“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”
YouTube is a fascinating place with many interesting people. It is, of course, often a waste of time and can quickly become a voyeuristic landscape of mental and emotional quicksand and minefields. Curiosity, they say, killed the cat, and St. Augustine has a thing or two to say about curiositas (and they are not good things).
However, when one desires a break from tedious writing work and opts to clean out the freezer and chip away at the mysterious ice that pools on the bottom and wipe out all the fragments of broccoli that somehow escape the packaging, YouTube consumption driven by curiosity is highly entertaining and sometimes educational.
We have visited before the Soft White Underbelly, the brainchild of photographer Mark Laita. From interviews with child predators, to victims of human trafficking, to unsavory characters of every variety, Laita photographs his subjects and conducts far-ranging and unexpected interviews.
On this freezer cleaning day, I enjoyed the thoughts of James Sexton, Esquire, a New York divorce attorney with two arms loaded with tattoos and a unique, if limited, perception about the current state of marriage.
The interview is surprisingly tender. There is a keen sense of longing, whether contrived or sincere. While most likely making a killing on messy and ugly marital fighting and destruction, Sexton, who is himself divorced, seems to long for another way, almost to wish wistfully that it could be otherwise.
Perhaps, if we are to take him at face value, which seems unwise, this is the sincere motivation of writing his books like “If You’re In My Office, It’s Already Too Late: A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Staying Together.” After identifying the common threads leading to misery time and again yet being unable to turn back time and help couples avoid catastrophe, Sexton offers his findings to the couples who have not yet reached ground zero. The more cynical read on his behavior is that a high-powered lawyer cashed in on decades of anecdotes about couples in the midst of knock-down-drag-out divorce fights.
As is often the case, most likely Sexton’s motivations are many. Yet, there is what can only be called tenderness when he speaks of why some couples divorce.
He recounts asking an attractive young woman in the throes of legal separation if there was a moment she knew that the relationship was in headed for destruction. She recalls that there was a specific granola she enjoyed on yogurt. If could only be purchased at a specialty grocer. When the marriage was healthy, she never had to think about it: When the granola was low, her husband would buy her more. Such a courteous gesture. One day, the granola ran out. Time passed, and no replacement came.
I won’t tell you what the young lady replied when asked what she had stopped doing for her husband around the same time (suffice it to say, Mr. Sexton spit out his coffee in surprise at her candid answer. That bit of voyeurism is for when you are cleaning out your freezer). The point is that both husband and wife had begun to neglect each other in small ways before the bottom fell out.
So how do you go bankrupt? The quote from Ernest Hemingway at the top of the page is pithy—the essence of Hemingway: “Gradually, then suddenly.” It’s often alternatively quoted in a wordier fashion: “At first you go bankrupt slowly, then all at once.” Sexton adapts the longer version to explain how people “fall out of love” in marriages.
First, the small gestures habitual in the relationship become infrequent. No pack of his favorite gum left in the center console, no note to say she looks beautiful. The granola runs out. The reassuring hug is brusquely forgotten. Then, suddenly: the affair, the addiction, the empty, lonely, loveless sadness comes to light. Each instance is a unique form of misery with its own patterns of behavior and predispositions. But the sudden freefall would for many arguably have been avoided if the simple gestures had continued the growth of the relationship instead of their absence contributing to a slow and gradual decline.
So many of us go from wondering how to date to bickering over the flotsam and jetsam of a shared life when, all we thought we wanted was to stay in the time between those fraught bookends of so many lives. Divorce is not inevitable, and Mr. Sexton, whatever his motives may be, has wise words for those who want to avoid it.
