James Sexton

And it's not one that we would ever ask the question of someone like if Ed said, hey, guess what?

My girl and I were getting married.

If I said, really, why?

That would be indelicate.

That would be a rude question to ask.

Whereas most things that catastrophically fail 50% of the time and generally fail to achieve the objective, which was living happily ever after, roughly 75% of the time, it's not unreasonable to say to this person, hey, what is the problem to which marriage is a solution?

And, you know, my graduate work before I went to law school was at NYU, and I was Neil Postman's research assistant on a few of his books.

And I was in his department, the Department of Culture and Communication.

And when I was there, you know, Neil had this approach to technology of saying, anytime you encounter any technology, ask yourself, what is the problem to which this technology is a solution?

Who has that problem?

How does it practically solve the problem?

And what new problems might it unintentionally cause?

And if you apply that model to the technology of marriage...

you're going to have people that are going to approach it very differently because marriage is, above all else, a contract with the state in regards to the rule set for your relationship.

And that's not how most people look at it.

So I've spent a lot of time discussing this and defending this.

So I've really done the research on it.

So, you know, and I'm going to rely a little bit on notes here, but because I want to get the numbers right.

But, you know, there's what we call the crude divorce rate and the CDC does.

the National Vital Statistics system that looks at accrued divorce rate of approximately 2.5 per 1,000 population in recent years, which, again, seems low in this scheme of things, but it translates to literally hundreds of thousands of divorces.