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Don”€™t throw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s bad for the kids. Flush the old marriage down the toilet and retain all the good parts of the relationship, the ones that got you guys married in the first place. Sure, your political views may change. Your interests in irrelevant hobbies may evolve, but you are basically the same person you were when you were 17. I don”€™t hate my teenage self. He was just misinformed. I”€™m sure I could red-pill the guy right now if I had a time machine. You are the same person you were when you married your wife and she’s the same person she was. Irreconcilable differences are a myth. 

A friend of mine lost his fiancée because he was smoking so much pot that she grew to hate him. All he did was eat snacks and watch movies. After they split, he quit pot, got in shape, and married a woman who looked just like his fiancée. I ran into the original girl a couple years later and we had lunch. She told me she wished the Eric (name changed) that was around now were the Eric she was engaged to. He could have been. I know of another guy who completely wrecked his life by getting seriously addicted to cocaine. He lost his wife and kids and went to rehab. After getting clean, he remarried and rebuilt the connection with his ex-wife and kids. Now he sees them on weekends and they”€™re all friends. I don”€™t see it as a success. I want to replace the new wife with the old wife and pretend the whole drug thing never happened. Another friend, an art school teacher, married a woman fifteen years younger than him. She said it wasn”€™t working out because she hadn”€™t experienced life, and the marriage dissolved. He saw her at a party a few years after and she disappeared into the bathroom. He followed her in there and she was sobbing. When he asked her what was wrong she screamed, “€œWhy didn”€™t you fight for me?!”€ (I”€™ve told this story 100 times and know of a couple who credit it with saving their marriage.) Divorced couples who are friends see it as some kind of victory (especially Europeans for some reason). They act like they”€™ve overcome adversity and survived. No. You failed. Ninety-nine percent of mistakes are forgivable.

Marriage is not an egalitarian relationship where two people are drifting along in matching kayaks hoping the current keeps them together. It is a big boat with one captain and that is the husband. If a marriage fails, it’s his fault. If there is no sex in the marriage, he needs to quit porn and make sex happen. Seduction is his job, not hers. If his wife is losing respect for him, he needs to gain it back. If she can”€™t get over the time he flipped the car, he needs to make her get over it. He needs to fight for her.

I have seen dozens of marriages fall apart and the people involved always seem damaged afterward, like they”€™re suffering from PTSD. The happy divorce Louis C.K. raves about doesn”€™t exist. There are only survivors. They cobble their lives back together and inevitably re-create a life that is just a makeshift version of the one they let fall to pieces. A man has to rise above divorce culture and right the ship. If you want to get divorced, get divorced. Just make sure, when the storm settles, the next woman you settle down with is the one you just left.