid. The existence of divorce is out there whether you acknowledge it or not. I may decide we won’t “use the C-word” in our house, but it doesn’t mean no one’s getting cancer.

It’s not so much “I don’t want you to divorce me” but “I want you to be happily married to me.” Those are two totally different ideas. You’re not interested in white-knuckling it through until death does one of you part. You’re interested in having the best, most mutually enriching, joy-filled, good-sex-filled life with someone who wants to stay married to you. A marriage that makes you both better people, on a continuing basis. Isn’t that what you signed up for, or thought you had? It’s not even about marriage. It’s about meaningful connection.

Ask most people to name the two top reasons for divorce, and they’ll almost always guess correctly: cheating and ruinous money issues. But those are never the reasons for divorce—rather, they’re the symptoms of a bad marriage. Lack of meaningful connection and proper attention and enduring affection led to those lapses, not the fact that someone in Accounts Payable happened to be wearing an incredible outfit one day when the weather turned warm. (Damn you, Heather!)

I never set out to learn what makes a relationship strong. But I have witnessed, up close and always personal, what makes it weak. No single raindrop is responsible for the flood.

Being married doesn’t guarantee a regularly accessible, satisfying sex partner any more than living near a restaurant guarantees being well-fed.

Honesty and candor are critical for healthy outcomes, relationships, and lives. That shouldn’t be a shocking revelation.

Confirmation bias creeps in when you’re unhappy and primed to think that your partner’s always the cause.

But really identify what you’re feeling and why you’re doing what you’re doing. Because you’re not a horrible person. You’re imperfect. You’re human. You had an affair, like many people do. There’s a reason the behavior made the top ten in the Bible.

I’d suggest that lawyers generally are cold-blooded, since law school tends to beat the humanity out of you.

There’s the world we want to live in, and the world we live in.

For people in functional parenting relationships, there are really only two amounts of time you’re spending with your children: Enough, and Not Enough.

If you don’t use a muscle, it gets weaker. If you’re in spouse mode or parent mode all the time, don’t you eventually forget about the “I”?

Proximity, both physical and psychological/emotional, is an important element in good relationships—you know, the nearness of you. But the occasional lack of proximity is critical, too. Being physically away from your spouse for a period; being away from your spouse while you, and they, gather valuable new experiences that can be brought back and shared with each other; and being away, together, from your normal routine (home, work, kids) are obviously valuable. You can’t end every night with, “Oh, I forgot to tell you that crazy story about when we both sat next to each other and watched Netflix until just now.”

Again, this is not a revelation. You already know the messages at the core of this: Make time for yourself. Don’t lose your identity in your marriage or in becoming a parent.

You stay interesting to your partner by staying interested in things outside your life together. You stay interesting to yourself—therefore better equipped to stay interesting to your partner—by stepping outside the marriage, from time to time, to find satisfaction. Your spouse can be a lot of things for you without being everything. Why the hell did we start trying to have one person be everything? Who thought that was a good idea?

Don’t be afraid to be selfish, even once you’ve become a parent—especially once you’ve become a parent. If you never fully allow yourself to unplug from being married, you never fully recharge. If you don’t step away from the “we” to reconnect to the “me,” you eventually find yourself far from shore (sometimes too far to get home) and lose both.

I learned a basic principle: Just because you are holding something doesn’t mean you are controlling it.

People can’t hear what you don’t say. No one—not even individuals in really happy couples, or with exceptional hearing—can hear what the other person isn’t saying.

Maybe you go months without monitoring how much is in your bank account, or days without looking at your teeth; I highly doubt it. I can’t tell you exactly how often you should check in on your relationship. (As much as you check the thermostat? Fill your car with gas?) The most technical I ever get is early and often; often and early. Because, however great you think you are at mind reading, at guessing what an expression or lack of expression means, my years of hanging around folks who are finally confronting the fact that their relationship did not go as planned have taught me this: Your partner can’t hear what you don’t say, and vice versa. Ignorance is rarely bliss for long. If you care enough about your relationship to want to keep it, be sure you’re checking in with your partner on a regular basis.

“I fell in love with a younger version of Molly.” I couldn’t help but think there was something terribly sad and unaware about that: He didn’t see the nanny on her own terms, but only as she contextualized what he thought of his wife. You know who else is a version of your wife? Your wife!

Alternatively, you can vow to never, under any circumstances, hire an attractive baby-sitter. It’s just going to make everyone sad. Trust me.

I apologize in advance: A car-buying metaphor for assessing potential marital partners is rife with hypermasculine oversimplification. But I do think the comparison is apt in this instance. (Or maybe it’s just an excuse for me to write about cars.) Do we give more thought to the car we buy than the person we marry? Of course not. How can that be? Marriage is dramatically different from car-shopping, in this important respect: You don’t expect to go “spouse-shopping” many times in your life (or even twice). Problem is, how do you shop for something right now that’s supposed to still work for you half a century from now … and be both reliable and enjoyable each and every year in between?

“Speeches are like affairs: Anyone can start one, but it takes a genius to end one well.”

How do you change a not-great situation in your relationship? By my count, there are a number of techniques, perspectives, and therapeutic modalities that, all bells and whistles aside, boil down to three specific choices: 1. Change yourself (more to the point, change the way you are in the relationship). 2. Change your partner (change the way they are in the relationship). 3. End the relationship. That’s it. The whole menu.

Now, there’s a good way to do this (we’ll get to it in a moment) and a bad way. The bad way is often known as “constructive criticism,” which I personally believe should be referred to merely as “criticism.”

I’ve had countless clients who were unsatisfied in their sex life with their partner—yes, female as well as male.

We fall in love not only because we feel affection for our partner, but because of the way their affection makes us feel. The ways our partners accept us make it easier to accept ourselves. The ways our partners embrace and enjoy us make us embrace and enjoy ourselves more fully. Perhaps that’s why it stings so much more when your romantic partner criticizes you. You didn’t just gain a critic. You lost a cheerleader.

Or use sex—yes—as a way to get more of the behavior that you want. That’s right. I said it. If behavior you like seeing from him—say, taking care of the kids while you go out with friends—leads to the reward of you becoming very affectionate or sexual, you will very, very likely see more of that behavior. What’s true for lab rats is true for men.3

Ideally, you never let your partner know you’re engaged in extensive experiments in behavior modification.

Is it cynical and distasteful and just plain wrong to suggest that a good, healthy relationship might feature a fairly steady diet of both partners manipulating each other? Not at all. We manipulate our children all the time—promising them rewards if they win the “quiet game” by going the whole car ride home without talking; telling them that maybe Santa will bring whatever stupid piece of plastic crap they’re clamoring for in the store so we can get out of there without having to debate the matter—and it would be ridiculous to suggest that in doing so, we somehow don’t love them with all our heart. And you’re not manipulating merely to serve your needs. You do it to serve the greater union of the two of you. If you do it right, you make yourself happier, your partner happier (or at least no less happy) … and the marriage incontestably better. How is that not a great thing?

I’m not suggesting that the marriage is more important than either of the two people who entered into it. I’m saying: You guys decided to do this thing, so you ought to really, really consider what it is and what it needs to stay vital.

I often think getting married is like getting a puppy at Christmas. You get a puppy. It goes perfectly with everything. It’s fun. It’s adorable. It’s new. Now, you may find at some point that you’ve had a change of heart. Or that you had no idea how much work was involved. Or you realized that the puppy does not stay a puppy for very long. And maybe your solution—no judgments here—is to part with the puppy. But here’s the thing: No one told you you had to get a puppy. And since you did get the puppy, you need to take care of it as long as it’s living in your home.

Marriage is a tool, and as with any other tool, you don’t have to use it the same way that everybody else does. Your marriage is a unique union of two unique individuals. Embrace that. Make it work for you.

Marriage is a contract; every day, you wake up and decide to continue the contract. You can terminate the contract anytime you like.

If you’re vaguely unhappy with your relationship or marriage, and especially if you’re more than vaguely unhappy with it: Stay away from Facebook. The vast majority of what you’ll find there is unhappiness masked as happiness. It will fuck with your head, your heart, and your relationship.1

Sex is a pillar of marriage. It’s right there in the traditional vows—“to have and to hold.” (That’s just the PG-13 version for all the old people at the wedding. It also sounds better than “to do unspeakable things to you after the kids go to sleep.”)

“Sex is the glue to a good marriage.”

(Hell, the Internet should be called “Strangers Fucking and Other Things.”)

As is too often the case in the American legal system, people get only as much justice as they can afford,

The only thing more expensive than a good divorce lawyer is a bad one.

After more than a year of denials to an increasingly suspicious Emily that he was cheating on her, and leaving no concrete evidence to the contrary, Walter, in an improbable collection of circumstances, finally got caught with another woman, at a Toby Keith concert, on the jumbotron screen that was, unbeknownst to Walter, nationally broadcast live on Country Music Television. Within half an hour, three of Emily’s friends had called to tell her. The lesson? No one should ever go to a Toby Keith concert.

The traits you need to fix the marriage are, unfortunately, the traits that would have been required to prevent it from breaking in the first place.

If your spouse was capable of the kind of empathy, forgiveness, and affection needed to turn a broken marriage into a fixed and functional one, they would probably have applied those traits to the marriage to begin with.

Many people understand themselves well enough to know that if they hang out long enough with attractive (and even unattractive) members of the opposite sex, eventually the temptation will make them take the bait. (Change “opposite” to “same,” if you’re gay. Just don’t tell Mike Pence.) Obviously, this isn’t true with everyone, or in every situation. (Lunch, Mike? Really, you can’t keep your hands off of them at lunch?) I don’t have much in common with Vice President Pence, and don’t feel my monogamy is threatened by my choice of lunch companions. But I’ll be honest: I understand what he’s saying. If you put me around a plate of nachos, I’m eventually going to eat them (nachos, unlike women, have no agency). I can’t be trusted to control myself around the things I find delicious even when I’ve promised myself I’m going to stick to my diet. It’s easier to control my environment than my brain. I’m not comparing women to nachos (though if you understood how much I enjoy good nachos, you would see such a comparison as a tremendous compliment). But one sort of desire is, to some degree, all desire.