The Ultimate Guide to Divorce (For You & The People You Love)

Thank you.

It's so good to be here again.

I am so thrilled that you said yes to this, because when I first had you on the show and you and I had one of the single best conversations about relationships, you taught me four words, and those four words are, "You're my favorite person," and those four words are the secret to having lasting love.

And I'm celebrating my 30th wedding anniversary this year with Chris, and we say, "You're my favorite person," every single day to one another, and it has really improved what was already a really great marriage.

And so I cannot thank you enough for not only, um, making a difference in my life, but after that conversation, I said to you, you are the number one divorce attorney in the United States.

If Chris and I were getting a divorce and I found out he hired you, I would need a diaper.

[laughs]

Not because you're mean, but because you're exceptional.

And I said to you after our first conversation, "Would you come back and do a comprehensive guide on divorce and cover everything? Because most of us, if we go through that, or if our loved ones do, would never be able to hire you." And you said yes.

Yeah.

And I would love to have you speak to the person who's listening and share with them what are we gonna cover today, and how do you want them to think about this conversation in terms of it being a life-changing resource for them or people that they love who may be going through divorce or may be considering divorce or may have gone through one and still- can't get their power and their life back.

I mean, I think our first conversation was more the physics of things, and this one's more the emergency room.

Mm.

Divorce is so common, increasingly more common in terms of the, you know, what we'll talk about later as being sort of the passive divorce, where people stay married, they don't do the paperwork, but they just have checked out of the marriage.

So really, what I, I hope, you know, everyone will walk out of here with today in a very tangible way is the realization that, A, if a marriage can be saved, that there are some points where that can happen early on in the process.

But if it can't be or it shouldn't be, and those are two different things, that there are ways that we can manage what's happening here.

A lot of people treated divorce like the weather, like it's something that happened to them, and that's not true.

It's a process, and it's a process you have a tremendous amount of control over.

So hopefully, people are gonna walk out of this conversation with real clarity as to the levers that they have control over and the things that they should be looking at.

And if you're thinking about it, I think you'll see the distinction, a key distinction, between is this broken or is this unattended? Because those are two different things.

Is my marriage broken, or is my marriage unattended? Because they're not the same, and they require two different skill sets to deal with.

If someone's in a divorce, meaning they've started one or they're right in the thick of one, I think at the end of this conversation, they're gonna spend less money on that divorce, they're gonna hurt their children less, they're gonna do less harm to themselves, and they're gonna work better with the counsel that they have.

If someone's been through a divorce and they're listening-

Mm

...