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

by James J. Sexton

56 percent of American marriages end in divorce. (The divorce rate for first marriages is a bit under 50 percent; with each subsequent marriage, the divorce rate increases, hence the over-50-percent total.)

marriage contract should be renegotiated every seven years.

hyper honesty in any relationship they want to keep healthy. Let’s call it Hit Send Now. A commitment to a specific form of radical honesty.

You want your partner to know how you feel, truly and without delay.

you can make the subject header “Hit Send Now,” to give your partner a little emotional preparation—a little advance warning that this is one of “those emails,”

Healthy couples know how to disagree with each other: They’re not so worried about being right, or about being more right than their partner.

Being right is not the most important takeaway, and is often precisely the obstacle to resolution.

Encouraging your spouse to play a regular round of golf, or hit the gym, or get her nails done, or get that drink with his old college roommate, or go away for a weekend, is almost always a winning relationship strategy, for two reasons:

you think the only thing keeping your spouse with you is your refusal…” Yeah, that. “Letting” them do their thing imparts a sense of trust in them.

person who comes back to you is a better version of the person who left.

People can’t hear what you don’t say.

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. No, you are not good at mind reading. No one is. There is no such thing.

Sometimes “good enough” is absolutely worth keeping. Remember the cardinal rule of Vegas: Don’t put anything on the table you aren’t willing to lose.

“No matter what, your marriage has to end.” Not—to be clear—“The two of you being married has to end.” No. But that marriage, the one that led to the supposedly out-of-the-blue affair, has to end. Now, whether the result will be divorce, or whether the marriage can and will be replaced by a better marriage, Marriage 2.0 … that’s the question.

After all, if you’re a cook, you do it all the time. Same ingredients, different recipe. A cook does it by using the ingredients in different ratios. Or by blending them together using a different process. Or by adding a few new ingredients to the old ones and so changing the flavor of the resulting dish.

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

Don’t waste your life crafting an advertisement for how great your life is. Get out there and live a great life.

Many, many of the couples I’ve worked with have distinctly differing perceptions of their sex lives.

you marry their circle, and they yours. Circles, plural, actually.

If you switch up responsibilities, even on a temporary basis, that fresh set of eyes may spot new ways—hacks—that the primary chore-doer can’t see anymore, or never saw in the first place.

Occasionally shifting roles in the marriage is a potential win-win for even the happiest couple. At best, it gives each partner insight into what the other is doing, potentially creating new approaches to tasks.

neither party knows nothing about anything and both parties know something about everything. Everybody should do something about everything, and neither of you should do everything about anything.

patience, rational discourse, profound empathy, and, perhaps above all else, the ability to forgive and forget.1

When is the last time you and your spouse discussed what it specifically means to be “happy” and how you each define that term? When was the last time you discussed, in specific terms, what a “satisfying” sex life is for each of you? These should be conversations you look forward to!