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**LINK IN BIO FOR FULL EPISODE**
A divorce can end the marriage without ending the pattern.
That may be the most alarming thing hidden inside the math. People often leave a relationship with a clean explanation for what happened: they cheated, they changed, they were selfish, they were impossible to live with.
Sometimes that explanation is true, at least partially.
But if it becomes the whole story, there is nothing left to examine. You’ll bring the same blind spots, survival strategies, and ways of disconnecting travel into the next relationship.
That is what makes James Sexton’s perspective so valuable.
Marriage has never come with more advice, more therapy, or more language for what healthy relationships should look like—and yet nearly half still end. After more than two decades inside thousands of divorces, James sees the patterns people often recognize only after it is too late.
In the full episode, we examine:
• Why women initiate 69% of divorces
• Why expensive weddings can predict failure
• How changing gender roles are reshaping marriage
• Why people repeat the same mistakes in second and third marriages
• And somehow, what blowjobs and granola have to do with all of it
Watch via the link in bio or search Mighty Pursuit Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Transcript
Look at the math. First marriages, roughly fifty percent divorce rate. Second marriages, sixty to seventy percent divorce rate. Third marriage is 70 and greater divorce rate. We're not getting better and better at this. So what does that tell us? Most people, after they divorce, they don't really do the hard work of going, okay. What happened here? Like, what where's my part of it? Because it's just tier simple explanation's easier. Why did we get divorced? She was sleeping with his secretary. Not why was he sleeping with his secretary? Because he's a he's a scumbag and a narcissist. No. We we disconnected, and we weren't, you know, honest with each other. Okay. Why did that happen? What's my share of it? What's his share of it? Like, there are awful people. There are malignant narcissists. There are people who gaslight and love bomb and whatever other TikTok terms you wanna throw at it. But the truth is that when people tell you the story of their life, they're usually the hero of the story. Put your radar up on that one and no, is there another version of this story where maybe I'm not the hero of the story a 100% of the time? I think a lot of people don't ever postgame that, and they just repeat the same mistakes over and over again. That's why the divorce rate for second marriages is higher than first, for third is higher than first and second, for fourth is higher than worst, second, and third, and it gets catastrophically worse as time goes on.
