How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together

It’s easy to express commitment to a principle; it’s tougher, and more important, to ask yourself whether your actions demonstrate that commitment.

“Frame,” by the way, is not a euphemism for “manipulate.” It’s not “spin,” or dishonesty. It means accessing another way to look at things—hopefully, a constructive, aspirational way.

I have learned, over and over, that marriages and other committed relationships fail for two fundamental reasons. 1. You don’t know what you want. 2. You can’t express what you want.

Often when we speak to people, we speak far too candidly to who they are, not who they want to be. Want to persuade someone? Speak to who they aspire or imagine themselves to be, not to who they actually are.

Divorce is an invitation to reinvent yourself. That’s part of what makes it so terrifying but also exciting.

There’s an unspoken assumption about marriage, one I hear from people on the verge of getting married (amazingly, I’ve yet to be barred from the weddings of friends, colleagues, and family—yet), and then hear about, later, on the other end, when people are in my conference room, giving the play-by-play of what went wrong. The assumption? “My partne

To win an argument, regardless of the time, preparation, and passion I’ve invested in it, is much harder when the person receiving it is disinclined to respond favorably—or, worse, bristles at what I’m saying regardless of the merits. I try to aim my message at whoever the hearer thinks they are or aspire to be—or, in pop psychology–speak, the pers

Just look at the story we tell when we’re first meeting and falling in love. The level of dissimulation on a first date is through the roof. We dress in a way we don’t normally dress, talk in a way we don’t normally talk, hold ourselves a certain way, curate our histories, all an elaborate, dissembling show. It’s fair to say that if you find yourse

Most of my professional efforts are spent figuring out what “victory” looks like for my clients. Where does she want to be five, ten, twenty years from now?