524 | Divorce

The Minimalists speak with divorce lawyer James J. Sexton about all the nuances of divorce, including the courage it takes to walk away from a marriage, housing and financial advice for recently single mothers, lessons from spousal cheating, how to know when a relationship is over, and much more! Discussed in this episode: What does it take for someone to find the courage to file for divorce? (10:14) What housing and financial advice do you have for a recently divorced single mother? (21:59) How do you know whether a relationship is worth staying in and fighting for? (32:39) Right Here, Right Now: A new free audiobook and ebook from The Minimalists (1:05:13) Listener Tip: Often, we aren't clinging to the thing; we're clinging to the story we've written in our minds. (1:07:45) Have a question for the show? Call 406-219-7839 or email a voice memo to [email protected]. Listen to the full Maximal episode on Patreon: patreon.com/theminimalists http://patreon.com/theminimalists Detailed show notes: minimalists.com/podcast http://minimalists.com/podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  This podcast has bad words.

• 0:39Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Minimalist Podcast, where we discuss what it means to live a meaningful life with less. My name is Joshua Fields Milburn, and joining me here at our studio in beautiful West Hollywood, California is my good friend TK Coleman. It's a beautiful day. TK, you know, we often talk about letting go on the show. And on this episode, we're talking about one of the most challenging types of letting go, but I think we're going to make it pretty fun. The preamble so far has been super fun. And today, we're joined by America's divorce lawyer to talk about the nuances of divorce. We're also going to talk about the courage it takes to walk away from a marriage, housing and financial

• 1:20Joshua Fields Millburn?

  advice for recently single mothers, lessons from spousal cheating, how to know when a relationship is over, and much, much more. Please welcome to the show James J. Sexton Esquire.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  That was such a... What an introduction. That was amazing. And as you're going over the topics we're going to do, I'm like, I would like to hear about that. I'm going to have a lot to learn on that. That's very good. No, thank you. It's great to be here. I know we've been trying to make this happen for a while, and I appreciate everyone being patient with me. I have, I have an ex-wife who will tell you I am wildly unreliable when it comes to scheduling, because when billionaires, you know, have problems in their marriage, they rarely do it on a schedule. And so they'll say, like, what are you doing next week? You're going to California? No, you're not. You're going to Family Court in Manhattan. So I constantly have to reschedule things. So thank you for sticking with me. I've been looking forward to this, and I'm really Glad it happened.

• 2:10Joshua Fields Millburn?

  TK, he has the best excuse. Anytime he has canceled on us.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 2:14Joshua Fields Millburn?

  It's always been, I have a trial next week. I'm gonna be like, no, man, no, you don't. Can it wait?

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I will tell all of the witnesses to hold on. Yeah, no, I, but it really is the nature of what I do is that, you know, you, you, even after 25 plus years of doing this, I, I'm very humbled by the fact that these people trust me with these very, very important things. And like, if anyone has ever hired a lawyer, even for, you know, a real estate closing, if you've had the pleasure of not ever being in an office like mine, you know, if your marriage is solid and stable, or you're not married. Like, you can just imagine, you know, because if you bought a condo, or you sold a piece of property, or you went and had a consultation about a criminal matter because you got a ticket or something, you feel so vulnerable. You feel so needy. And it's, it's a frightening feeling to feel that vulnerable

• 3:07Speaker 02

  and needy. And I take very seriously that these people have chosen me to be the person. And so I tend to, even though I've been blessed in recent years to do a lot of this media stuff that is like a second, like who knew, like after 50, I was going to have this whole second career. I still have this full-time job that is like a more than full-time job. Like, I did not need a part-time job at all. I needed to actually try to find a work-life balance. So it, it requires me sometimes, as much as I would love to do something, to just go, yeah, no, I have to dance with the one that brung me, you know, I have to, I have to stay with the, the path that I committed myself to, so.

• 3:47Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Well, I love your nuanced approach. I first learned about you because my wife, who's on the couch today, Rebecca, she was sending me some Jim Sexton quotes about like marriage and strong relationships. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, like, like she gets it. And you get it in a way, like you understand the nuances of relationship, but it seems to me it's because you have the experience of, of seeing a lot of relationships that just explode.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, when, when you think about divorce, like divorce. Divorce is the catastrophic failure of a marriage. So like, there's failure, I think, in marriage, which is, we married, we were, you know, really into each other, and now we're not really into each other anymore. We don't really enjoy each other anymore. I think there's a lot of people that have that feeling, but they stay married. Like, for the kids, or because they don't want to give away half their stuff, or whatever it might be.

• 4:41Joshua Fields Millburn?

  It becomes companionate.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it becomes, okay, we like, it's like a business. We're running a daycare center together. Or, you know, we have the business of our household, and we're partners in that business. And we, listen, you know, like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards probably don't like vacation together. They probably don't even take the same bus, right? But the two of them are the two who make the music, and they know that. So I, I think sometimes a marriage can be that. It's, hey, look, we're, we're not as like crazed about each other as we once were. We don't feel it for each other the way we once did. But we've got this thing we've built together, and let's stay together. Like, let's stay connected, let's work with each other, let's be, you know, cool with each other. Divorce is, is a different kind of failure. It's like a catastrophic failure, like this needs to end. Now, I'm not saying, by the way, that like, it's a catastrophic failure,

• 5:27Speaker 02

  like the wheels coming off your car while you're driving. Like, sometimes happily ever after means happily ever after separately. Like, we're, we're gonna end this because it's no longer serving us. It's no longer helping us become the best and most authentic version of ourselves. And so what we're gonna do is, we're gonna just part. We're gonna split, and, and we're gonna let this chapter end. Because I, I actually like to think about romantic relationships, at least in my own life, as chapters in a very long book. And some of those chapters are just filled with so much joy. And some of them, you look at it and go, wow, I can't believe I made the mistakes that I made in there. But they're chapters in a long book that's still being written. But 56% of marriages catastrophically fail.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Let's be charitable and say another 10% stay together for the kids. I think it's probably way more than that, maybe 10, 20%. So now we have something that fails 76% of the time.

• 6:21Joshua Fields Millburn?

  How many people are in this room right now? There are, what, seven of us? And five of us have been divorced at some point?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, well, it's the overwhelming majority. I mean, seventy something percent, I mean, even fifty six percent is the overwhelming majority. I've made the argument before as a lawyer in my media presence that, you know, you could argue that that marriage is not negligent. Negligence is the is the failure to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk of serious harm. That's the definition of negligence. I would argue that divorce, marriage is definitely negligent. Like, it's definitely you're failing to perceive serious harm. I would argue it's reckless. The definition of reckless is a conscious disregard for a substantial unjustifiable risk. So you can't say, I didn't know marriages generally don't work out.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Like, I didn't know that the overwhelming majority of marriages catastrophically fail. Everyone knows this. It's so obvious. But the statistic that I actually think is even more interesting is that eighty six percent of people are remarried within five years of their divorce. So think about that. You've engaged in this technology. It's catastrophically failed. And now you go, yeah, I'm gonna do that again. I'm gonna sign up for that again. So what that tells me is not that people are stupid. What that tells me is that there's something in this that calls to us. Like, there's something, and I don't know what that is. It could be something that we should be striving to transcend.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  It could be that, right? Like, it could be that marriage is a tradition. And tradition in one sense is the wisdom of the people who were here before us and what we could learn from them. And tradition in another sense is peer pressure from dead people.

• 8:10Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I love that definition.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Like, my great, great grandmother got married, and her grandmother got married. So, you know, we should do it, too. And it's like, oh, well, she had a buggy whip. Do you have a buggy whip? Like, she didn't have the sum total of all human wisdom in every song that's ever been recorded instantly accessible on a device in her hand. So why would the same thing that suited her suit you? Especially when you have evidence to support the theory that it's catastrophically likely to fail and cause you harm. So, again, like, I think there's, there is something in us that wants to deeply connect with another person.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  And marriage may just be something that we think has value in shoring that up.

• 9:01Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And building on that, you know, so the best definition I ever heard of God is that God is the name we give to a blanket that we put over a mystery to give it shape. And I think maybe what marriage is, is a wall that we build around our connection to this person who we love very deeply in the hope that it will keep it safe and make it sustain. And I think time has shown us that that's not true. It doesn't do that, but there's something in us that wants to keep trying. And I actually think that's really, really beautiful.

• 9:40Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Well, we have a lot of questions from our audience about this topic specifically. We knew you'd be showing up. So let's dive into some callers here. If you have a question for our show, we would love to hear from you. 406-219-7839 is the phone number, or you can just send a voice memo right from your phone to [email protected]. Let us know if you're a Patreon subscriber so we can prioritize your message. By the way, big thanks to our patrons. Your support keeps our podcast 100% advertisement free because sing along at home, y'all. Advertisements suck. Yes, they do. Our first question today is from Kim.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Kim. I'm 35 years old and I live in Belgium. I am a Patreon subscriber. I am currently going through a divorce. My ex and I have been together for 15 years and we have three boys together. After years of abuse, I finally found the courage to divorce him. I work part-time to take care of the kids. We bought our house together eight years ago, but my ex has more financial funds because he works full-time. So my share is way less than his. He will pay me my share, but it won't be enough to buy something for myself.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Currently, we still live under the same roof. Now I am looking for a place to rent for me and my boys. But the renting prices for a three-bedroom apartment are really high. I can also try to rent a smaller place with two bedrooms, but then my boys will have to share one room. Plus landlords are not excited to put four people in such a small place. I get lots of anxiety because I have to make this decision. I recently switched jobs, so now I earn a little bit more money, plus the working hours are much better. So my question is, do you have any advice for me?

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Do I go for one extra bedroom, but at a cost of mentally and financially more weight on my shoulders? Or do I have to rent a smaller place, which will give me more financial peace, but it will be very small and crowded? I also like to thank you because you brought so much value to my life through this podcast. I have learned so many things about self-worth, decluttering, and my health improved drastically thanks to my earthing, Matt. Thank you, guys. Bye.

• 12:20Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Hey, shout out. There's a couple of places to start here. She has questions about the financial advice, housing advice, but I wanted to illustrate a point that she didn't ask a direct question, but there was something in here about, hey, I was in this relationship for 15 years and it was abusive. She didn't say what kind of abuse there, but we can make assumptions. And I'm wondering, with all of the clients that you speak to, what does it take for someone to find the courage to finally say, it's time?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a unique problem, the problem and the situation and the ecosystem of coercive control, intimate partner abuse, domestic violence. I mean, we used to refer to that as domestic violence in its totality, which was sort of any relationship where there were these elements of coercive control. But now we more often refer to it as IPA intimate partner abuse because it's not always physical violence or abuse. It's often financial abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse. It can really be a whole ecosystem of all of those things. It's sort of a cycle. And it's very often a cycle of what we call coercive control. It's really a cycle of

• 13:29Speaker 02

  sort of breaking down a person's self-esteem, causing in them with verbal or physical abuse, you know, a sort of bending this person to your will and creating in them a certain helplessness so that you can then perpetuate that, you know, that that system of of power, where you have power. And it's very often tied to like narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder. And it's very often tied to a narcissistic wound. So this is an ecosystem that as a divorce lawyer, I encounter constantly. I represent a lot of victims of intimate partner abuse and domestic violence. I also won't lie. I don't always wear the white hat, you know, I often represent abusers. I often represent perpetrators of domestic violence. Um, you know, as a lawyer, you represent your client and you represent

• 14:12Speaker 02

  the system. And I don't always believe in the client, but I always believe in the system. Like, I think that our system, thankfully, the truth has a way of coming out. Very often, despite my best efforts, it has a way of coming out. So the the cycle she's describing, the cycle of domestic violence, and because she didn't get into the specifics of it, I'm going to say or assume that this really is an intimate partner abuse situation, whether it's verbal, physical, financial, all of those really are the same thing in many ways. So in that situation, there's a tremendous amount of danger and risk in the initial steps of extricating oneself from that system. The likelihood of there being some kind of retaliation

• 14:56Speaker 02

  or violence is most acute in the very early stages of usually a woman extricating herself from the domestic violence and coercive control cycle. So the first piece of advice I would give there is to work with counsel who are experienced in and trained in working with You know, victims of and perpetrators of intimate partner abuse and domestic violence, because we're going to understand the gravity of risk. And there are, thankfully, in almost every country, including Belgium, there are safeguards put in place on how a person can have protections, orders of protection. Very often, by the time the abuser even knows that we're filing for divorce, we have orders of protection in place. Like, we've done it like a professional hit.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  By the time this person knows the fight is coming, the fight is over. Like, we've already just tactically, and I mean, I've done that to the point where we get them another phone, because their phone is being used to track their location, so that when they meet with us, they can leave that phone in a location. So their spouse thinks that they're not leaving, and then they can come and call us with the other phone. Like, we, you know, good experienced attorneys will think very strategically. We're tacticians at heart. But thankfully, the majority of people that need to leave a marriage are not leaving a domestic violence situation. But it still requires some of the same things, which is a tremendous amount of courage, obviously. A lot of, there's a lot of bravery involved in saying out loud, even to yourself,

• 16:25Speaker 02

  that this marriage is over. And it's very, very scary to do that, you know? And I often, clients will say to me, you know, in their initial consultations, they'll sometimes be very vulnerable, and they'll say, you know, "I'm so scared. Like, I feel so powerless. I feel so, like, am I doing the right thing? I feel so scared." And I say to them, you know, you're, just the fact we're having this conversation, you're being very brave. And they'll say, "Well, I don't feel brave. Like, how could I be brave? I'm this scared. How could I be brave?" And I often will say, like, "Well, if you're not scared, it's not brave. Like, it's only brave if you're scared and you do it. Like, if you do it anyway, even though you're scared. Like, overcoming fear is what makes it brave."

• 17:07Speaker 02

  So I think the first step for most people is having an honest conversation with yourself about where this marriage is serving you, where it's failing you, what, if anything, can be done to repair it, if at all, right? I think I think we're foolish to say that you couldn't take the same ingredients and make a different dish. Like, if you gave me five ingredients and you gave Thomas Keller or Jose Andre those same five ingredients, we're going to make different dishes. Like, you could take the same ingredients and make something very different. I think that sometimes people lose the plot in their marriage. And they just, they lose the plot.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  They started out moving in the same direction, they started out with the same goal in mind, and somewhere, one or both of them lost the plot. And I think the first thing you should do, if you're driving a car and you're lost, I think, I think I'm lost now, well, don't like floor the gas. You know, like, and just stop and think, okay, where, where did I maybe get lost here?

• 18:10Joshua Fields Millburn?

  This happens all the time, where it's like, this marriage is in shambles, let's buy a dog, let's have a kid, let's buy a house.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  A hundred, and you know what, I think that's a very, I mean, you know, this is why our, I'm such a fan of the podcast and of, like, I'm very much a fan of your perspective, because, you know, we've been told for many, many years that consumption will fill the void. And so, I think we feel restless in our marriages sometimes, because we're restless in our lives. Like, our marriages happen in our lives, and so we're restless in our lives. And now we go, well, you used to make me feel really good, and now I don't feel really good, so it must be you, you're messing this up, you know? And I think it's actually getting much, much worse, because we're just barraged now with advertisement, and advertisements do in fact suck.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  But, but my, my, my preposition to tie this to marriage failure and marriage dissatisfaction, which I actually think is more important to look at than divorce, which is the catastrophic failure, I like to think about marriage satisfaction. Because if you said to me, we met, we did it, we won, we stayed together for 40 years, we were miserable for 37 of them, but we did it, like, okay, you didn't win then. I don't think you won because you managed to stay together. But, but now, what I think is happening is there is this massive amount of dissatisfaction and restlessness that so many people are feeling. And I genuinely believe it is a function of the fact we are living in an advertising saturated world.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Because if you think about it, at its core, advertising is the opposite of therapy. It is the opposite of therapy. Like, if the purpose of therapy is to say,

• 19:54Speaker 02

  To create a sense of wholeness in you and calm and peace inside of you. Advertising is the opposite of it because the core of every advertisement is you're not okay.

• 20:04Joshua Fields Millburn?

  You are incomplete.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  You're not okay. You could be okay, but you'd need to do some stuff. Like you need, you're gonna need this tie. You're gonna, if you had this tie, you're not, because you're not okay. You could be okay. Redemption is available, but you're gonna need to do a few things, right? The message no advertisement has ever said to anyone ever is, you're fine. You don't need anything at all. You're fine. And by the way, what is love? Marriage love? Like, I'm not gonna call marriage because marriage to me is a legal status. What is deep romantic love for another person? It's, it's, it's exactly what you don't see in advertising.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Like, it's marriage to me, or love to me, love worth having and trying to keep forever, is the following four words. You're my favorite person. That's it. And by the way, could you think of any words, much less four words? Could you think of any words that it would feel more beautiful to say and mean? And to then have the other person say to you, and you know it's true. Then you're my favorite person. And when they say you're my favorite person, you go, I know that.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Like, and so I think it's so simple. It's so wonderful. It doesn't cost anything. So advertising would hate it, right? Because like, you don't need to buy anything. Like, you don't need to spend three months' salary, you know, to prove it. You don't have to do anything. So we've created a culture that I think, without meaning to do so, is incredibly antagonistic to marriage because it's antagonistic to our sense of self. So to tie it back to the, to the question, or how do we start that process, right? The tactical answer to that is really easy. Go talk to a lawyer. Like, that's our job. But if you're talking to a responsible lawyer... Like, I don't make it rain, I sell the umbrella.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Like, I don't, I'm a divorce lawyer, I'm not like the Grim Reaper of marriage. Like, I'm not walking around, you know, bars and saying like, you could do better, man. Like, to people, like, I don't, I don't take any joy in people getting divorced. And if you speak to a responsible divorce lawyer, they're gonna first say, okay, is there anything that could be done to like, heal what's happening between the two of you? And if the answer is no, okay, could you maybe go to mediation together? Where the two of you work with one attorney or one trained professional? And you work together to figure out a sensible way to sort of unravel the various ties that constitute your marriage? And if you can't do that, okay, then hire a lawyer, right? Because a divorce is like a table, there's you and your spouse, and then their lawyer

• 22:57Speaker 02

  and your lawyer. And so it's like four legs. If one of those legs is off, it doesn't matter how nice and straight the other three legs are, the table's falling down. Like, you need one unreasonable person in this equation for a divorce to go sideways and get ugly really fast. Because doing this for over 25 years, no one has ever once, I've seen every permutation of human craziness, every permutation of anger, vindictive, like, everything. No one has ever once, ever in my, come into my office, sat in front of me and said, I would like this to be ugly and expensive and terrible and the worst experience ever. I'd like to put your kids through college instead of my own. No one has ever said that. They always say the exact same thing. I want to be fair. The problem is, their spouse is in another lawyer's office saying, I want to be fair. And their definitions of fair are completely different.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  So, the first step to extricating yourself from these situations, even if it is an intimate partner review situation, like the caller said, or even if it's just your generic, this marriage is not working for me, you know, I feel restlessness in it, it's, I feel like I need to get out of it to become the most authentic version of myself. I think the answer first is to find a responsible attorney to talk to about what your options are. Because the best option is the one that creates more options. And I think that it is perfectly okay, living in the world we're living in. To feel restless in your marriage sometimes, to feel questioning of your marriage sometimes. And I think the world is antagonistic to marriage.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  You know, it is constantly pulling us away from each other and pulling us away from our authentic self. And so I really genuinely think the first step is speak to counsel. Start to identify what's actually going on in the ecosystem of your family. And I say the ecosystem of your family, it's a deliberate choice of words because an ecosystem, you know, you add a salamander to a forest. You don't have the forest plus a salamander. You've got a whole new forest because that salamander eats this bug and that bug used to eat this plant. And that plant's growth used to inhibit what happened in this stream. So now we have a whole new ecosystem. And if we figure this out and we go, okay, let's take the salamander out. Guess what? We don't have the old ecosystem anymore.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  We don't have that ecosystem minus salamander. We've got a whole new ecosystem now. So I think before you start making moves, you need to first go to first principles of what's going on here. And the very specific problem of do I get a two bedroom? Do I get a three bedroom? Because a lot of what I'm discussing here is these sort of existential aspects of things. But there's also a tremendously pragmatic side to what I do, which is helping people with the nuts and bolts of their day to day lives. And you know, what you need in life, you need shelter, you need food, you need safety. I personally believe and have counseled many of my clients

• 25:49Speaker 02

  that it is better to be happy and connected in a small apartment where all of you are sleeping in the same room, but you are not suffering from economic instability and the tremendous stress that comes with unnecessary financial pressure. Look, I represent now some of the wealthiest people in the world. Like one of my clients is worth eight billion dollars with a B.

• 26:16Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Wow.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  In that kind of a case, it's super easy to make sure everyone's going to get their own new house and their own New Hamptons second residence and their own private jet. But for most people, it's hard to pay the electric bill. So now you're gonna have two electric bills.

• 26:36Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Right.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  And it's hard to have a cell phone. Now you have two cell phones. And now you definitely need a cellphone for the kids because they're going between your respective residences. And that creates all kinds of second order effects, both financial and interpersonal. So again, I like to go back to what do our children want? Whether they're the children of billionaires? Or whether they're the children of just a person who's struggling with whatever wage life they're living? I genuinely think our children want our presence. They want our stability, consistency, predictability. And I think that putting financial strain on yourself when you're already so strained and there's already so much change going on.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  If you think having a slightly larger bedroom for your children is going to be the balm that makes your divorce less painful for them, I understand why you would think that because advertising's been telling you if you just have the right couch, things are gonna be fine. But I just genuinely don't believe that that should be the priority. The priority will be love, peace, stability, connection. And very often, there is an economic disparity post divorce. One person has money, the other one doesn't. And I have not found, in doing this for a very long time, that the parent who has more money somehow has a deeper connection to the children or a better life.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Very often, they're absolutely miserable. And I say that as someone who represents billionaires. Because I think fundamentally, one of the places where our messages intersect is, I think there are two amounts of money, enough and not enough. That's it. Those are the only two amounts of money that exist. And I think enough is enough. And I think in this situation, this caller is realizing.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  This marriage is enough. I'm enough. I deserve to be safe and to feel, you know, good and loved. And whatever bedroom you choose, it will be enough.

• 28:35Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah. Yeah. TK, I'd love to talk to you about courage real quick because he brought up an important point there that courage doesn't exist in a vacuum. As soon as the fear goes away, then I get the courage. Courage is a saddle that rests upon atop our like most aggressive, scariest monsters. Right? And it's being able to put that that saddle on the monster and then see it through to whatever the end here for this caller. It happens to be divorce and then post divorce as well. Talk to me a bit about courage.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  The first step to becoming more courageous isn't in trying to force yourself to act like people who look courageous. It's by honestly facing your vulnerabilities because it takes a tremendous amount of courage to say, I feel very weak. I have no idea where I'm at, how I got here, how to get out of this situation, or what in the world I am doing. That kind of mindset, that kind of honesty leads to the kinds of answers and insights that produce competence and consequently more confidence, which the world will look at later down the road and say, wow, you're courageous. But you will know for yourself, that courage began with the willingness to embrace my vulnerability.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  And when we go through transitions, transitions have a way of disrupting our lives in a manner that exaggerates that need for stability. And so you think about things like, well, I'm accustomed to having, you know, each of the kids having their own room. And now everything in my life is being disrupted. Anything I can hold on to that feels like the life I'm losing is a good thing that I must prioritize. So maybe I put first, keeping the kids all having their separate rooms. But that's a trick. That's an illusion. That's not going to make anyone happier. What you have to do is you have to say, I'm going to exercise the courage to recognize that my life isn't what it used to be, that I now have less money and I have less options.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  And yeah, that stinks. And I don't have to pretend that it doesn't. In fact, I can be honest with my children. I don't have to have the most sophisticated conversation with them, but I can say, hey, look, mommy and daddy. Are going through a hard time. We're going through changes. A lot of things are going to be different. We might not have some of the things that we used to have, but we're gonna be okay. We're gonna be okay because we're family and I love you and I'm gonna be with you and I'm gonna make things better, but I'm gonna need more time. And if they're not old enough to understand that conversation, then you don't even need to have it. But then when you, when you start to think in that way, you can say, all right, I can live the life I can afford to live because I have courage in my ability to improvise and love in spite of my conditions. But that also becomes the life that makes it possible for

• 31:14Speaker 04

  me to invest in something that is closer to my ideal. Why spend an extra $200, $500 a month trying to cling to what is familiar when I can take that and store that away for emergencies, for future needs, or for the life that I really want, where maybe they do have their own separate bedroom, but I can get there in two years, three years, four years, five years, just like we do with anything else that's worth having in life.

• 31:40Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And that type of clinging leads to a ton of emotional clutter as well. There's a lot of baggage there. Kim, I'd love to send you a copy of TK's book, Emotional Clutter. You can download it for free over at theminimalists.com or if you want the audiobook, I'd be happy to send that to you as well. Jim, we got a bunch more callers to talk to, but first, let's dive into the Patreon community chat. This is where we try to answer a question, the question of the week with a short shareable, we call them minimal maxims. Don't worry, you can wander on as much as you want.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  I'm not particularly the strong silent type. I'm not known for my brevity.

• 32:13Joshua Fields Millburn?

  TK and I will wrap it up with some pithy bows at the end of all of this. You can find all of the minimal maxims for this week's episode in the show notes over at theminimalists.com and every minimal maxim ever at minimalmaxims.com. We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox for free if you sign up for our email newsletter over at theminimalists.com. We'll never send you spam or junk or advertisements, but we will start your week off with a dose of simplicity. All right. Question of the week this week. How do you know whether a relationship is worth staying in and fighting for? Now, I want to hear what you have to say here, but let's hear what some of our listeners had to say first.

• 32:53Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Maria said, I think that when there are words you cannot take back and action that cannot be forgiven, or if you completely lose trust, then it's time to move on. So it's sort of the opposite of relationships worth staying and fighting for, which is the question of the week here. So I think that everyone wants to know where to start, but people rarely ask when to stop. Yeah, it's like the marriage is like the exciting place to start, but also you come to an end, you get to a dead end in some relationships. And it's like, we don't, we're just, because we're going to hang out here at this dead end for a while. Jim, you, in fact, you wrote a book called, If You're in My Office, It's Already Too Late.

• 33:38Joshua Fields Millburn?

  So you're probably the perfect person to, to answer this. When do most people know that a relationship is over?

• 33:45Speaker 02

  You know, it's the, it's the question, like that's the question. So I would say a few things. One is that, you know, we fall in love very quickly, like we fall in love very quickly. It's, it's amazing to me how quickly our heart recognizes that, you know? And falling feels like flying for a little while, until the ground, you know? But it feels like flying. And people's marriages end the same way that they go bankrupt, which is very slowly and then all at once. You know, it's, it's, there's no single raindrop responsible for the flood. Like it's just these little drops and little drops and little drops. And then it's the flood, the flood comes and it comes all at once.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  You know, my, my mom used to say to me when I was a kid that, um, it's really hard to define intelligence, but she could spot stupid a mile away.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  And I actually think that's true, right? And I think similarly, a really good relationship, like what makes a relationship good, is kind of hard to define, but man, like I can bad ones, whoo, like you can see them. You know, you go out to dinner with a group of couples, you could just feel sometimes the heaviness, the tension, the like disconnection between people, you know? It's in the gestures, it's in the way the eyes when the person is talking like there's so, there's so much there, you know, so.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  I think what's interesting to me is, is how romantic love is a combination of simplicity and complexity. Like, there's, fundamentally, it's really simple. You're my favorite person, I'm your favorite person. There's eight billion options in the world. I'm you, I pick you. We're gonna hold hands, and we're gonna just, this shit is scary, but we're gonna hold hands. And when it's good, we're gonna celebrate, and when it's really scary, we'll be a little less scared, because we have each other. Like, what a lovely, worthy thing that is, you know? And I think most people start that way. Like, that's where they start. But they lose the plot, like, overwhelming majority lose the plot.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  And so, to me, then, the question becomes, okay, so what does, what does it look like? And I guess the question to ask is, you know, what, what does real love look like? And I was talking to a friend the other day, because this question came up. Like, I have weird conversations with my friends, and I imagine you guys do, too. And he said something about, like, well, what do you think real love looks like? And he has a cat, he has a really lovely cat, named Delilah. And I know he loves Delilah, like, most people who have pets love their pets. I have two dogs, I love them, like, in just insane way. And I said to him, well, and he has a watch, he has a nice watch, I think someone bought it for him, it's a lovely watch.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  And I said to him, well, here's, here's how I define love. How much is your, did you pay for your watch? And he says, oh, it's like a $5,000 watch. And I said, okay, if I said I'll give you $5,000 for that watch, would you give me your watch? And he said, no, because it's, you know, it's, like, I've had it, and I have a sentimental attachment to it. I said, okay, if I said I'll give you $10,000 for your watch, would you give it to me? He said, yeah, absolutely, $10,000, like, I'll give you this watch. I said, okay, great. How much, if I said I'll give you a million dollars for Delilah, your cat, would you give it to me? He said, no, absolutely not. I would never sell you, and anyone with a pet will tell you, like, I would never sell you my pet.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  I'll sell you my husband.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Right. I'll say, but, but here's, but here's the question, right? Here's the question, like, that, that is absolutely true and funny, but it's a really interesting question, because I then said, okay, I pardon this thought experiment, which is painful to hear.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  You would not sell me Delilah for $10 million. No. Okay, if you knew you were only going to have Delilah for 30 more days, that she was going to pass, she was going to, because you do know she's going, like, we're all going to die, right? We all know this. Every time you get a pet, you know this pet's going to die. Like, you accept the inevitability of that loss, right? So to ma- I hate to break it to anyone who doesn't know, every marriage ends. Every single marriage ends. It ends in death or divorce. It's, it's so odd, because what you're saying is, I hope this ends in death. Like, if you said to me, I'm getting married next week, and I went, oh, that's so good. I hope it ends in the death.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  I definitely hope it ends in death. But it's gonna end. Like, it's gonna definitely end. Okay. So now, we've got 30 days with this cat. Now will you take $100 million to sell me that cat right now? And he immediately said, absolutely not. And I said, you're telling me that lifetime financial security,

• 38:40Speaker 02

  you would not trade 30 days with an animal that is about to be gone anyway, for lifetime financial security? And he said, I, I wouldn't do it. I would actually want to keep her more, because I only have 30 days. And I said, that's love.

• 38:59Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Wow. That's so good.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  That's love.

• 39:02Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Heather said, if you can't 100% trust your partner and feel safe with them, then it's, if you can trust them, then it's worth saving. I'm going through my divorce right now, and it is a total mess, she says. I can't stay with a serial cheater. I've tried marriage counseling and all that, and it's not worth it for how long I've stayed, which is 20 years. Jim, what have you learned about marital infidelity as a divorce lawyer?

• 39:29Speaker 02

  I feel like I have a PhD in infidelity, because I've, I've represented the cheater, and I've represented the cheated on, and I've represented the paramour, which is what we call the mistress or male equivalent. There's no word for the male equivalent of a mistress. It's very, like, a mister.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  So it's very odd to me. It never made sense. But you know, what's interesting is I spend a lot of time with people who commit infidelity in marriage, and I spend a lot of time with people who have been victims of infidelity in marriage. And what you certainly learn when you spend that amount of time around the ecosystem of infidelity is that it really just creates a lot of victims. Like, it causes a lot of pain. Like, they're everyone in that equation gets hurt. The cheater that cheated on, the person they're cheating with, they they're it just victims and victims and victims. There's nothing but victims in that equation. But I tend to believe, and it's not always a popular opinion, that happy people who have the right kind of connection to each

• 40:31Speaker 02

  other don't cheat. So I don't think that the cheating is the illness. I think the cheating is the symptom of the illness. The illness is the underlying disconnection. So people very often want me to give them like a pithy answer that, you know, like, how do I do infidelity proof my marriage? Or how often is infidelity the reason people divorce? And I I find that latter question like very problematic, because I don't think like, yes, how many marriages, how many divorces is infidelity a factor? A tremendous number. But is the infidelity the cause of the demise of that marriage, or a symptom of the problem

• 41:13Speaker 02

  that caused the demise of the marriage? And that is disconnection between two people, which, by the way, may not even be just the cause. It may be that you don't know what you want, and you don't know how to express it to another person. You know, to bounce off of what you said earlier, TK, is that which I thought was really, really well said, that, you know, what if there's a question to be asked in therapy, like, one question you should be entering therapy with is, what is it that I'm afraid to feel?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Like that, that is the most useful question you can ask in therapy. And as Carl Jung said, that which you most need to see is in the place that you least want to look. And so I think that there is a reality here that maybe look at, like when you talk about serial cheating, what you really should be asking is what is going on in that person? That they have this massive restlessness that they think they're going to solve through sexual connection to another person? And what's going on in this person? This other person, the spouse who's married to a serial cheater, meaning this person has cheated repeatedly and you've taken them back and you've forgiven it? What is going on in you that believes that this is the love that you're worth?

• 42:30Speaker 02

  That this is the behavior that you deserve and that you should tolerate in your partner? And I think that often is going to be a function of, we don't know what we want or what we're really feeling. And if we can identify that, we don't know how to express it to another person.

• 42:48Joshua Fields Millburn?

  If there's time on page three, I've got this article I want to share with you about micro cheating, which is...

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Just we needed another form of cheating.

• 42:55Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes, yeah, I often think...

• 42:57Speaker 02

  It already got two of the 10 commandments. Like, thou shall not kill got one. Out of 10, God was like, you know, we got 10 rules, guys. 10, okay? Don't kill, that's one of them, you know? Like, honor the Sabbath, that's one. Don't cheat. Seriously. Don't covet your neighbor's wife. Like, it's, I mean, it's hilarious to think. And I say that to people because even if you're not religious, we all agree the Bible was written a long time ago. Even if you don't think it's true, it was written a long time ago. And it was a top 10 problem, to the point of two out of the 10. So you're not alone. You know, this, this person saying this serial cheating's a problem.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  I genuinely think like infidelity as a technology was invented probably like five minutes after monogamy was invented.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Like there was some primal human in a cave with their now like spouse grunting at each other of like, you know, like where they're gonna be and they're gonna be together. And then he went out to like, kill the elk and he saw some other woman in a loincloth and went like, that's not bad, you know, and kind of. And I think it was just that it's been around that long and we're still as bad at it as ever.

• 44:18Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah, so good. Dimitri, one more for you here. Dimitri says, what's interesting in my case is that we divorced after 27 years of marriage, but the divorce has actually strengthened our relationship. The divorce didn't end our relationship, it simply created a new chapter in it. I'm grateful for that. We still spend time together as friends and also with our kids, all adults now, as a family unit. We no longer live together. We do not have a romantic connection, but we talk more than we have in a long time and get along better now. Plus, we have each other's back. Jim, this is a, this sort of relationship improvement happened in my own life when my first marriage. Like, we're

• 44:59Joshua Fields Millburn?

  still really great friends, but like, it didn't work as a romantic, monogamous relationship for us. How common is that?

• 45:07Speaker 02

  You know, it is so much more common than the world thinks. And I'll tell you the reason why. I, I've been a divorce lawyer a really long time and I don't go to cocktail parties, but if I was invited to a cocktail party and someone said, what do you do for a living? And I said, oh, I'm a divorce lawyer. The first thing every single person says is, oh my God, you must have some stories. And if I said, well, I have, I've got one here. There was this couple and they were quite young and they met each other and they found each other very compelling. And that was enough that it caused them to say, hey, we should enter into this very specific kind of pair bond. And then they did. And they even had children together and life together. And then it came to be that the Venn diagram of their sort of overlapping interests and how they felt about each other got to a place

• 45:50Speaker 02

  where, you know, they really no longer had that much intersection. So they, you know, sat down together and with the help of professionals, they figured out how to divide their various things that they own and, and how to like effectively care for the children that they love, you know, so much more than anyone else in the world. And then they went on and just did that.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  That was like the worst story ever. And that was like the most boring story in the history of story. Whereas if I went like, and then he took a chainsaw and he cut the car, literally cut the engine block in half and said, you pick which half you want. True story, by the way, true story.

• 46:26Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Oh, wise King Solomon.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  That's the story people want to hear. And so that's the story people tell when you put a microphone in front of them or when you're a divorce lawyer and someone goes, you must have some stories. I got a lot of those crazy ass stories. By the way, how often, like, I had a divorce like yours, okay? Great friends with my ex-wife. There's a lot of people I love that I wouldn't want to be married to.

• 46:49Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Amen.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Like, all of them, actually. Like, for me, all of them. Like, and I love them so much. But there's a very specific way you should love a person you're going to marry. And I don't love those people that way. It doesn't mean I don't love them. There's all kinds of love. The way I love my grandmother and the way I love coffee are very different, but I mean it when I say I love them, right? So I really think that we, um, we, the kind of people, like, I don't talk about my divorce a lot because it's not interesting. She was lovely. We met in college. We were, I had a motorcycle and long hair and tattoos. She had like a great body and blonde hair. Like, what more do you need in life when you're 18? You know? And then we figured out, like, oh, we have like fully nothing in common. But we'd had two kids at that point.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  By the way, we really like each other. Like, she's still one of my favorite people. She's hilarious. She's smart. She's a million wonderful things. But like, you meet her husband, who she's been successfully married to now for 15 years, and you put he and I next to each other, you would go, no woman who likes this one would like, he's quiet. He's a therapist. He's like the most like sedate, mellow guy. Like, he's the exact opposite of me and he's perfect for her. But I don't talk a lot about my divorce. And I imagine you probably don't talk a lot about your divorce because it's not that interesting. You know who talks about their divorce? People who've been terribly wounded by their divorce. To the point where it becomes like definitional in their life. Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Like, I know people who got divorced 10 years ago and they're still talking about it like it happened to them a week ago. Because there's this unattended sorrow. There's this trauma, this, this just breaking. And, and as you said, and I loved, I felt like I want to give almost all my clients your number, because there was so much of what you said about how when you're feeling this, this trauma, this pain, this disconnection, and something you said that I love, a therapist of mine once said to me, because I was talking about how difficult a change that was happening in my life was, and he said, you know, change is really good, but transitions are really hard. And seeing the difference between change and transition, right? And what you're, you're having a hard time with is this transition, you know? And, and what was amazing is that same therapist said to me, I said, I'm just so anxious, I'm

• 49:04Speaker 02

  so nervous, and he said, you know, I want to change your vocabulary. Could you maybe think about it like, I'm feeling really disoriented right now? Because here's the thing, in order to reorient to a new way of living, you first have to be disoriented. Like, and what we're doing is reorienting our lives, and to do that, you have to first be disoriented. So, don't look at it as I'm anxious, look at it as I'm disoriented right now, right? And what do you do? What you just said, grab onto things. Oh, if I have the same house, if I have the same house, it'll be like I, the kids won't notice we got divorced if I could keep the house. The, the kids are gonna notice your divorce, dad's not here anymore. Like, they're gonna notice.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  So, so trading all of these other things, so you can keep the house, it's so well intended. Like, I want the kids not to feel pain. But, but this isn't the thing that's gonna make them not feel pain. So, I think, to answer the question, I, I think fundamentally, like, people who talk about their divorce endlessly are usually people that had a terribly wounding divorce that they never really healed. And so, we have this cultural perception that that's what divorce looks like. Because that's the divorces you hear about. What, what movie? Like, watch A Marriage Story with, you know, Adam whatever and Scarlett Johansson, like, which should have been called A Divorce Story, by the way. It's a knock down, drag out, brutal divorce.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Like, they wouldn't make a movie about a friendly divorce. It would be a very boring movie. Like, they don't make movies about cars not exploding. They make movies where the cars explode. Like, if you just had a film where all of the people in Vin Diesel's car were doing the speed limit, you'd kind of go, this is like the slow and the curious, not the fast. And it's like boring. So you have to just sort of realize that there are so many people that it just doesn't work out. It just doesn't work out. And sometimes now we've created a world where you have to like, I don't know. It's like little kids, like we love pro wrestling, you know? Where like the bad guy's the bad guy.

• 51:06Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  And when he comes in, the dun dun dun dun, music comes on. And the good guy is like the good guy. And then they do dun dun dun dun, music when he comes on, you know? And God, if only that were true, like, wouldn't that be great? You know, wouldn't it be great if there were just like evil people? And all we had to do was just find them and sort of segregate them. But the truth is, like, the line of good and evil runs right through the human heart. And who wants to cut out a piece of their own heart? Like, we have darkness in us, we have evil in us, we have every base thing in us. And we also have so much beauty and love and compassion and empathy in us. And I genuinely believe that there is a way, and I've seen it thousands of times,

• 51:47Speaker 02

  for people to say, I don't love you the way that married people should love each other. We don't love each other that way, but we love each other. And love is a feeling and love is a verb. And so I feel love for you and I'm going to act with love for you in our uncoupling. And there is a way to do that with a tremendous amount of dignity and a tremendous amount, I believe, of not setting on fire the aspects of this person that you cared about, you know? And that you loved. And I have to tell you, I personally, when my son got married a few months ago, getting to spend the weekend, because my ex-wife and her husband live, you know, five or six hours away from me.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  And spending the weekend with her was lovely. Like to be around the warmth of her humor, to be around her with my sons and to see how they love their mom and, you know, the, the, the way we went right back to joking together and the way that her husband and I like sort of bonded in this experience of, oh, we've, we've both been her husband, you know, and I kind of had the joy of, you know, like when something would happen, I'd be like, that's your problem now, buddy. But it, it was like a lovely thing. And I think that you can, if you can accept that transition and that change and say, you know, the barns burned down and now I see the moon. I, I think that has tremendous value.

• 53:12Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Oh, so good. TK, you got something pithy for us to wrap up the question of the week segment. How do you know whether a relationship is worth staying in or fighting for?

• 53:24Speaker 04

  If it builds you up, it's worth it. If it breaks you down, it's not. The thing about fighting, I think about Steven Pressfield's words in the War of Art, "Resistance with the capital R. That's the discomfort you must face anytime you reach for something good on the other side." You're going to have to deal with fights, fighting for something in every arena of life. If you say, "I'm out of this marriage. I'm getting a divorce." That's going to be a fight. You're gonna, you're gonna have to pay social costs, financial costs, hits to your reputation. You will have to fight to rebuild your life. And that's what we see with the earlier caller. If you stay in that, there are going to be some moments where you may have to say, "I have to speak up in ways that are uncomfortable. I have to ask for things that require me to face my insecurities. I may have to do some things

• 54:09Speaker 04

  that don't feel good in the moment." There will always be a fight, but the question to ask is, what is this fight doing to me? Who am I becoming in the process of having fights like this? I had a good friend who won't be named, who talked about how a company acquired his, but he kept a small portion of it. And he would have to have these meetings with the acquiring company. And then one day they brought in their lawyers and they made it clear that they want the remaining part. And he wasn't willing to give it up. And so he showed up to all of these meetings with his lawyers and he was fighting them back and resisting. One day he turns to his team and he says, "Hey, guys." We're becoming really good at standing up to people that try to bully us and, and being

• 54:51Speaker 04

  confident in the face of adversity. And that's one thing I don't want to spend my life becoming good at. We're gonna give up this part of the company and opt out of this fight. So what does the fight do to you? You can become good at a fight. You can become the Mike Tyson of that fight. But is that fight making you the kind of person that you want to become? If the answer is yes, keep on fighting. If the answer is no, it's time to consider an alternative.

• 55:13Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Jim, do you see why he's my counselor?

• 55:15Speaker 02

  I got, I swear, every time he finishes, I'm like, preach. Like, I gotta write this down. Like, I have to, I have to really save this episode. This is really good. I'm just gonna repeat everything and just claim authorship of it to my clients. This is really, and charge them a thousand dollars an hour for the discussion. So I appreciate this.

• 55:33Joshua Fields Millburn?

  TK as well, clutter counseling. He helps people with emotional clutter, physical clutter, psychological clutter. TheMinimalists.com for anyone listening to this who wants to do a clutter counseling session with TK Coleman. You can do that from anywhere in the world. TK, you made me think about the fighting bit here. It depends on what we mean by fighting. My, my pithy answer was if it requires fighting, it's not worth fighting for. But it kind of depends on what do we mean by fighting, right? Like, I'm okay with a disagreement. Sometimes when we say, oh, we had a disagreement. Oh, we were fighting. No, it was just a disagreement. We disagreed about something. Or maybe there's even a time to argue your perspective, right? When I think about fighting, I think about I'm clinging to something. I'm clinging to the way I wish things were. I'm clinging to changing your mind. And I think that's how

• 56:17Joshua Fields Millburn?

  to unlove someone. To love someone is to see them for who they are without trying to change them, coerce them, manipulate them. But to unlove them is to drag them kicking and screaming to your point of view, because this is something that is worth fighting for. You know what's most compelling about TK is he's convinced me of so many things since he joined the show three years ago, almost four years ago now. He's never once tried to convince me of anything. And I've been convinced so many times, not because he's trying to convince me, because he, his point of view happens to be so persuasive. And I think the moment where he's like, I'm going to force you to see my point of view. It's easier to shut down like, well, no, no, I am definitely right.

• 56:59Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And so when I think about fighting in a relationship, I know Bex and I have had one fight in over a decade. And it was totally my fault. And it was a misunderstanding of what she meant by something. And recognizing that like what I was trying to do in that moment was cling to being right. And righteousness came out in that moment of being right. Now, we disagree about stuff all the time. We have different preferences as well. That's not a fight. But I'm going to force you to believe and like me and have the same opinion as me. That becomes a significant problem.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  You know, I just to bounce off of that. I mean, I would push back in the following way, and maybe it's because I fight for a living.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  But you know, I view my job as, as I jokingly say, it's full contact storytelling. Because I'm there to tell a story while someone else is trying to stop me from telling the story and tell a different story. So like, that's a very specific tool. But what I would push back on is this, I don't think every couple fights, right? Like, people will say like, well, if you don't, if you don't have fighting in your relationship, then you're not invested in your relationship. It means that you're not invested in your relationship and you don't care about each other. Because and I think there's something to that in the sense that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. Love and hate are very passionate emotions. So you've got emotional skin in the game. If you're angry at someone, if you're fighting with someone. What's, what's the opposite of love is I don't care. Like, I just don't care.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Like, I don't care enough about your point of view to want to persuade you. I don't really care what you think. Like, that's the opposite, right? So what I would push back on is the following. I, I see conflict as clay sometimes. Like, it's the clay from which we can sculpt some resolution that, that works for both of us in some fashion. I don't, I think one of the reasons to be married. Is that I can't learn everything I need to know about myself from myself. Like, I think I need someone who sees my blind spots. Because I can't see them. That's why they're blind spots to me. But my partner could see them, and I can see theirs. And again, going back to simplicity.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  If you're my favorite person, and I know I'm your favorite person, then if you're telling me something I need to work on, or something that, you know, I know you think this, but I don't think it's serving you. I don't think it's authentic to you. I don't think it's expressing who you are authentically. I know, if I'm your favorite person, and I know that to be true, I'm not going to hear that defensively. I'm going to hear that as you're seeing something I can't see. You're seeing behind me or something. You're seeing some part of my blind spot. And I have to tell you, like, the...

• 59:48Speaker 02

  In the vision of your life as a married man,

• 59:52Speaker 02

  you will lose your wife someday. I'm sorry to say. I hope, like, there is no greater wish I could make for you than when you lose her. Either you die, or she dies, or maybe like, you know, at the age of 150, in the middle of great sex, the roof just caves in, both die instantly. That's actually what I wish for, for the two of you. That's a great way to go.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  I like that one.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  Great way to go. Yeah, yeah, simultaneously. All likelihood, it probably won't happen. Roofs are really sturdy these days.

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  All those details.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, all those details. But what I hope, at the end of your life, you'll be able to say about your wife, and she'll be able to say about you, is two things. I hope the last thing you would say about her is, "This person helped me become the most authentic version of myself."

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  "And she's still my favorite person."

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  Oh, that second one.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  If you can say those two things, that this person helped me become the most au... And I helped her become not what I want her to be.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  I helped her become the most authentic version of herself. And she was still my favorite person. That's the greatest blessing I could ever ask for. And that's the only wedding toast worth saying is that I hope at the end of this, because here's the thing, it's ending right now. It's ending. All of it is ending. Like, there's a finite number of times you will kiss your wife. I don't know the number, but there's a number. Someday we'll know it, but we don't know it right now. It could be thousands. I hope it's thousands. It could be five. Like, but man, I would if I'm you, if I have a wife, I'd be, I'd have that in my mind every day when I woke up.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  Every day I would think, I have to remember to kiss her.

• 1:01:45Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah. Every day, it's so funny because we do say this literally every day. You're my favorite person. I've never heard you say that.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  So right. I've never really said it before.

• 1:01:53Joshua Fields Millburn?

  That's, yeah, it's so powerful because there's something else to it. I think about what Orion Taraban says with respect to love. He says, love is the humiliated self exultant.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's why I love Orion.

• 1:02:07Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And, and I find that really fascinating because there are times when you see the other person and they see you and it's humiliating. And we can, we can honor that in a way that, and that's why I don't push back on, you're right, every relationship is going to have conflict. The, the fighting thing for me is about like, you should do this. No, you should do this. No, you shouldn't.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  You're talking about a kind of fighting. And, and, and there are a lot of people who think that kind of fighting is productive. And by the way, there might be people that that kind of fighting is very comfortable for them. Maybe they grew up in a, in a household where that, that is how conflict is done. I have some friends that like very vigorously like argue with each other, like good friends, you know, not married people even, that just argue in this very intense way. And then they're like, I love you, man. You know, like I've been doing Brazilian jiu jitsu for 20 years. Like almost every one of my best friends has tried to choke me or break my arms. Almost every one of them. All of them do jujitsu. Yeah, yeah, that's right. But none of the, not like they, but there is always this feeling after of like, okay, man, that was awesome, you know, because we go into it knowing that we're not actually trying to hurt

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  each other. And political debate can be that way. Like, any kind of disagreement can be that way. Like, I'm fighting the idea, not the person, and I'm trying to persuade you. And, but again, like, do I love you anyway? If you, of course, I love you anyway. You're my friend. Like, you don't have to agree with me for me to love you. But I love you enough to, like, point out, I think you're wrong. I think you're wrong. I love you enough to say, I think this thought isn't serving you, or it isn't worthy of you. I think you're better than this. But if you never get there where I'm trying to lead you, I'm not gonna not love you. I'm not gonna not love you. Like, I love you. I can't help it. That's why I like, when people break up, or when you watch these, like, reality TV shows, like, the, where The Bachelor, or whatever,

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  and they're like, okay, I think I'm gonna propose, you know? And then they're like, okay, I proposed to the person, and the person says no. And then they're like, well, I'm never speaking to her again. Well, I'm sure glad you didn't marry her then.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Because if you're like, I love you more than anything in the world, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, you, and only you. And the person says, well, I don't want to marry you. I think your response would be, well, that sucks, because then I'm just gonna be this person that's incredibly in love with you forever, and isn't married to you. I'm gonna just be a fool. And I'm just gonna be around you all the time and want to be in your orbit. Because even if you don't love me, like, I'm still just gonna want to be around you, because I love you more than anyone. And I don't know, like, but for the answer to be like, oh, you don't love me? All right, well, then I hate you. I hate you? Like, wow, did we get whiplash? Like, that was a big one. At best, it should be like, well, I love you slightly less now, you know? But don't just say, no, I love you more than

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  anything in the world. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Oh, you don't want to marry me? All right, I hate you, and there's nothing redeeming about you. That's borderline personality disorder. That's not love.

• 1:05:02Joshua Fields Millburn?

  How about you listeners? How do you know whether a relationship is worth staying in and fighting for? Let us know your thoughts in the Patreon community chat. Let's move on to, we got some, a whole switchboard of callers here. We have a quick segment we do called Right Here, Right Now, where we talk about one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist. So when this episode, the day this episode comes out, I have a new audiobook that is coming out. It's called Very, Very Simple. And TK and I actually recorded it together. So I wrote this audiobook. You can download it for free right now. It's not going to be free in perpetuity, but I wanted to give our audience the chance to get it for free. It's called Very, Very Simple. It's 12 tools for a simpler life. It's just some heuristics that we live by, some adjustable, we call them tools or rules in the book,

• 1:05:46Joshua Fields Millburn?

  but they're really just these boundaries. And I find they work really well in relationships too, because in a cluttered house, there's often a lot that's going on beneath the clutter. Our material possessions are a physical manifestation of what's going on in our internal lives. And so if I've got a lot of mess out here, there's probably a lot of mess up here, a lot of mess in here, relationship clutter. And so what Very, Very Simple is, is these 12 heuristics that will really help you sort through the mess, both externally and internally. It's 12 practical tools. They're flexible rules, they're not rigid dogmas to help you define what's no longer acceptable in your life and let it go.

• 1:06:28Joshua Fields Millburn?

  You can find that at very, very simple.com. You can download the ebook or the audiobook for free over there for a limited time. Less clutter, fewer distractions, more life. Also a bonus, Right Here, Right Now segment, since we have the divorce attorney here. My good friend, Sean Mahalik, is a talented novelist. I think his, this is your ninth novel that's coming out, and it's called Divorce, with an exclamation point. It's kind of like Jeopardy, you got the exclamation point there.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  It sounds more severe.

• 1:06:58Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Isn't that kind of how divorce often feels? And when you talk about divorce, you're talking about divorce. And it's a rather NC 17 novel, so please don't read it in front of the kids. But if you're interested in it, it's available for preorder right now. Where do I go for that, Sean? I've got it written down here somewhere. Oh, yeah, it's anslimpress.com. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. It's called Divorce. Kind of think about Fifty Shades of Grey for divorce. I know that's not exactly it, but that'll give you the feeling of it. It's an erotic novel. In fact, that is the subtitle, divorce, an erotic novel. And also, he wrote it, I mean, he's not hiding that he's the author, but he wrote it pseudonymously. So it's under a pin name as well. You can find all the details to that in the show notes at anslimpress.com.

• 1:07:43Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Much more coming up, y'all. But first, here's a minimalist tip from one of our listeners.

• 1:07:49Speaker 05

  Hi, Josh, TK and the Minimalist team. This is Jen from Herefordshire in the UK, and I just wanted to express my sincere thanks to you all. I found your podcast coming out a year ago, and I will remain forever grateful. I'd been decluttering for a while, but what you taught me was that I needed to let go of the stories behind the stuff. We learned to accept that two of our medically complex children, and indeed our own future selves, would be different from the past versions, whose belongings we were clinging to. So for the first six months of 2025, I practiced letting go, letting go of inherited furniture that was taking up a whole barn, of the clutter that we'd accumulated over the past 25 years, and learning that there were other forms of emotional clutter. And that made the most enormous difference. Life became vastly simpler.

• 1:08:35Speaker 05

  Items that had required time and effort to maintain, we gave away. We brought joy to others, and rather than rotting away in a dusty barn, the stuff which was overwhelming us started a new life with new stories. Some went to a vineyard in Georgia, a local primary school, and even a trike was taken by a 90-year-old lady to cycle down her drive every day to collect her newspaper. So by mid-July, our barn was clear and ready for the upcoming apple season with fruit farmers. We cleared the clutter we'd become blind to, and we all felt a great weight had been lifted. The next day, I had a severe brain hemorrhage whilst travelling on a train to London. Over the next hours and days, my life was literally saved by being able to remain relaxed, largely because I felt safe in the knowledge that I laid the foundations for my family to move on,

• 1:09:20Speaker 05

  with or without me. The brain injury has left me unable to spatially map, to safely negotiate clutter or out-of-place items. Decluttering enabled me to return home. I'm most thankful for the knowledge of identity clutter. Not clinging to the person I was before has enabled me to accept my current situation. I know I'll be a different version of me again in the future. I'm really proud that I previously focused all my energy and love into that which I valued. Yes, you also taught me to identify my core values. And with your help, I'd unwittingly laid strong foundations for life to continue. So while I'm unable to continue physically decluttering,

• 1:10:01Speaker 05

  I'm using neuroplasticity to rebuild skills and constantly consider and refine my identity and practise letting go in ways I'd never have imagined. I will, however, hold on to the fact that the brain has a remarkable power to heal and grow. Thank you.

• 1:10:17Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Jen, thank you for that compelling story. Wow. You remind me of why we do what we do here at The Minimalist. TK, I suspect this also applies to relationships too. We often, we think we're like clinging to a person, but, but maybe we're just clinging to a story that we have wrapped around that person.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  Man, I remember my first breakup after like my first major relationship. I dated a girl my entire college career. And the first time I went out to eat without her, I felt like a total loser for being alone. Anyone who knows me today would laugh because I don't feel like I'm winning unless I can have alone time like that. And the last thing I would ever feel today is a loser for going to the movies by myself or a restaurant by myself. But in the immediate aftermath of not having her there with me, I felt like I was a loser. Everyone's looking at me like a guy that can't get a date. It's stories like that that bind us to things that are unworthy of us, bind us to things that have toxic effects on our lives

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  because of a narrative that says, "I can't live without it. I can't be someone who matters without it. I'll never grow beyond it. This is the best that I can do," etc.

• 1:11:31Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Jim, I imagine part of your job is helping people let go of the stories about their relationship.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I love the thought of it being sort of relationship clutter. You know, I think, one of the things I talk about in my book, How to Stay in Love: Practical Wisdom From An Unlikely Source, is I talk about routine maintenance in relationship in a very practical way. And one of the things that I think is really valuable about this stuff is all of it is free. Like, none of that costs anything. Like, what does it take to send an email to your partner or to go for a walk together? If you're not the kind of person that can do things off the cuff, if you, that's why I think an email sometimes is like helpful, because you can compose your thoughts. But if you're the kind of person that does well in conversation, that's good, too.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  To say like, hey, every week, we're gonna make this a practice. Like, tell me three things I did this week that made you feel my love. Tell me three things I did this week that made you feel less than loved. Tell me three things I did this week that made you wanna rip my clothes off. You know, tell me three things this week I did that gave you the ick. You know, like, because here's the thing, like, we do hold on to these patterns, these habits, these ways of being together. We don't check in on like, are they still serving us or are they clutter? Or worse than clutter, are they, are they weighing us down and creating drag that we don't need? You know, and all it would take is a very short check-in, a very short check-in to say, you know,

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  because by the way, what, who wouldn't love to hear the answer to the question, what are three things I did this week that made you feel loved? Like, I would love to hear the answer to that. Like, like, we're standing here, you know, three men talking to each other. If you said to me like, hey, Jim, tell me three things that you like about me so far. Like, I could, both of you, I could give you three things really easily. Like, and by the way, it would be really fun for me to tell you them, it would feel really good. And I think it would feel really good for you to hear them. And I think you might be surprised by them. Like, you might, it might be something that you just completely take for granted. Like, because whoever discovered water wasn't a fish. Like, you're just, you're you, so you don't know, like, oh, you know what I like about you? I like this, you know? And by the way, what are some ways I might have missed the mark? Because I wanna know, I wanna be good at this job.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  You signed up for a job when you got married, and I wanna be good at this job. So, you know, I'm reminded when, because sometimes I make that suggestion to people. And they'll say like, well, you know, like, it sounds like a thing like you gotta do a whole thing. You gotta do this every week. And like, here's what I'm gonna tell you. If you don't have 10 minutes a week to devote to your marriage, you're gonna need a lot more time than that to devote to your marriage. Like, you know, the Dalai Lama is credited with having spoken to a CEO, a Fortune 50 CEO, and he was talking to him about how he feels restless and lost. And the Dalai Lama said, I think you should meditate for 15 minutes a day. And he said, Well, I don't have 15 minutes a day to meditate. He said, Well, then I think you should meditate for an hour.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  And I think it's the same thing. Like, I think that there's clutter in relationships. And just like the clutter in your house, like, you didn't go, Oh, my God, I want to buy that so it can be clutter. Like, I want to buy that. What is it? It's a dust catcher. It's just gonna sit on a shelf and just get dusty. And I'm gonna stop seeing it because it's just sitting in this room. And eventually, I'm just gonna go kind of blind to it because it's just there and it doesn't add any value to my life. And eventually, it's just gonna weigh me down. Okay. Well, how many things in your relationship are like that? They made sense at one point. There was something that, at that stage in your relationship, it made sense. But now we do it. And if we didn't do it, there'd be the feeling of now we have to have a conversation about why we're not doing it anymore. And my partner might really like it. By the way, and maybe your partner is like, I don't actually know why we do that either. Like, why do we do that? Like, one of the most controversial

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  hot takes I've ever had on the internet is, a few weeks ago, I said in an interview that I don't understand why people feel like they have to sleep in the same bed. 10 million views, shared thousands of times. People have very strong feelings on this. And by the way, why do you have very strong feelings upon where I like to sleep? That's very strange. And by the way, if you have a problem with how I like to sleep, don't comment on it on the internet. Text me on my cellphone. And if you don't have my cellphone number, Then you don't get to have strong feelings about where I sleep at night.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Like, you probably shouldn't have strong feelings about that. Because here's the thing, like, why do we do, like, it's okay to check in with your partner and say, why are we sleeping in the same bed? We kick each other, you like to starfish out, you snore, whatever. You wake up so early, I like to sleep in, you make lots of noise, whatever it might be. And to say, hey, you know what? Like, maybe this doesn't serve us. Like, maybe we're a couple, like, we'll snuggle in bed, we'll watch TV, we'll whatever, and then we'll go to our neutral corners and sleep like civilized people. You know, or maybe one or both of you will say, oh my God, I love that time. I love when we're like all tucked in and we're in the cave and it's just us and we sleep and I wake up in the middle of the night and you're right there and I can smell you and reach out to you.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  Great, great. I'm not saying, don't do that.

• 1:16:46Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Right.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  I'm saying for me, that's not the thing. For you, that's the thing. If it's for the two of you and it doesn't scare the horses, knock yourself out. Like, I don't care what you do. So what is relationship clutter in your marriage? What is, again, peer pressure exerted by dead people? You know? And what is serving you? And how do you check in on that from time to time? How do you sort that out? Because again, I think it's not only a useful practice, it's free. I think it's fun. And I think it deepens your connection to each other. And that's like a win, a win, a win. But again, you're not going to hear anyone suggesting that to you because you don't need to buy anything. You don't need to do anything. You don't need to, you don't, you're never going to hear anybody say, buy my new book,

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  Talk to Your Spouse.

• 1:17:35Joshua Fields Millburn?

  You know, I think about one of the most controversial things that I said was, I didn't realize, it was accidentally controversial as well, is my wife and I live apart half the time. And people have opinions about that.

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  Big, strong opinions about it.

• 1:17:50Joshua Fields Millburn?

  You shouldn't do that. You don't love each other. Clearly, you don't get along.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  Did you guys have a talk and go like, darling, we apparently don't love each other? You know, johnxyz23@gmail.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Told us and to go, oh no, I really thought I loved you. I can't believe John 42613 figured it out that we don't love each other. I was still feeling really strongly about, well, you know, I guess we'll move on. Yeah.

• 1:18:17Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah. And the funny thing is like, we actually do enjoy sleeping next to each other when we do. And we often like hold hands in the middle of the night and it's like so sweet. It's like cliche almost. But I found, I think if we did that every single night, it would feel obligatory. And I think that's part of the thing as well, that it may be the objection to like asking those questions every week. You don't want it to feel obligatory. You want it to be sincere.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. But I think, I think there are some patterns in our life. Like I kind of don't care why you exercise a little bit every day. It's good for your body.

• 1:18:50Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  It's good for your body. If you do it because you are worried about maintaining your weight and you have like body image issues or body dysmorphia, I think it's good to work on those things. But the solution's not going to be, you know, no, don't exercise at all because I would be learn how to exercise in a manner that doesn't exacerbate your body dysmorphia. Do yoga, do something like that. The answer is not, oh, don't care at all about your health. So like you may, you don't have to, like, there's so many things that, you know, I, I, I tell clients this all the time. Like I'll tell someone, you have to pay $2,500 a month in child support. And they'll say, well, I don't want to pay $2,500 a month in child support. And I go, well, good news. You don't have to. And they go, I don't have to pay it. And I go, no, you don't have

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  to want to pay it. You just have to pay it. Like you don't, you don't have to want to do this thing. There may be a week where you don't feel like doing that. And by the way, wouldn't that be a lovely thing to share with your partner and to have the kind of space that you could say, I don't know this, this week, this feels like an obligation. And maybe you could go, are you feeling that too? No, actually I was looking forward to this this week. Yeah. So what's going on in me this week? Like, I don't know what's going on in me that I'm feeling that like, be curious still about each other. Like familiarity breeds contempt sometimes, you know, no man's a hero to his butler. And so you're around each other and in each other. Um, because when you meet. You're interested and interesting.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  And you don't just fall in love with the person. You fall in love with the person you are when you're with that person. Like, every time I've fallen in love, I fell in love with a woman. And I fell in love with me. I fell in love with the me that she saw and that she made me look at. And that she, like, oh, I don't, I don't feel very handsome a lot of the time. But God, when like a beautiful woman to me is looking at me and says like, oh, God, you're, man, you're my flavor. I feel really handsome. I feel wonderfully handsome. And by the way, is that a healthy way to be? No, but it's human. It's human. Like, I should, I should certainly have an internal sense of self and a compass that I can find my own beauty inside of me.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  But maybe one of the ways to get to that place is through connection. Like, we break in relationship and we heal in relationship. So you've been cheated on by a prior relationship. The answer is not, okay, I'm gonna build these giant walls and I'm gonna, like, I, you don't learn how to swim by reading books about swimming. You learn how to swim by getting in a pool. Like, someone broke your heart and broke your trust. Trusting someone again and having that trust not be betrayed is how you heal from that. So I, I think that it, it may feel like a chore sometimes if you make a practice of a thing. But that, that feeling is worth looking at, too.

• 1:21:38Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes. Yeah, that's good. Every other Friday, we do a day date together. And it's like, we just take the day off work. And sometimes it's, uh, it's an incredible burden in terms of like, setting aside that time.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  There's stuff to do.

• 1:21:50Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah, I'm gonna have to work the weekend now or whatever. But it's, it never feels like an obligation. I think that's the thing where it can feel like a burden, but what's going on in my own life or my own story that I'm telling myself about this schedule that makes it feel that way? And man, it's like, I can't do it this Friday. Well, maybe I need to do it two weeks in a row then, right?

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I love that.

• 1:22:12Joshua Fields Millburn?

  We've got a lot more to talk about. Let us know if you have any listener tips or insights about this episode. Just send a voice memo to [email protected] so we can feature your voice on the show. Up next, page two and page three. But first, let's take a quick pandiculation break. We'll be right back.

• 1:22:33Joshua Fields Millburn?

  All right, y'all, that's like the first 33% of episode 524, the full three and a half hour maximal edition with James Sexton includes answers to a bunch more questions like, should I hold on to sentimental items that trigger bad memories? Should a married couple ever keep separate bank accounts? His answer to this really surprised me on this one. Actually, a lot of his answers surprised me. How would your marriage benefit from term limits? We also had that article on micro cheating and we talked about religion's role in divorce and how that can complicate or in some cases, simplify things for us. Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the minimalist private podcast on Patreon. The link is in the description. When you subscribe, you can listen to our

• 1:23:18Joshua Fields Millburn?

  private podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Plus, you'll gain access to all of our archives, all the way back to the very first episode. Big thanks to James Sexton for joining us today. His book is called How to Stay in Love. We'll put a link to that and all of his books in the show notes. Also, his YouTube channel. He started a YouTube channel recently and it is irreverent and fun and playful about a topic that often isn't very irreverent, fun, or playful. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And that is our minimal episode for today. On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, TK Coleman, Audio Ben, Spire Jeff, Inspire Dave, Jordan No More, Tom Cat, Professor

• 1:23:59Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Sean, Savvy D. Also, we had my wife Rebecca and Buola on the couch today. My name is Joshua Fields Milburn. If you leave here with just one message, let it be this: Love people and use things because the opposite never works. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll see you next time. Peace.