• Today on GTU – A divorce lawyer says that marriage doesn’t make any sense. Lawyer James Sexton, a divorce attorney for 20 years, recently spoke to the inspiration and motivation TikTok channel @welovethatquote about the matter. And it’s hard to come away from his analysis without feeling that it’s high time we start reconsidering our perception of marriage as sacred.
    • “If you break it down, fundamentally, 56% of marriages end in divorce,” Sexton says in the video, before pointing out the part of that equation most of us probably don’t often consider — that’s just the couples who actually go through with the costly, tedious and emotionally devastating process of divorcing. What about all the other married people who stay together “for the kids or because they don’t want to give away half their stuff?” as Sexton put it. He estimated this to be “20% at least,” before going to analogize marriage to a technology product. “You now have a technology that fails 76% of the time. That’s insane.” Sexton explained that marriage doesn’t even meet basic standards for negligence applied to practically every other part of life.
    • Sexton then said, “If I told you there’s a 76% chance when you walk out the door today, you’re going to get hit in the head with a bowling ball, you would not go out, or you’d wear a helmet.” Pretty hard to argue with him there. It’s for this reason, that he says marriage “literally fits the legal definition of negligence,” because it falls short of a key standard legal professionals use for assessing risk: the Burden, Probability and Loss analysis, which is used to determine whether “what you lose by not doing something is lower than the risk of harm. Held to this standard, Sexton says “Marriage is an inherently negligent activity. It’s like owning a lion. The likelihood of someone getting hurt seriously is very, very high.”
    • Given this it’s not just that marriage doesn’t make sense — our cultural obsession with it doesn’t either. We definitely wouldn’t leave the house if we knew there was a 76% chance of taking a bowling ball to the cranium. Yet we have no such hesitations with marriage — not only do people continue to do it, but as Sexton points out, “there’s a presumption that you should get married, and if you don’t get married, there’s something wrong with you.” Put in these stark terms, it’s hard not to wonder why we’re like this. Religion plays into it, of course, as do issues like legal benefits and entitlements, from tax breaks to parental rights (especially for LGBTQ+ people) to access to healthcare — in fact, a 2020 survey found that 26% of people who got married in 2020 did so to get on their partner’s health insurance. But those issues aside, it’s hard not to feel like Sexton has a point about the ways marriage just… doesn’t make any sense. And he suggested we should probably be changing how we treat this topic culturally. Instead of reflexively celebrating the idea of marriage, perhaps we should be asking couples harder questions, like “why? You’re happy? Why would you get married…why would you put yourself through that? Why would you run that risk?” We hope you join us as we dive into this Hot Topic and so much more this morning on GTU!