How understanding divorce can help your marriage

To understand what makes marriages work, we need to talk about why they sometimes end, says family law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen. Follow along as she lays out three ways that thinking about marital decisions through the lens of divorce can help you better navigate togetherness from the beginning.

"Till death do us part."

When we get married, we make vows.

To love, to honor,

to forsake all others.

Or as a friend of mine put it,

"Not to leave dirty socks
all over the house."

(Laughter)

We may fall short of some of our promises

some of the time,

but one that will always hold true
is that first one:

"Till death do us part."

Because spouses are bound together
by their decisions,

in marriage and in divorce.

So, a mentor of mine once told me,

"You should always marry
your second husband first."

(Laughter)

What did that mean?

It didn't mean that Mr. Right
is somehow waiting behind door number two.

It meant that if you want to understand

what makes a marriage work,

you should think
about how a marriage ends.

Divorce makes extremely explicit

what the tacit rules of marriage are.

And everyone should
understand those rules,

because doing so can help us build
better marriages from the beginning.

I know, it doesn't sound very romantic,

but sometimes the things we do out of love

can be the very things
that make it hard for that love to last.

I am a family-law professor.

I have taught students,

I've been an attorney,

I'm a mediator

and I've also been divorced.

And I'm now happily married
to my actual second husband.

(Laughter)

The reason that I think
this is so important

is that I think everyone should be having
some of these very painful conversations

that divorced people experience.

These are painful conversations
about what we contributed,

what we owe,

what we are willing to give

and what we give up.

And also, what's important to us.

Those conversations should be happening
in a good marriage,

not after it is broken.

Because when you wait until it's broken,

it's too late.

But if you have them early on,

they can actually help build
a better marriage.

Three ideas that I want
to put on the table

for you to consider.

One, sacrifice should be thought of
as a fair exchange.

Two, there's no such thing
as free childcare.

And three, what's yours
probably becomes ours.

So let me talk about each of these ideas.

The first one,

sacrifice should be a fair exchange.

Take the example of Lisa and Andy.

Lisa decides to go to medical school
early in the marriage,

and Andy works to support them.

And Andy works night shifts
in order to do that,

and he also gives up a great job
in another city.

He does this out of love.

But of course, he also understands

that Lisa's degree
will benefit them both in the end.

But after a few years,
Andy becomes neglected and resentful.

And he starts drinking heavily.

And Lisa looks at her life
and she looks at Andy and she thinks,

"This is not the bargain
I wanted to make."

A couple of years go by,

she graduates from medical school,

and she files for a divorce.

So in my perfect world,

some kind of marriage mediator
would have been able to talk to them

before Lisa went to medical school.

And at that point,
that mediator might have asked,

"How exactly does fair exchange work?

What does it look like in your marriage?

What are you willing to give
and what are you willing to owe?"

So in a divorce,

Lisa now probably is going to owe Andy
financial support for years.

And Andy ...

no amount of financial support
is going to make him feel compensated

for what he gave up,

and the lost traction in his career.

If the two of them had thought
about their split early on,

what might have gone differently?

Well, it's possible that Lisa
would have decided

that she would take loans
or work a part-time job

in order to support her own tuition

so that Andy wouldn't have had to bear
the entire burden for that.

And Andy might have decided
to take that job in that other city

and maybe the two of them
would have commuted for a couple of years

while Lisa finished her degree.

So let's take another couple,
Emily and Deb.

They live in a big city,

they have two children, they both work.

Emily gets a job in a small town,

and they decide to move there together.

And Deb quits her job
to look after the children full-time.

Deb leaves behind an extended family,

her friends

and a job that she really liked.

And in that small town,
Deb starts to feel isolated and lonely.

And 10 years later, Deb has an affair,

and things fall apart.

Now, the marriage mediator
who would have come in

before they moved
and before Deb quit her job

might have asked them,

"What do your choices about childcare

do to the obligations
you have to each other?

How do they affect your relationship?

Because you have to remember

that there is no such thing
as free childcare."

If the two of them had thought
about their split beforehand,

what would have gone differently?

Well, maybe Deb would have
realized a little better

how much her family and her friends
were important to her

precisely in what she was taking on,

which is full-time parenthood.

Perhaps Emily,

in weighing the excitement
of the new job offer

might have also thought about
what that would mean for the cost to Deb

and what would be owed to Deb

as a result of her taking on
full-time parenthood.

So, let's go back to Lisa and Andy.

Lisa had an inheritance
from her grandmother

before the marriage.

And when they got married,
they bought a home,

and Lisa put that inheritance
toward a down payment on that home.

And then Andy of course worked
to make the mortgage payments.

And all of their premarital
and marital property

became joined.

That inheritance is now marital property.

So, in a split, what's going to happen?

They're going to have to sell the house
and split the proceeds,

or one of them can buy the other out.

So this marriage mediator,

if they had talked to them
before all of this happened,

that person would have asked,

"What do you want to keep separate
and what do you want to keep together?

And how does that choice

actually support the security
of the marriage?

Because you have to remember

that what's yours,
probably, will become ours,

unless you actually are mindful
and take steps to do otherwise."

So if they had thought about their split,

maybe they would have decided differently,

maybe Lisa would have thought,

"Maybe the inheritance can stay separate,"

and saved for a day
when they might actually need it.

And maybe the mortgage that they took on
wouldn't have been as onerous,

and maybe Andy wouldn't have had
to work so hard to make those payments.

And maybe he would have
become less resentful.

Maybe they would have lived
in a smaller house

and been content to do that.

The point is,

if they had had
a divorce-conscious discussion

about what to keep separate,

their marriage might have been
more connected and more together.

Too often in marriage, we make sacrifices,

and we demand them,

without reckoning their cost.

But there is wisdom
in looking at the price tags

attached to our marital decisions

in just the way that divorce law
teaches us to do.

What I want

is for people to think
about their marital bargains

through the lens of divorce.

And to ask,

"How is marriage a sacrifice,

but an exchange of sacrifice?

How do we think about our exchange?"

Second:

"How do we think about childcare

and deal with the fact

that there is no such thing
as free childcare?"

"How do we deal with the fact

that some things can be separate
and some things can be together,

and if we don't think about it,

then it will all be part
of the joint enterprise."

So basically,

what I want to leave you with
is that in marriage or divorce,

people should think about the way

that "till death do us part" marriage

is forever.

Thank you.

(Applause)