One of New York’s top divorce lawyers has likened finding a life partner to “winning the lottery”. Having someone with whom to endure life’s “terrifying”, “brutal” tribulations, he says, is a “gorgeous thought”.
James Sexton is a regular media commentator on divorce-related issues, and focuses exclusively on divorce and family matters in his professional practice. He’s a popular presence on TikTok, although he calls social media an “infidelity-generating machine” and recommends getting off it entirely in order to save a relationship that’s on the rocks.
New York divorce lawyer emphases the good fortune of those in successful marriages
James Sexton, a popular family and divorce lawyer in New York, says anyone who has been happily married for a long period of time has essentially won the lottery. Such is their good fortune.
“Life is terrifying,” he says. “And it’s brutal. And it ends – it invariably ends. We’re all going to die. Everyone we love is going to die. We’re playing a game that you can’t win, to the utmost.”
In this bleak conceptualization of life as a human on Earth, Sexton says, having a committed partner is a source of unparalleled comfort.
“Having a partner in that,” he continues, someone whose hand you can hold, who will comfort you when you’re scared and vice versa, and who will help to identify your blind spots, “what a gorgeous thought that is. What a beautiful thought that is. What a worthy pursuit that is.”
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James Sexton is nothing if not quotable
As divorce lawyers go, Sexton knows how to capture his reader’s, or listener’s, imagination. He has a substantial following on TikTok, despite arguing in his book If You’re In My Office, It’s Already Too Late that social media is an “infidelity-generating machine”.
Presumably, he sees his own presence on social media as a sort of antidote, or tonic. He says many of his clients had affairs that started on Facebook. Facebook, he says, is the “most toxic website for relationships”.
Sexton advocates prenuptial agreements, but discourages sunset- and fidelity clauses. He points to high divorce rates and calls marriage an “inherently negligent activity”. And he describes his clients as falling out of love “very slowly, then all at once”, modifying an Ernest Hemingway quote.
“There’s no single raindrop that’s responsible for the flood, but the flood comes.”
In an interview with the Art of Manliness podcast in August 2023, he likened marriage to owning a lion as a pet, or “having a trampoline next to a radioactive waste pile.”
And he’s expressed sentiments similar to the one in the video above before.
“Marriage is like the lottery,” Your Tango quoted him as saying, in 2022. “You’re probably not going to win, but if you win, what you win is so good that it’s worth buying a ticket.”
He gets two or three new infidelity cases a week that Facebook helped facilitate
In 2018, Time published an article by Sexton in which the popular divorce lawyer describes Facebook as a “cheating machine”.
“Facebook,” he writes, “is the single greatest breeding ground ever for infidelity. Nothing that has come before – not swingers’ clubs and key parties, not chat rooms, not workplace temptations, not Ashley Madison, Tinder or Grindr.”
If he had to estimate, he continues, he would say he gets two or three new cases per week that feature infidelity that started, or was facilitated in some way, by Facebook.
Recent research suggests that almost half of all marriages in the US will end in either divorce or separation. Over the last two decades, divorce rates – and marriage rates – have been steadily decreasing. During the average five-hour wedding reception, there are 430 divorces in the US.
James Sexton obtained his Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law in 2001. He opened Law Offices of James Sexton, PC in the same year, and has written two books on relationships and divorce. He is divorced and has two sons.
