What if marriage is actually simple?

“Try loving your spouse a quarter as much as you love your cat.”

“Be as polite to your spouse as you are to strangers.”

“If your marriage has gone south, try as a last-ditch effort doing one kind act a day for a month and see what happens.”

Just three selected bits of advice I jotted from Christian podcaster Matt Walsh’s interview with a $750-an-hour New York divorce lawyer named James J. Sexton.

Not too shabby. Sexton is far from Christian, but it stings just as much from a heathen as from a believer to be rebuked for showing more affection to Puss ’n Boots than to the person you married. Balaam’s donkey gave better advice to Balaam than any human in the camp. And if a Midianite had exclaimed to the adulterous King David “You are the man!” the monarch would have been no less cut to the quick.

There are limitations to Sexton’s helpfulness. For a hard-bitten, take-no-prisoners attorney who has seen it all (one of his clients was stabbed, then run over four times by her husband in a parking garage), he shares the curious naïveté of men who “do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matthew 22:29).

On the one hand, he has no concept of “evil” or “sin,” but only of “hurt people hurting other people.” At the other extreme, he knows nothing of the transforming power of unearthly grace to resurrect even the deadest marriages.

Still, like the blind men of Industan, who miss the whole elephant but are informative on some features, Sexton makes good points. A 25-year career of seeing nothing but wrecked marriages is pretty good practice for extrapolating repetitive patterns of failure.

Sexton is in no danger of putting himself out of a job by sharing couples advice in his book How To Stay in Love. Enough marriages end in divorce to provide ample job security, even with lawyers as common as rats in the Big Apple. But Sexton cites a statistic that intrigues: 86 percent of divorced people remarry within five years. That tells me that people are bad at marriage, but also that the desire to marry is in our spiritual DNA.

Both facts confirm the Bible: (1) men are sinners; (2) men are created to marry, and without marriage are lonely.

Sexton’s interviews are raw and PG-rated (except for Walsh’s where he seems conscious of speaking to a better man). But the mature Christian will profit from insights like the following:

We should beware of enormous baleful cultural influence in the form of tropes and social media to make criticizing our spouses in public acceptable.

We should understand that marriages are rarely destroyed by one big event—an affair, a death, a financial ­collapse—but by a sequence of small actions and reactions, and the continuous honeycombing of the substructure of trust by a thousand little capitulations. As a character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises said about how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

By the time a phone call is made to Sexton, the marriage has been in downward spiral for a long time: “The cycle of misery that people experience that lands in my office: ‘Well, why should I sleep with him; he was working all the time.’ ‘Well, why should I want to come home; when I come all she does is complain to me.’”

Let us end with a word of hope from the barrister:

“The cycle of misery can also go the other way. Just be kind to your spouse, … all the things you were to each other when you were dating … . What if it’s that simple? What if it’s just leaving a note before you go to work that says, ‘I married the prettiest girl in the world. See you later.’ There’s no product you have to buy. Advertisers will never jump all over it. … What does it cost to tell your spouse they’re beautiful, or that they’re funny, or that they’re smart, or that they’re a great mom? … What if it’s just that simple?”