My name’s James Sexton.
I'm a divorce trial lawyer in New York City.
One thing most people don't think about
when they're going through a divorce but they should
is that divorce isn't a cure-all to the problems
that they have in their life.
When you're married, you have one set of problems,
but you don't have another.
When you're divorced, you have one set of problems,
but you don't have another.
So basically, you're trading one set of problems
for another set of problems.
And at the end of the day, whether it's married or divorced,
whether it's single or in a relationship,
it's all about picking the set of problems
that you feel most comfortable with.
The best way for someone to move past a divorce
is to start thinking about their post-divorce life
from the beginning.
When you think about why, you can endure the how.
When you think about the destination you want to get to,
you can navigate your way there.
People who are going through a divorce
very often think about nothing but the loss.
But the truth is, there's also a lot of things
you're gonna gain when you get divorced.
There's a freedom from a certain kind of upset that you had,
there's a freedom from a certain stress that you had,
there's different ways to interact with your children,
and different ways to interact with your home and your environment.
So I try to get people, when they're in my office,
to start thinking about the things that they're keeping
and not the things that they're losing.
Talking to your children about divorce
is incredibly important,
but my clients often want to do it way too soon.
They want to talk to the kids about what's going on
with mom and dad, and that mom and dad are gonna split up
before there's any plan in place.
The most natural question that children ask is,
“What's gonna happen? When am I gonna see Mom?
When am I gonna see Dad?
Are we gonna be living in the same house that we used to live in?
How's the dog gonna go back and forth?”
Kids ask all kinds of reasonable questions
about the very specific things that are gonna happen.
So as much as you might want to share with your kids real early on
that you are splitting up, until you have an answer
to some of those really significant questions, don't do it.
It's really easy to think that marriage is binary.
If you're not perfect at it, you suck at it.
To people who are newly married,
the suggestion I would give is,
remember why you feel the way you feel right now.
There's a way you're behaving towards each other right now.
There's a way you're looking at each other
when you're newly married.
That changes over time
because the world's antagonistic to marriage.
The world doesn't do much to facilitate marriage,
as in help them.
It does a lot to beat the hell out of them.
So one of the best things you can do
is try to remember what connected you to your spouse,
and try to remind yourself and your spouse every day
of what parts of them you fell in love with.
They say marriage is hard,
but it's only hard if you think paying attention is hard.
