Divorce

Why Are 80 Percent Of Your Clients Women?

Having mediated divorces and legal separations for more than 36 years, (over half of my life), I’ve learned that the dynamic between couples is remarkably interesting. The initial attraction normally occurs when men are attracted to women sexually, or women see a future with the man, but not necessarily from the same vantage point. I’m not a psychologist or a scientist. However, I am a man. I have a wife and four grown children, and I dated pretty extensively throughout high school and college before I was married.

Young men have a desire to be sexually satisfied forever. They hope to meet a woman who can help make that happen. This can lead to a relationship full of love and affection, which often leads to having children, who will need to be taught how to become adults. Children learn how to become adults through watching and learning from their parents.

My dad had an older brother who died way before his time. He was brilliant—maybe even one of the last true geniuses of the world. He used to say that perfect parents raise perfect children. I would say that he was right, but the problem is that no one is perfect; everyone has their faults. When those faults are brought into a marriage, what happens?

In most marriages, the sexual involvement slows down as the years pass. As men age, their testosterone levels decrease. They might even develop erectile dysfunction. If the primary reason a man finds a woman attractive and wants to stay married is to maintain sexual prowess, and if that sexual prowess decreases over time, then one would think that I would receive more calls from men. You might assume it is men who have come to understand that they are no longer getting out of their marriage what they first intended to get out of it.

Having sex with one’s partner is about the most intimate, incredible thing that can happen to two people. Two naked bodies getting together and engaging in what is natural. However, when the marriage begins, and sexual activity is at an all-time high, and then slows down, (or ceases to exist), problems often arise. I am not a scientist and I’ve never proven this. However, based on what I have observed through thousands of mediations I have presided over in Suffolk County, I would say that the woman in a marriage tends to lose her desire to engage in sex after having children and ten or more years pass. The woman might need to relax with a glass of wine or go on vacation, because otherwise her mind is racing and it’s often not in the bedroom.

While men can easily and quickly perform in bed, that’s not typically what women want. Women don’t look to get married because they have an enormous sexual urge, (of course some do), and they don’t carry around this appendage that has a little head of its own. So, what does the woman want in a marriage?

Well, in order for the woman to get married to a man, she will have to engage in sexual acts with him, because if the man isn’t getting that, then he will move on to someone else. The woman has to engage in the same level of sexual activity desired by the man, at least in the beginning, so that the man wants to marry her. According to my theory, the man chooses to marry a woman if that woman is sexually attractive to him, and follows his sexual drive, with or without the desire to bring children into this world.

Once a man and woman get married, the woman is not normally focused on having sex with her husband. Instead, the woman is more focused on the future, on stability, and on having children. The woman looks at the future in her future husband, and she’s typically not going to marry a man unless believes she can have children with him, because it’s very important for her to fulfill her motherly instincts. Understandably, many couples choose not to have children, however, statistically, the majority of married couples have families.

All mothers teach their children to have children, although perhaps more commonly than ever, people these days get married and do not have children. As of July 2021, the number of people getting married in Suffolk County has decreased significantly. In addition, divorces as a result of the pandemic have risen to over 50 percent, which is very frightening for the future stability of the populace of Long Island.

New York State statutes, which are the strongest in the country, do not speak of mothers and fathers, but are gender-neutral. A mother and father have equal rights to their children, but most fathers don’t want to fight for those rights, and about 90 percent are not going to look to take the children away from their mother. This is because they know the trauma that would create for the children and for the mother. Even though the statute dictates that a father could, under the right circumstances, obtain custody and pull his children away from the mother, most fathers simply don’t want, or don’t think they would be successful seeking sole custody.

Of course, there are exceptions, such as when the mother is an alcoholic or drug addict, or otherwise cannot do as good of a job raising her children as the father can. In those cases, which comprise less than 10 percent of divorcing couples, those husbands usually do want to raise the children.

The woman looks at her husband and says, “I want to have children with this man,” and then she does. She looks at him and says, “I want to live in a nice house,” and maybe she does. However, on Long Island, that’s a big trick today, because there are so few houses available for sale right now, and when one is for sale, perhaps the seller gets bids over the asking price. At that point, it’s just a matter of how much over the asking price someone is willing to pay.

In some cases, people might bid $100,000 over the asking price; the closing statements for the sales during this Covid era, will soon be published in the office of the county clerk and we will be able to do the statistics on them. This is an incredible time in our lives. We’ve never experienced anything the Covid-19 pandemic in our lifetimes. We are currently one year past the beginning of the pandemic, which doesn’t seem to be coming to an end, with the Delta variant spreading, and who knows which Greek letter future variant will surface.

A woman wants to have a nice car, get her nails done, and spend $150 or $200 at a beauty parlor to have her hair cut and colored. If she could have a cleaning professional clean the house two or three times a month, that would be great too.

A woman wants to be able to raise her children on Long Island, and ensure that they receive a good education in one of the best school systems in the country. Long Island produces many scientific award scholarships and Harvard acceptances, and is known throughout the world for having a very good educational system. It also has beautiful beaches, parks, and museums, and is in close proximity to Manhattan, which used to be a great place to go (and will be again). A woman wants to have a nice car to drive to the Long Island railway station, spend $150 on a ticket to Broadway, and have dinner in New York City. All of this could cost $700 to $1,000 a day, which is a lot of money, and about 80 percent of the women on Long Island simply can’t afford it.

Here are some statistics: The initial contact our office receives is made approximately 80 percent of the time from women who are unhappy in their marriage. It is the woman who calls or e mails us. Is it a coincidence that women who live on Long Island cannot afford to comfortably live on Long Island. What does “comfortably” mean? It means they are married, have children, and live in a good suburban community where their children attend good schools, yet can’t take full advantage of the things life has to offer on Long Island.

This has slightly changed recently because as a result of the pandemic, many families are spending much more time at home now, working remotely. My daughter’s bedroom has been converted to an office, and I do 100 percent of my work from home. I sell the road to happiness. I get people out of miserable relationships and I help their children. I help individuals and couples get out of bad marriages, and move on to a happier life. To me, that is the most important thing that I have learned to do over my 36-year career.

My wife of 40 years and I have raised our children on Long Island since they were infants. They have graduated from school, and they are all happily married and successful.

Raising children on Long island is a huge ‘ask’. It is the biggest possible thing and the hardest possible thing to attain, encompassing everything, including money, security, good behavior and living a ‘good’ life. We all want our children to have children and raise them with values, and establish a great life.

The women on Long Island want these things, and want to be married to a man who can help achieve it. Many of those women are married with children, but they just aren’t happy. Many times for many years. But fear and the desire not to tell their spouse they are unhappy in the marriage prevents them from acting, so they linger in a marriage that is not fulfilling, many times sexless and void of any fun.

However, they have children and they live in a house in Suffolk County, which is where they thought it would be a good idea to get married and raise children.

Men don’t really think of these things; they think more about the sexual aspect of things, and they go to work to provide financially for their family. Women provide financially for their families too, now more than ever. In fact, most mothers on Long Island work; they have to in order to afford anything resembling a lifestyle, and they have to pay mortgages and these ridiculously high taxes.

If what I’m saying makes sense, (and all my statistics are approximate; I don’t have codified statistical analyses on these things, I just know from the trend based on what I do), then 80 percent of the couples with children on Long Island cannot afford that kind of life. And more than half of them are not happy in their marriages.

However, this is changing. A lot of people who lived in the City, and are making $200,000 or more per year are moving to Long Island. To where are they moving? They are moving into homes, but they can’t find homes because the 250,000 or 300,000 people before them moved out here. Many of them went to the Hamptons, Westchester, and Jersey, but a lot of them came here to middle Long Island. They couldn’t afford two million dollar houses in South Hampton or East Hampton, and there are so few houses for sale out there anyway. Most of those houses doubled in value in one year. Because of this, those people fall into good neighborhoods, (or not so good neighborhoods), based upon school district statistics and affordability in Suffolk County. Even more expensive is Nassau County, which has approximately as many people of about 1.4 million people.

Based on this analysis, the woman is looking for security, but the man does not view security as the number one priority. If the man is smart, then he is focused on keeping the woman happy in order to get what he wants. Of course, a husband and father wants far more than sex; he also wants happiness. How does he get it?

He got married, which is a choice, and in New York State an extremely serious choice. New York has very old conservative divorce laws. They are the strongest in America. There’s no such thing as community property in New York. This means that if two people live together forever but are not married, and if one person has $10 million and the other person is about to go on welfare, the person with the $10 million has zero legal responsibility to support the other person. Even if they lived together in the same house for many years. It is only marriage that counts in New York. If the same two people were married, however, then a different story ensues, and that’s why people end up needing me.

He wants that security and he wants his wife to be happy and to raise his children in a house. How does he do that? He has to work hard and make money, the lifelong dream of virtually every soul on the planet. Everything is about money, except health. However, there is also a component of money when it comes to health, because people have to eat well and exercise in order to stay healthy, and both require money.

Time is also a component of money. Someone might have to work two jobs to pay the bills, just to come home feeling frustrated and having to help raise their children, and still unable to pay for the things that they want to pay for (and I’m not talking about the mortgage, taxes, insurance, and food, but about getting on a train, getting nails and hair done, seeing a show on Broadway, and all of the other reasons people come to live on Long Island).

People find that they can’t fulfill the dream they had about what it would look like to live on Long Island, but men don’t call me because they’re afraid and they don’t understand what their wives are feeling because their wives are very different than they are.

I had a very special mother who died very early at the age of 61. I also have a wife, a daughter and four granddaughters. Females are quite different than males. They ‘get’ it. What does it mean to say that they “get it”? It means that they have a more intuitive understanding of the world as it really is. They’re not clouded by that sexual thing that guys have; their focus is on teaching their children how to become happy human beings, and isn’t that what it’s really all about?

If someone doesn’t have money, then it’s going to be tough for them to be happy living in Suffolk County. They won’t be able to take advantage of the things that Suffolk County has to offer, like the beautiful beaches, museums, and thousands of great restaurants. When that’s not being fulfilled on both sides, there’s unhappiness, but the wife views it completely differently than the husband. The wife shuts down early in the relationship, when children are born and there’s not enough money to do the things she wants to do.

Over the many years I have been an attorney, I note that approximately 80 percent of the couples with houses and children on Long Island and Suffolk County cannot afford to do these things. This is what they signed up to do, but then they find that they can’t do it. This is when the sex trails off because the wife doesn’t want it and she doesn’t want to reward her husband. She knows what he wants, and he knows what she wants, and he doesn’t understand why he is not getting it. Often he notices his wife’s unhappiness, but doesn’t attribute any of it to him, and thinks it’s just a bad mood she will snap out of.

Most of the time, the couples who are struggling with their economic lives and who are among the 80 percent, are usually associated with other families in same economic condition, more or less. No one wants to go out with a couple that makes two million dollars, just to feel like they have to use a credit card to go to expensive places, and wealthy couples don’t want to bring their friends places that they know they can’t afford. It’s all about the money. That’s just the way life is.

Women have an intuitive sense, and if they’re not happy, then they will start to shut down in their marriage. A wife will not, however, want to tell her husband that she’s not happy; instead, she will express it in other ways, perhaps by having an affair. If she has an affair, it probably won’t be for the sex, but because she is afraid to tell her husband how she’s feeling. She will also be afraid of getting caught, and this situation will lead to divorce. The woman will not be happy and she will not know what to do about it, because she will be afraid of the economic consequences of divorce, especially if she has young children.

Traditionally, it has been the man who brings in the money, but that’s changed radically. Once the husband leaves the house after divorce, the wife will not receive 100 percent of what he earns; she will likely receive maintenance for a period of time, as well as child support, which is determined by a formula. If a husband and wife have four children together, then the wife will get 31 percent of her ex-husband’s income. Fewer children yields less child support. The husband will always end up keeping at least 50 percent of his income.

Under these circumstances, what is the wife to do? How will she pay the bills after divorce? In most cases, she won’t be able to, and will not have been able to live the life she wanted anyway, even before the divorce. To be clear, I am not talking about the bare necessities, but about what she envisioned when she moved to Long Island. There is a breakdown in communication, and the frustration grows.

Most of the women who call us have been feeling some level of unhappiness and have been thinking about divorce for a bare minimum of two years (and many of them for five or 10 years). The men are typically blindsided by this; they might have known something was going on, but thought it was a temporary bad mood and that she would snap out of it. Unfortunately, it’s usually not just a bad mood.

For the men who are reading this, if your wife is not happy, then life is going to be miserable for you. The old phrase, “A happy wife is a happy life” is very true. Isn’t money one of the real important components of making her happy? Of course it is; it is essential. If a husband lives on Long Island, then he is going to need a lot of row money in order to make his wife happy.

The children will be going to good schools in an area where real estate taxes are, at minimum, $10,000 to $12,000 per year, which is about $1,000 per month just in taxes. Many houses on Long Island have a real estate tax of $20,000 to $25,000 per year. This is something that doesn’t exist in Nebraska, Alabama, or North Carolina, where the standard of living and the cost of raising two children is significantly lower.

The money is honey, and if someone isn’t making it, the frustration level can grow rapidly. On top of that, in this crazy age of Covid-19, many husbands are at home with their wives a lot more often than when they were working outside of the home, which can make things very tense.

How can someone live their best life on Long Island? Why are 80 percent of my calls and emails from women? The answer to both questions is about the same thing: money. If there isn’t enough money to afford the things that the wife moved to Long Island for, then the needs of the wife will be unmet. Men simply don’t understand it.

I’m a rare being, because I had a mother who was very special and taught me a lot of feminine things; I cry easily, I am artistic, I am a musician, I cook, and those traits are feminine. I have never had a problem with this. I wore pink shirts for seven months when my fourth child was to be born, I wanted a girl, and I got it.

Since most men don’t get it, women have to help them. How do they do that? I don’t know. They can stay busy, be active, do thing to keep themselves occupied, exercise, and eat well. I’m not a nutritionist or a psychologist, but I lead a busy productive life, and that’s what has to be done if a husband and wife want to stay married and continue living on Long Island. If a couple doesn’t do these things, then the marriage will likely suffer, and they may divorce. If the couple does not get divorced or legally separated, then they may stay miserably married. This, however, would mean teaching the children to live in a dysfunctional relationship. Eighty percent of couples that are unhappy is usually because the wife is unhappy, and that is why so many women call me. So many men who never ‘got it’ feel blindsided and reluctantly cooperate in the mediation process, not understanding why this

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