A divorce lawyer's warning: the affair starts with 'saw you went to Tulum'
A divorce lawyer has ranked the threats to your marriage. Porn didn't win. Neither did Tinder.
James J. Sexton has spent more than 25 years as a divorce lawyer. He says infidelity plays some role in "a good 85%" of the divorces he's involved in. He also has a theory about where a lot of it now starts.
The machine
His book came out in 2018 as If You're in My Office, It's Already Too Late. The paperback was retitled How to Stay in Love.
In March, Mel Robbins read him a passage from Chapter 19 on her podcast: "If we were designing an infidelity-generating machine, it would be Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, social media."
Swingers clubs, key parties, chat rooms, workplace temptation, Ashley Madison, Tinder, Grindr. Nothing that came before, "not even porn comes within a thousand miles."
His answer: "Yeah, I stand by that."
Why it works
He calls it "a perfect storm of attacks on the institution of a monogamous marriage." It has four parts.
Cover. A strip club needs an excuse. A phone doesn't. "There's a million reasons you'd be on your phone that are totally innocuous."
Access. His hypothetical is a mom from his son's soccer practice. Offline, the only way to talk to her is to walk up at practice, in front of everyone.
Online, you're both in the parents' group chat. You follow each other. You see her vacation pictures. Then you type: "Oh, I saw you guys went to Tulum. Where did you stay? We're thinking about going."
"It's not like approaching you at the soccer game. It's like approaching you alone in a restaurant and we're just the two of us talking and no one can see what we're saying."
Contrast. Everyone posts their best pictures. You aren't scrolling on your best day. "You're on the subway, you're on the toilet, you're bored." In his words, "You're living your gag reel and you're looking at everyone's greatest hits."
Deniability. If your spouse asks why you're on your phone, there are a million answers.
His verdict on the platforms: "As divorce lawyers, we owe the people who made these platforms a debt of tremendous gratitude because they have given us job security."
What the affair is really for
Sexton's view is that the pull is rarely just the other person.
"It's not just the other person that we kind of fall for. It's also who we feel like when we're with them."
Clients who have had affairs tell him a version of the same story. They never stopped loving their spouse. Their spouse just doesn't find them beautiful or handsome anymore. Then someone new finds them fascinating.
He compares it to the seven deadly sins: "seven very normal human things taken to the wrong level."
The root cause, he says, is disconnection. "No single raindrop was responsible for the flood, but the flood's nothing but little raindrops."
Couples, he says, fall apart the way people go bankrupt: "very slowly and then all at once."
The spouse test
His fix starts with you, not your partner's phone. He isn't telling couples to monitor each other.
The test: "Would I be following these people if my spouse was watching who I follow?"
Would you talk to this person this way, in this tone, with this body language, if your spouse were standing next to you? If the answer is no, notice it.
He treats it like snacks. He can control his food environment better than his brain. "If there's potato chips around, I'm eating them."
The phone does damage without a third person, too. Scrolling while your spouse is talking, he says, tells them one thing: "You're not important."
The cheap cure
What he prescribes costs nothing.
Ten minutes a week. Ask: "Tell me three things I did this week that made you feel loved." Then, if you're brave, ask where you missed the mark.
Leave a note. Text a song that matters to the two of you. Write an email listing 10 things you love about them.
And if you can't think of 10? "Then maybe you should consider getting divorced."
That's the lawyer talking. Judith Newman put it this way in The New York Times Book Review: "Who would have guessed that the person who gives the best advice about marriage was the guy responsible for getting you out of yours?"
His shortest rule: "Love's a verb."
The group chat is the new hotel bar.
The full conversation is on The Mel Robbins Podcast.
Image: Rory Lewis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
