 Okay, we're back. We're live. This is Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Community Matters, and we have Brad Coates. Hi, Brad. He joins us today as a matrimonial lawyer to talk about love. Love is good. Love in the time of the COVID. What do you think, Brad? Love in the time of COVID is a little trickier. It was a, this was a love in the taste time of Colorado was a famous book that I think Gabrielle Marquez wrote. And so I just thought love in the time of Corona made a little bit of a nice play on words. But it is definitely problematic from the perspective of a divorce lawyer and a family law specialist. It's going to make for a lot of work, I'm afraid. It's going to make for a lot of would-be demands. Now we came back on. But I don't know if anybody's going to have any money to pay lawyers at this point. So we'll have to see how that turns out. That's true. Talking before the show about, you know, lawyers need to have clients and clients, usually in a business sense, they need to have some money to pay the lawyers. Lawyers will represent other clients or no clients. Lawyers can stay home too. Lawyers can go to the beach too. I remember I knew one lawyer where, you know, the client told him, I can't pay you. And the lawyers, I wouldn't mention any names. And the lawyer said, you won't pay me. Well, you know, I like to go to the beach. I'm going to spend my time at the beach too. Have a nice day. I thought it was pretty wise actually in the in the fullness of time. That seemed like a good idea. Well, it's hard. It's hard in our situation because you're really empathized with the people. We're getting lots of kinds, lots of calls, everything from, you know, standard marital disputes to actual, you know, outright domestic violence from having been cooped up for so long. I mean, it's it's causing some real, real problems. And we certainly would like to try and help everybody we can. But what are people going to do? Secondarily endorse over their unemployment checks to their lawyer? I mean, you know, it's tough. Nobody's going to have any money. You got to pay you got to pay your expenses to stay in business. And so your clients have to pay your fees. I see I see three, you know, when we talk about this and break it down, I see, you know, three major trends that are that are going to happen. One is marriages are going to be delayed. I mean, marriages were already delayed till way, way later in life compared to when you and I ever got married right out of college. Now, kids aren't getting married until, you know, the guys in his early thirties and the, you know, the women's and well, right now it's 27 for Wahinis and 29 for guys. And that I bet that'll be kicked over another couple of years because nobody's gonna have the money. I'm weddings are literally wedding ceremonies are postponed. So that's going to be some of these are very expensive. I I know one individual who is associated with think tech was going to get married this spring. No way to do that. And yeah, has to put it off for a while until you can have gatherings until she can, you know, make a better deal for the event. It's not cheap. So yeah, no, you're going to see marriages get postponed and delayed. People getting married later in life. You're going to see careers get delayed. You know, especially for millennials, you know, these are the key years when you're supposed to be building your career. You know, for you and I, it was our late thirties mid forties. You know, that was the that's the time where you really kind of get your career on track. And unfortunately, a lot of people are going to be sidetracked by a number of years. And then the third trend, so you got marriages delayed, you got careers delayed. And then the huge one is going to be the gap between the haves and the have nots is going to continue to widen. It's going to the gap between the middle America, the flyover states and you're working, you know, serious manual labor kind of jobs, guys, you know, compared to the elites that are on the coast and, you know, and as long as they can get to their computer in a zoom meeting, they're able to maintain their jobs, gap between rich and poor, old and young, you know, Republicans are Democrats. This is going to I mean, I love to watch those ads about we're all we're all in this together alone together. And you know, we're all in this together. And that, you know, that's certainly the that's kind of the mojo you want to exhibit. But in reality, I wonder if this isn't going to be more divisive. Yeah, when you're talking about love, though, not necessarily marriage or career here, and I, I thought, you know, we didn't talk about this in advance, but I thought when you talking about love, talking about romance, talking about, you know, sexual love as well. And my opening question to you actually, Brad, and I don't know if you can answer or there is an answer, but does the rules about social distancing apply? How can you do it six feet apart? Do you need, do you need, do you need a mask? Can you face your partner or do you have to somehow turn your back on your partner? I mean, is that is all these more rates are they changing now? Well, I, I, I, I think definitely fit in the physical act of consummating, consummating sex from six feet apart would probably be pretty impossible unless you're Johnny Wad. I don't know. But you know, that's for sure. And you know, and backing it up even more than that, I mean, you know, even to spot somebody that you think might be might be attractive to you. How do you, how do you sort that out when everybody's wearing a mask? I mean, you know, there's, there's going to be some, there's going to be some interesting issues that arise out of it. The three, the three key causes J for, for, for divorce, and it's in my divorce with decency book, and it hasn't changed COVID or no, no COVID. Money, sex, and family. Money is what is one of the first causes that can be too much or too little. And, you know, obviously, the too little is going to be the problem now. We went one, one half of the couple loses their job. And, you know, all of a sudden, the family checkbook goes out of balance and the, you know, the wife gets tired of supporting the husband or vice versa. You know, you couldn't laugh that you can laugh along with that for a while. But as we saw when Aloha Airlines went under, you know, husband says, well, that's okay, honey, I'll cover the bills. And that works for a while. But we saw a flood of divorces coming in. When self-destructed. Of course, there's apparently a flood of divorces happening in his sex. And we talked about, we talked about sex, you know, what's what's sexy during a during a virus era. You know, that can be a real upender. And are people going to be, you know, happier being in close configuration with one another? Are they just going to start pissing each other off? And the other one is family, where you've got, you know, family issues that are that are going on. Sometimes more generations having to live under one roof. I'm reminded of the big blackouts back in, I guess, sixties and seventies. And since where, you know, nine months after the blackouts, there would be an increase in childbirth and that baby boom, yeah, baby boom. Yeah, you're on a baby. I look forward to that. You think that'll happen? Because frankly, I think that a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people are reluctant to spend proximity time with their partner. Because who knows? And there's something troubling about the possibility of catching something. And I don't think everybody is like that. But I think there are a fair number. And I think that would probably diminish any baby boom effect on you. Well, I think there's no question about that. I mean, people are going to have a problem with trying to trying to, you know, feel comfortable about mating. You know, the whole approach to mating is going to start to switch around. I mean, obviously, it's horrible for conventional, you know, in-person kind of meetings. That's going to be problematic for the foreseeable future. Probably pretty good for online dating and the hookup sites or whatever. But I'm not sure anybody wants to hook up with a total stranger at a time like this. I'm not sure people want to have sex with their own partner, much less, you know, new partners that they've only, you know, known over the internet. So yeah, I think you're right, that the whole sex thing could get thrown out of kilter. Well, this is troubling. We don't know yet though, right? It's too early to tell. It's too early for either of us or really any professional to figure out what's happening in the bedroom because we don't have any data. Unless you have more data than I do. I don't talk to people about what they do in the privacy of their homes. I can't claim to be an expert on what people do in the privacy of their own homes. I barely know what's going on in mine. But the reality of it is that, you know, theoretically, if everybody's got all this free time on their hands and they're using some of it to make love, maybe you've got Corona babies in nine months. But a lot of people think twice about whether they want to have their offspring come out of a sex act. And if they, again, it comes back to economics, if people don't think they're going to be able to support more kids, they're probably not going to have more kids. I think what this could lead to, and we're already headed this way, Jay, is more, you know, permanent singlehood seems to be more preferable recently, even before the virus. Then, you know, the number of Americans living solo in 1952 when I was born, I was born in 51. You know, how many Americans live on their own in the 1950s? 9%. Now that's up to 28%. You know, there's just so many different options nowadays that people, like I say, they're commitment phobic to begin with. You know, we've got all these sort of spoiled lifestyles where everybody gets to do things exactly the way they want to do it, and they're not willing to compromise. So, you know, even trying to stay marriages are down living to everybody wants to and cohabitation has replaced marriage and now living singles almost replacing cohabitation. The flip side of that is, is there ever another point in time, when you really the solace of having a partner is important, then during a crisis, right? I was just going to say the same thing. Yeah, being being alone at a time like this, you'd be crawling the walls and losing it. I mean, there were there are already a number of articles that have appeared in the last few weeks about the extraordinary number of people in the country, who because of living alone are getting depressed, and have anxieties and all those things in the psychology books. And so if you want to live alone now, it's take a certain certain risk. The other thing is pooling of income. If I have one partner who does keep a job and the other partner who doesn't, it's probably, I mean, not married necessarily. It's probably a good idea to have somebody with whom you can pool income, pool resources, you know, pool tasks. And this, this takes me back. It takes me back to, you know, why marriage was so important, for example, among immigrant families in the early 20th century, because they could do things together, they could help each other, save each other, have the back of so to speak of the other one. So in a time of crisis, those are competing considerations. One is, you don't want to be near anybody. But the other is, you really do need somebody to work with and achieve, you know, do tasks together with and share things with. I don't think I don't think there's any question about you're exactly right. During an actual crisis, at least on a short term basis, having at least one person have a job so that, you know, we can meet the mortgage and, and doing that makes sense. But, you know, that's coming head to head with, you know, sort of very self-centered baby boomer kind of yuppie values where, you know, over the long haul, how long do you want to keep supporting him or it, you know, it works for a for a while. But what we've got is a very self-centered generation that's emerged. And, you know, if it's causing me more trouble than it's worth, I bail. And that's, you know, that's part of the problem. That's the way a lot of people think nowadays. It's interesting when you were talking about how all this seclusion is leading, is leading to depression. When you, when you talk to psychologists, and I talked to a lot of them in the divorce business, you're always talking to marriage psychology, depression peaks at age 44. That's the, you know, that's the 40s turned out to be a very depressive period for a lot of people. The median age for US employees right now is 42. So, so, you know, you've got that collision course where right at that exact same time where people are about to be lose, you know, are supposedly employed, which means that more of them are going to be unemployed. And then it can coincide with that's when depression sets in anyway. This could be a, you know, real unhappy period for a lot of people. Yeah. Well, happy being the operative word you mentioned before domestic violence. And I mean, that's already demonstrated in the stats that there's more domestic violence going on now. So it's hard for me to appreciate, to understand and accept the notion of the baby boomer, the baby boomer scenario we talked about, when there's domestic violence or a ramp up to domestic domestic violence doesn't happen all of a sudden, you know, you have to work up to it. And that means an unhappy home. An unhappy home is not a romantic home, generally speaking. I suppose there are exceptions to that. But I would say that if you're on the road to domestic violence, you're not likely to have a very romantic relationship with your partner. Well, that's an understatement. And it all I mean, it also hinges a lot on physical space. You know, if if you're if you're too cloistered in and you got, you know, three generations of people, you know, I used to be just the husband of the live now all of a sudden, the kids have moved home because college has kicked them out of the student dorm. And by the way, their parents, her parents have just moved back now you got three generations in one roof, fighting to go to one bathroom, you know, that gets problematic. You know, we were headed towards a situation where people lived a lot on their own anyway. I mean, the actual architectural shift during boom times has to do with separate suites for his and her suites at different ends of the houses. I mean, when people get to fulfill their selfish little yuppie dreams, that's the way it goes. It's kind of the opposite of what you were saying about, hey, you brought in three generations of family and we all made it go but now everybody is every man, woman and child for themselves. It's gotten to be a little trickier. Yeah, well, tricky, tricky actually affects the national economy. You know, what I would say is that we're not really talking about a baby boom quote, nine months post COVID, which is going to last longer in a sense, a much longer period than exactly what happened. That baby boom after World War Two was exactly what happened. They came back from World War Two and everybody was happy to be alive and they had kids. So that was that was a big baby boom and we'll see if there's a COVID one. It just depends on how happy people are to be alive right now. I suggest to you that the greater likelihood, maybe an equal out, but the greater likelihood is it can be reversed. Reverse of a baby boom. There won't be that many children born nine months from now or it's a sliding scale, nine months from that part of the curve we're in over COVID. And that means that the, what do you call it, the hourglass, the population hourglass is probably going to decline. It already was declining in this country. It's going to decline further. I think you're right. And that affects the economy going forward. I think you're right. Exactly right. It's you know, I gave you that interesting statistic about 42 years old being the median age of all employees in America and depression peaking at 42. Here's another one that's getting ready for your talk and I do put my heart and soul into your talks. Lord knows. Appreciate that, Brad. Here's another interesting one. Sweden, the highest percentage of people living alone, now you were talking earlier about, are we in a post familial culture? I mean, is it three generations of immigrants hanging on to three generations of family or is it everybody going their own way? Sweden has the highest percentage of people living solo in the world. As I mentioned to you right now, America is at about 28% of its population living solo. Sweden, 47% fully, almost half of the people in Sweden live alone. Interestingly, Sweden is the only country that did not lock down. If you recall, you've seen the news clips where, oh no, we're just going to keep on being Swedes and they don't, you know, they didn't change their program. Partly because everybody was used to living alone to begin with and partly because they have a lot of trust in their government, which is something that may be lacking in ours and they sort of, sort of, they all function on a community level and they went with this basic program. But I thought that was kind of interesting that the one country where people are mostly going it on their own to begin with and also have a higher sense of community, even though it's individualized segments of that community, they were the one place that didn't lock down and they're the one place that's kind of used to it already. This adds a very interesting idea to the modeling going forward about where you have greater risk for COVID and where you don't. And I think one of the elements that you raise in the story, I don't know if there's any data on it, you know, if you live with other people, if you spend your time with other people, my guess is that your risk for COVID is enhanced. If you live alone and you don't spend your time alone, whatever the circumstances, therefore the flip side is your risk for COVID for catching the infection is reduced. That's kind of play into the experience in Sweden. Well, they're a culture of a very, they're a very culture that is very self-sufficient. Everybody's kind of living on their own already and they're already social distance because they already do live on their own. So yeah, I mean, they were the perfect country to try this experiment and now we'll wait and see how it works. Well, you know, I'm very concerned, you know, we're looking for the things that will change. That's gonna be interesting to watch it all come filtering in from all over the world. Yep, yeah. And in effect, the effects of it will filter in for a long time. I would say for decades, at least, he is even assuming a vaccine because it will affect ultimately the economy. So I was gonna ask you, what about the homeless? You know, if our subject is, you know, how is love being affected? Love, romance, what have you, being affected by COVID? How is love being affected in the situation of the homeless? Because there are more of them all the time. Well, it's interesting, you should mention that. You know, they're in tight spaces. There's no sanitation. They're, you know, it's really a compressed living situation that is conducive to people being upset easily by other people who are too close to their space, I guess. And I don't know, I just watched some of these homeless people screaming at each other. I thought, wow, you know, how do you, how do you live in that environment? And then your question is, you know, how do you stay in love in that environment? I mean, it's very, it's very tricky. If you, if you, you know, I also run a lot. I'm still, even at my advanced age, I still do a lot of jogging. And I jog through some of these homeless encampments. A lot of times, you know, you'll see a homeless person with animals. You won't see a homeless person with other homeless. I mean, this is a generalization, but a lot of times it's a guy talking to Jesus and, and, you know, I heard somebody screaming at the top of his lungs about gays in the military. I'm going, what exactly does that have to do with anything at this point in time? But, you know, it's a guy and his dog and, you know, walking along. And, and, you know, I think people are sometimes, they form their relationships with, like I say, either unknown bodies up in the atmosphere or with a, you know, a pooch that's loyal to them no matter what. I, you know, I think it's very hard, very hard for homeless people to sustain. You know, a happy lifestyle, much less a romantic relationship. I mean, you know, yeah. I mean, there's a very interesting thing that's happening. This is a bit of a diversion, but it was a very interesting thing that's happening with an already huge gap in class stratification in America. Two-thirds of college graduates are married, have married and stayed married. They self-select into, into their own class of people and they manage to keep their ship together. The, there's less than half of people with only a high school education that have gotten married and stayed married. So that's a pretty, it's a pretty big gap between how much affluence, common goals, having your ship together and, you know, and then having a good career and prosperity and a house in the suburbs. And that probably makes it a lot easier to stay married than it does if you only got a high school education. A job as a welder and live in a trailer, you know, with, you know, with another, you know, unwed, a gal who was an unwed mother, has two kids now and you've got a kid and you're trying to do the Brady Bunch with five, you know, three other kids in a, in a mobile home, you know, that's conducive to problems. And, and what, and meanwhile, who's lost their jobs in this recession? The welders. I guess they're, they're essentials supposedly, but, you know, it's the bartenders, the cooks, the, you know, the truck riders, there's a lot of, there's a lot of just, you know, manual laborers and, and service industry people that have got jobs that are not, you know, quite so cute that they can do it from their home, you know, in San Francisco or, or New York, be a master of the universe talking to their computer on Zoom all day. You know, these are people that had a job, it involved going physically to work and doing physical stuff and they've all lost their job. So again, now you've got the gap between the elites, the coastals, the middle America, the red states, blue states, the troopers, the nonfront, you know, as if this country was not polarized enough. I see this as being a polarizing event. I'd love to believe that we're all alone together and let's just, uh, rah, rah, we'll all come out of this together and I hope that proves to be true, but I see it having the potential to be very disruptive socially. Yeah, and there's another, there's another aspect here aside from the fact that, you know, the fertility rate is likely to drop in this country because everything is on hold. You're right on there. Including having children, but, but you know, another, another thing is this is undermining the family as an institution. Totally. The kind of, you know, the, oh, the hearths, you know, the, the, the gathering place. You come back from work, spend time with the, with the family, the kids, the dog, whatnot. And I think that, that ritual, that culture is, is under attack because of the money issues, because life is on hold, because people are crawling the walls, because they're unhappy in their circumstances. At the end of the day, yes, I agree, more divorces, more separations, more, you know, de facto separations, and this is going to undermine the family institution and therefore the country that is built on family institutions. This has a greater effect, don't you think? I think you're exactly right. And I think, I think that, you know, the family institution was, you know, it was on its way to, you know, the dust heap, dust heap of, dust heap of western, at least in western civilization, it may have been on its way to the dustbin of history anyway. You know, it used to be that, you know, every, you know, you've, you've took, you know, your 78-year-old mom got, you know, got incapacitated, you brought her into your house, and you took care of her, and the Asians still do, and a lot of the Third World, they still all do that. Not in America, you put mom in one of these care holds, and it turns out they've got more COVID than any place. So, you know, you've got, we've already switched over. I mean, I think it's a generational deal, and I think it's being exacerbated by this. When you think about, when you think about yours and my generation, we hit a really, really sweet spot in history. You look back, I was a history major in college, you look back on most history, there's wars and pandemics and plague and pestilence and locusts and, you know, problems going on all the time throughout history. Rarely do you see a 50-year window that was, you know, we went to school, came out of school, there were college recruiters giving us jobs coming out of school. We could get, we could get, we could go to school and not amass a quarter million dollars in student debt because it only cost a thousand dollars a year to go to, I went to UCLA. It's a beautiful state school, and a thousand dollars a quarter or something like that to go to law school. You know, now it's three hundred thousand dollars. So, we could come out, we could buy homes, we could get jobs. We had drug sex and rock and roll in the 60s. Everybody turned into a hedonist. Yeah, we were going to be a communal, you know, save the planet kind of a consciousness. Instead, we turned out to be the biggest retail shoppers in the world and everybody. Then we built all these monster homes and then the price of housing went up to a million dollars and now these kids behind us, they can't afford, they can't get jobs, they can't afford the homes, they basically took all the money and ran. So, you know, it's a, that's a bit of an overstatement, but we didn't, you know, we had the Vietnam War, which was not good, but you know, a lot of us wound up not serving in Vietnam. Other than that, you know, we've had, you know, you know, we've had the biggest problem is trying to beat the cocaine and opioid addictions that came from being too self-indulgent to begin with. I mean, we really, we've had a pretty good run and we could travel all over the world. It was safe. You didn't have to go through a TSA. It was fun. There were actual new cultures to experience. Now it's like, holy shit, the whole thing's come to a screeching halt and I'm just sort of sitting here looking at it and going, I feel blessed to have had the run that we did. That was kind of off-subject, but it's really, it's kind of true. What that did, what that did was it made us all very self-centered and, you know, which, you know, it's hard to maintain a marriage, it's hard to maintain a family, it's hard to maintain all the stuff that was the backbone of civilization as we knew it. You know, certainly, you know, you look at the Asian cultural trajectories, you look at the Jewish tradition, you know, these are these are built on family ties and you don't mess with them. But now half the country's agnostic anyway, so who cares? Well, and then, you know, all these things you're describing are built around the notion of events, you know, weddings, bar mitzvahs, funerals, all that. But you can't have that now. You can't have a big wedding. I'll still come to yours, Jane. Thank you for that. By mitzvah, you can't do it, you can't have a gathering. I mean, arguably in some places you can't even go to church. And finally, and this came up on a show yesterday, so there's a woman who has a mother on the mainland, or rather in Europe, and she's in a senior facility, no surprise, and she dies alone, no surprise, and the family cannot get from various places in the world, they cannot get to be with her at the end, or even celebrate her death, memorialize her death, and say, you know, what does this do? I'm asking a question. What does this do to the notion of a multi-generational, a horizontal, vertical family unit when you can't get together with your family? One of the most, one of the most profound implications of family is gatherings. Can you still have family without gatherings? That's a, that's a interesting, that's an interesting question. That's a very interesting question, because those, all those kind of things, weddings, funerals, you know, Super Bowl games, you know, anything that used to be the touchstone of communal kind of consciousness are being eroded, and we're being replaced by, you know, three generations of families stuck in one small house, and that actually, that may impact the face, all the stuff that was great for building the family and the communal ties that are being, you know, we're verboten now, and instead it's being replaced with a lot of very high stress, high stress kind of situation, just the physical living situation, not to mention, and a lot of it comes back down to money. If you can't, you know, we've all gotten so used to having a prosperous economy, and if that continues to tank, we got a problem. You know, stress, stress brings out the best and the worst in people, and, you know, that's really what it's going to come down to. These are high stress times, and it's going to either cause people to buck up, or it's going to cause them to crumble. Yeah, okay, well let's, we got to stay alert on it actually, Brad. We got to come back and connect the dots and see how it's doing. I'm sure you'll be, you'll be aware of it before I will, and I appreciate talking with you about these things. Thank you so much, Brad Coates. I always enjoy talking to you, Jay.