Number one divorce lawyer says ’50% of marriages’ end because of one main mistake
One of the world's top divorce lawyers has claimed '50 percent of marriages' end because of a big mistake people make, something he has called 'slippage'.
James Sexton has had over 25 years of experience 'guiding couples through heartbreak and separation', as he puts it, and reckons that the idea half of all marriages end in divorce is a 'frightening statistic'.
In that case it's fortunate that it's no longer the case, as Psychology Today dug into the figures and found that after a 'divorce spike' in past decades the rate of married couples separating had actually fallen to around 40 percent.
Still, there have been plenty of marriages ending which have kept Sexton employed, and when he appeared on the Diary of a CEO podcast to discuss divorce where he explained one of the main mistakes lots of people made were actually made up of many small pieces.
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"Slippage is these small disconnections. Small disconnections that in of themselves mean nothing," Sexton said of the thing he was sure 'will keep me in business for the rest of my life' and brought down so many marriages.
"No single raindrop is responsible for the flood. That little raindrop, it's just a little raindrop. That's all it really is.
"But slippage is this gradually increasing number of small disconnections that eventually leads to the giant marriage killer that you come in and say, 'Here's why we're getting divorced'. But it wasn't that, it was all these little pieces."
The divorce lawyer was asked whether people spotted the 'slippage' in the moment and if they said nothing because they didn't think it was significant enough to make a thing of at the time.
He agreed with that idea and said 'people just don't want temporary discomfort' which ended up costing them much more in the long run as those individual things they didn't want to pick up on all added up to the end of a marriage.
Sexton spoke of people having an 'aversion to pain' coupled with 'the narrative that love should be easy' meaning their relationship went through slippage and they missed the chance to stop those 'little pieces' from getting out of hand.
Elsewhere in his career, he's looked through many prenuptial agreements, and told LADbible what he thought was the craziest clause he saw in one.
That was a stipulation that for every 10lbs of weight his wife gained during their marriage she'd lose $10,000 a month in alimony, leaving him astonished she ever agreed to marry someone who would insist upon having that in the prenup.
Other clauses the man had seen included requirements over the frequency at which they'd have sex in their marriage to bans on certain hairstyles.
The guy sounds a bit jaded from his job, as he said he regards marriage as a lottery ticket 'you're probably not going to win'.
Then again, he does spend all his time dealing with couples that didn't manage the whole 'until death do us part' bit of their vows.
Topics: Sex and Relationships
Joe Harker