Can you actually sue your husband's mistress? In North Carolina, you can. This week I sat down with Nicole Sodoma, a family law attorney who's spent 25 years in divorce court, and she walked me through alienation of affection — one of the last laws in the country that lets a wife sue the other woman for the end of her marriage.
But the part that stuck with me wasn't the lawsuit. It was her take on why marriages actually end. After thousands of consultations, Nicole is convinced infidelity is almost never the real reason. It's a symptom. The affair is the thing everyone points to, but underneath it there's usually a slow breakdown in communication that started long before anyone crossed a line.
We get into why women file for divorce more than men, and why that number might not mean what people think it means. We talk about what she asks every single client about the moment their marriage started falling apart, and how shame shows up in divorce even when no one has the words for it yet.
Nicole's been through her own separation, and it changed how she practices. Her closing advice about the space between what happens to you and how you respond is the kind of thing I wrote down the second we stopped recording.
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