Being trapped with your significant other 24/7 is not a recipe for relationship success. That’s why this week we’re talking with divorce attorney James J. Sexton about how to save our marriage and avoid becoming a statistic in the post-pandemic “divorce boom.” Hear James talk about the ways couples can remind themselves of when they were first falling in love and the best strategies for finding distance without losing connection.
James is the author of If You’re In My Office, It’s Already Too Late: A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Staying Together most recently, How to Stay In Love: Practical Wisdom from an Unexpected Source.
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Highlights from this week’s episode
From the James J. Sexton interview
On the surprising opportunity that being quarantined with our partner presents:
[W]e’re really in each other’s faces now. And that’s challenging. I think that it creates a different skill set. But I also think it gives us even more of a motivation to really address the little things, because one of the core things I’ve always believed and continue to believe is that we fall in love fast and we fall out of love by a series of slow disconnections, small disconnections…And this is an opportunity for people to have to confront some of the things in a very head-on way.
On how to find some space during the current period of confinement:
I know couples that are deliberately taking like one night a week and saying, “I’m going to go upstairs and watch my shows and you’re going to sit downstairs and read and we’re [going to have] some time apart because one of the things that’s nice about a relationship is missing each other sometimes and not constantly having each other. So build that in…We have the ability to say to our partner, “hey, I like missing you. I like the feeling of you doing the things you enjoy independent of my preferences. So let’s build this into our our COVID quarantine life. Let’s create some time where we’re both going to do our own thing. Neither of us is gonna read into it. We’re gonna see it as an act of love, not an act of isolation.” And see how it feels.
To hear more of James’ tips on how to save your relationship during the pandemic, we recommend listening to the entire episode.
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