Married Men: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES hire an attractive nanny

You can learn a lot about marriage from the way at least half of them end and this book, by a practicing New York divorce attorney, should be required reading for committed couples.

Given the author's 20-year professional experience, it's a how-NOT-to book; in an engaging storytelling format, it illustrates how once madly-in-love couples royally screw the pooch when it comes to their marriages and then pay the price ($600 an hour to Sexton's law firm for counsel is just the start!)

I've been married for seven years now to my wife; a few of those years were pretty rocky, but we're now more committed than ever to each other (and very happy together) because we've continued to treat our marriage like (this isn't going to sound terribly romantic) a project. More like a beautiful high-performance automobile deserving of regular maintenance, instead of a painting that sits on a wall.

* We have certain daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly to-dos that go into habit-tracking software.

* I maintain a rather large notes file on our marriage; enumerating challenges and goals along with brainstorming solutions and summaries of compromises reached after disagreements.

* We stack a bunch of different Biohacks and lifehacks; we're always looking for a smart way to do things.

* And every year I read a book or two about marriage, relationships, women, or sex - from which I always learn a new thing or two that makes us a happier, healthier couple.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES hire an attractive nanny

The funniest chapter of the book is about the "Nanny Fascination" - apparently a lot of divorce cases involve a nanny (as do a lot of high-profile cases of rich, powerful men cheating on their wives). Oscar Wilde cynically wrote

“Everything in life is about sex, except for sex, which is about power.”

And there's some truth in it. So many husbands cheat (or try to cheat) with the nanny because the power dynamic is kind of the best of both worlds. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, it just flips a lot of the attraction switches for both the husband and nanny. Sexton writes...

The power component of the Nanny Fascination cannot be discounted. The power differential between the husband and the nanny is huge. The nanny is subordinate to the husband, who is, in that dynamic, the boss of her. She follows his directions, and his decision-making authority is generally not open to questioning. There’s also no reciprocity required in the relationship: The transaction is simple. The nanny cares for the children and the husband gives her money. The husband isn’t required to fulfill her emotional or familial needs as he would be with a spouse, nor is he required to indulge her complaints or moods unless he feels like it.

In the book, he bends at least half over to be politically correct (which I suppose is to be expected from a New York lawyer), but in regards to the Nanny Fascination, he reluctantly advises wives to maybe be a little more like a nanny. To retain a bit of their allure by having a life outside of being a wife and mother. Also, it sounds like many of Sexton's clients are New York "power couples" committed to their demanding careers - I can imagine that many of these wives are far outside of their traditional (and undeniably appealing) gender roles (hence the need to hire a nanny that husbands become fascinated by).

But the more important takeaway is obvious, don't hire an attractive nanny (especially if she's younger, single, exotically foreign, and going to be living under your roof).

Define, express, or get divorced

Marriages and other committed relationships fail for two fundamental reasons, according to the book...

1. You don’t know what you want. 2. You can’t express what you want.

Reason #1 is why I wrote a book for single men about how to avoid "sticking your dick in a blend" by getting entangled with the wrong kind of woman. Too many unmarried men fail to disqualify the women; they have little more criteria for the women they date (and ultimately marry) than 1) She's attractive enough to give me a boner and 2) She's willing to sleep with me. While it may seem unromantic; I urge single people to itemize what exactly they want (and don't want) in a girlfriend or boyfriend. Define what you want or else it will be defined for you by your selfish genes, your lower impulses, culture, or the impositions of others. My book gives single a good place to start.

I think a big part of the reason so many relationships fail in modernity is "love." From my article, Musings on the inadequacy of our favorite word...

The problem I have with love is that it’s universally held in very high esteem and universally thought of as good. In fact, most people regard love as the most good thing. I blame pop culture mostly for this. The lyrics of most of the songs that we listen to and the themes of most of the movies that play on the silver screen reinforce this idiotic idea that doing whatever feels right in the moment results in true love and love always results in a happy and meaningful life.

In the past love was a word that signified an intense emotional commitment to something greater than oneself expressed through acts of service. Now love just means this intoxicated feeling, that you fall into and fall out of randomly, that makes you act stupid. It’s this insatiable desire for someone or something that makes you irrational. It’s this thing that people say to each other for our own emotional validation. I think modern-day love, does more harm than good.

If you asked a hundred modern couples why they got married, about 98 of them would tell you that it was first and foremost because they were in love. I'd wager most of them are referring to the emotionally intoxicated kind of love. I was also very in love with my wife when we married but I also had several very rational and pragmatic reasons for choosing her.

To address the second fundamental reason for failure, the author suggests...

Hit Send Now - a marriage hack

If your partner does something during the day that bothers you even a little, within a couple of hours—or minutes—write him or her an email or text about it. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t obsessively read and reread the email or text. And then, against all your instincts as a human being who, like most human beings, has a people-pleasing streak, just press Send.

It’s a way to address and resolve small problems immediately, before they mushroom. It says, “This is exactly how I feel right now.” You can express your feelings in an email or text, maybe a phone call. I advocate for email, because the format allows the recipient to digest what’s being communicated and to reread it as the content sinks in; even better, you can make the subject header “Hit Send Now,” to give your partner a little emotional preparation—a little advance warning that this is one of “those emails,”

A sit-down discussion is often not the best venue to express your feelings fully. My wife and I write each other love letters a couple of times a year, but sometimes we also write not-so-lovey letters about something that needs to be addressed.

“Custodial rotation” - a marriage hack

Why can’t parents in a happy or stable marriage leverage this idea? “This is my weekend with the kids, so you go be someone who doesn’t have a spouse or kids—go to a