This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

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I don't pretend to have the market cornered on marital wisdom and best practices. I'm still just some divorced asshole." Fray, who grew his blog into a new career as a relationship coach, states more than once that the end of his marriage was the worst thing that has happened to him. He estimates that 85% of men are like he was and don't know they are bad husbands. The joke is that his wife divorced him because he would always put his glass next to the dishwasher rather than in it, and while there may be some exaggeration there, there is also some truth to it. Really nice sentiment. This notion of morphing into a lovely person. That’s what this chapter of my life was supposed to be about, varying degrees of success depending on the subject, but I’m certainly proud of the mental and emotional work I’ve done RE: relationships. And if I try to use the lessons here as counting for both parties in a marriage, my wife failing to take my plate to the sink when she is taking hers is suddenly not something to shrug about but a declaration of her not respecting me and and an act of ultimate selfishness.

The author’s heart is in the right place but I want to actively warn anybody whose relationship is not in a serious crisis off this book because I’m quite sure this can do a lot of damage.

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I had no idea. I guessed that I might get an increase in requests for coaching services, and that seemed cool to me.

In “This Is How Your Marriage Ends,” Matthew Fray argues that marriages end not with a bang but with a whimper. In his debut self-help book, the relationship counselor offers readers insight into how to save their relationships using examples from his own marriage and those of his clients. Unfortunately, the advice he offers fails to consider the female perspective and in fact often infantilizes and vilifies women. He has a theory of “motion” in relationships: t hat you are either moving closer or farther apart to your partner. There is no inertia or statis. So if you aren’t actively moving closer, you are drifting apart. “Doing nothing is a death sentence.” This is probably true of all relationships: it’s hard to put a friendship “on hold” for years and expect it to be exactly the sameI have really mixed feelings about this book, perhaps because it caused such mixed feelings about my life. I bought the book after stumbling upon the author's article, "She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes By the Kitchen Sink." I have been on the other side of the dish argument for decades, now, and, impressed that he had given the matter enough thought to begin to see the problem, I was interested in what else he had to say. One night during his divorce, after one too many vodkas and a call with a phone-in-therapist who told him to "journal his feelings," Matthew Fray started a blog. He needed to figure out how his ex-wife went from the eighteen-year-old college freshman who adored him to the angry woman who thought he was an asshole and left him. As he pieced together the story of his marriage and its end, Matthew began to realize a hard truth: even though he was a decent guy, he was a bad husband. This captivating A-Z compendium by #KateSummerscale explores the world in 99 obsessions - from spiders to clowns to all that will make your skin crawl. It's a book that validates women's experiences, and hearing a former husband validate their pain can certainly be healing and cathartic. It's a book that women WANT their husbands to read. It's a book that Fray WANTS their husbands to read. But how many men are actually reading this book? My own husband's more optimistic take was that, because men are not "supposed" to be interested in relationships, the men who read this book are probably doing so in secret. I hope he's right. Because the idea of a marriage-saving book for men that is only read by their suffering wives is really depressing to me. I mean, the guy did a lot of work. It’s good stuff. But he still gets caught up in semantics, still says things like Luke Armstrong got caught doping and a bunch of people “decided they didn’t like him anymore,” instead of “he messed up and lost a lot of respect”- you know what I mean? And there’s a little whisper of “my wife’s feelings were still silly but I should have empathized anyway!”

And something magical happened. People "got" it. My story was their story. My dysfunctional relationship looked and sounded and felt like their dysfunctional relationships.Fray's insight is to realise that the substance of the dispute isn't that important - it was his reaction to his ex-wife's reaction to the dirty dishes that, over time, hollowed out their marriage ... Makes me want to try harder in future' And it's precisely this rarity that makes this book and Fray's confessions so compelling. He started out like most recently divorced men, blaming the demise of his marriage on his wife making a "big deal" out of "trivial things." But in his aloneness, he did the soul-searching that led to his 180 or at least allowed him to talk a good talk. I believe in his sincerity in wanting to save other couples from his fate. The final chapter where he details the day his wife and son moved out is like a gut punch. It haunts me. I personally thought this was a great book on relationships that everyone should read--while some of its advice and reflections may be broad, they can be profound with deeper application onto one's own life. To preface, I have never read anything in this genre before; I don't even like reading books in the 'self-help' section. But one day at work I was about to shelve this book and I hesitated. The title seemed to jump out at me with relevance.

Having relationships and friendships outside of your relationship is key to keeping your marriage strong and healthy. You need to have a support system that isn’t just your spouse. This means that you have to have friends or strong relationships with your family members. Marriage therapists have pointed out that if your only strong friendship or relationship is your spouse, then your marriage might be in trouble. Having a support network and taking the stress of your partner is vital to a healthy and long-lasting marriage. 3. There are differences in values

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Fray lists the "Invalidation Triple Threat", which are: thinking that your spouse's thoughts were wrong, or her feelings were wrong, or if you just understood what I did you would understand why what I did was fine. You pinpoint painful places and offer genuine insight and life-changing practical solutions with lovingkindness, which makes you an amazing counselor, teacher, and guide. And now you are a bonafide book author! I’m so happy for you! I borrowed bits and pieces from blog posts that captured certain ideas. I shared new personal stories about my own life and, with permission, the lives of several of my coaching clients. And to the best of my ability, I attempted to lay out the way I believe good people are inadvertently bad at relationships. I attempted to tell the story about how two people who genuinely love one another can erode trust in their blind spots, slowly papercutting their marriage or long-term relationship to death. Eventually, the truth caught up to me and I understood: Good people can be bad at relationships. People with the best intentions in the world can still inadvertently harm their relationship partners.