James J. Sexton > Quotes

“If you had to listen to a lawyer read the email or text out loud in a courtroom, would you change the tone? When I was a teenager, my mom used to tell me not to put anything in writing that I would feel uncomfortable seeing published on the front page of the New York Times. I understood, even then, what she was suggesting: Engage only in behavior that you’re prepared to stand by and defend. Be on your toes to be your best self at all times, even when no one is watching.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Shoot for resolution rather than full satisfaction. Stop worrying about being right.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“The line I use in my work more than any other is “I hear you.” Not “You’re right.” I don’t even need to agree. Just acknowledge. I hear you. I hear your frustration. I get it.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Don’t put the future in jeopardy just to indulge in some frivolous nostalgia. The negatives far outweigh the positives.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“To feel fulfilled” might mean “to get over a specific traumatic event from his past.” Or it might mean “to enjoy a less stressful job where there aren’t so many people advancing competing agendas that he has to try to balance.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“1.  You don’t know what you want. 2.  You can’t express what you want.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“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”?”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“You can love something, or someone, and still tire of them at times. Feel restless. That’s when things sometimes happen.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Did you stop paying attention because the relationship didn’t make you happy, or did the relationship stop bringing happiness because you stopped paying attention to it?”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Write a letter to your partner. List at least five things they do that you appreciate. Tell them a few things they do that upset you. Tell them what you are craving but not getting from them. Tell them a few things you are getting and are incredibly grateful for. Tell them a story from your shared history, in as much detail as you can, that you remember fondly. Maybe write a mini-chronicle of your marriage. It’s been said that the unexamined life is not worth living. My experience has taught me that the unexamined marriage is not sustainable. Write your spouse a letter. Make it simple or make it detailed. But make it authentic and honest.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“we fix things and hold on to things because we ourselves don’t want to be thrown away. You don’t want to feel as if you are disposable to your partner, your children, your coworkers. You want to be as relevant and vital as you can, for as long as you can. When”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“I’m okay with being pragmatic rather than romantic; honestly, there’s something romantic about pragmatism. I find reality way sexier than delusion.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Do you have a my-way-or-the-highway attitude? American culture, as I wrote earlier, is a distressingly disposable one; we’ve grown so used to simply getting rid of things as soon as they present a problem or seem outdated (whatever that means).”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Don’t lie. Or if you’re going to lie, don’t lie to yourself. The most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Of course, we do need to change in a long-term relationship. We do so willingly; ideally, we do so enthusiastically. We give up sleeping with other people. We start to share our living space and our daily routine. Our perspective becomes more long-term and we start to think about developing the “we” instead of just walking the path solo. Yet sometimes we end up mothballing important, joy-bringing parts of us—the dancer (our partner doesn’t like to dance), the fisherman, the museum-goer, the aspiring yogi, the film buff, the person who travels or who doesn’t count calories on Saturdays. Part of this is a function of adulthood, not just of coupling, but how much of it is really required, and how much of it is a prison of our own making? What would my clients say to those who might listen—or, more poignantly, to their former selves, though it’s too late to salvage the marriage? This, in essence, is what I hear them saying: 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?”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Divorce is the marriage story that ends abruptly and unhappily. But everyone, including those in very good marriages or relationships, has to tell stories—believable stories—about their own lives, to themselves. And even in very good unions, with their day-to-day demands and course corrections, it can be as hard to see the contour of life as it is to see the curve of the earth. Without that vision, though, small digressions and conflicts can make us lose perspective, or lose faith in the reason we fell in love with our partner in the first place: because she or he offered not just a beautiful present tense but also a happy (imagined) ending (future), too.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Love is loaned. It isn’t permanently gifted. We all want more than to not get divorced or not break up. We want, and deserve, to find genuine joy in our connection to our romantic partner and deeper understanding of ourselves in our decision to share our life with another.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“What I do professionally has taught me an enormous amount about what is possible personally. Being a divorce lawyer, or any kind of lawyer, quickly drains you of the arrogance that you can always be simultaneously successful and virtuous; it has taught me that good relationships require deep compromise—yes, to the point that even an important value or two is sacrificed.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“5. THE REVENGE “You had an affair. We supposedly worked it out and moved on, but I was secretly (or not-so-secretly) still incredibly angry with you and now I’ve had an affair, too.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“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?”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“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.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“It gets more microscopic. The roots of relationship failure are many. You’re dishonest with yourself. You’re dishonest with your partner. Expectations are out of whack. There’s passivity or lack of appreciation. The dynamic between what one wants, needs, and feels entitled to is strained, strange, and ever-changing. The list of specific possible problems is long, but most of them fall into the two broad categories above.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Marriage should ideally be rooted in something deeper than our desire for sex, and it should be held together by something stronger than the “glue” of sex. Yet here we are. Still, as a culture, insisting on keeping marriage and sex tied together until death (or divorce) do them part.5 How to correct this? Be honest—even if retroactively.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“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.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“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. We fall in love quickly and often effortlessly. Some people see the divorce rate (over 53% in the United States as I type this sentence) and wonder why anyone would ever get married. I’ve always been fascinated, instead, by the re-marriage rate for people who are already divorced (over 80% within five years of their divorce). That tells me something about marriage and about our incredibly strong desire, as human beings, to find deep connection to another person.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“At the risk of seeming nostalgic or engaging in what my favorite college professor called “golden-age thinking”—the tendency to believe, often with wild inaccuracy, that things “used to be better” and that humans weren’t so awful to each other back in the day—I think it’s fair to say that we don’t look at cars, or marriage, the way we did twenty years ago. Our grandparents didn’t lease cars. They bought a car and drove it as long as they could. They took care of it and they appreciated the fact that their car was reliable. They did what they needed to keep the car healthy in the long term. You do the math.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“What are you willing to do to maintain it? How willing are you to make compromises? Do you have a my-way-or-the-highway attitude? American culture, as I wrote earlier, is a distressingly disposable one;”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Blame, fault, and righteousness are perceived as zero-sum games:”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

“Their happiness is the collateral damage of being “right.” Shoot for resolution rather than full satisfaction. Stop worrying about being right.”
― James J. Sexton, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together