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

Product Information

As he shared raw, uncomfortable, and darkly humorous first-person stories about the lessons he'd learned from his failed marriage, a peculiar thing happened.

I have loved his writing and his advice from the first day I encountered him, and this book is no exception. The key is to talk those differences out, respect them, and compromise on things in your new life together. People who “can't be bothered” by the trivial, meaningless tasks associated with cleaning up after themselves are essentially saying that they are “better than” those who will eventually do it for them.Not only will you learn how to have a successful marriage but also learn more of who you are, the characteristics that you have, and the thoughts that you perpetuate. 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. Such as always thinking, his feelings and preferences were the correct ones and his wife’s were the wrong ones.

Only after the divorce shattered him did he find the wherewithal to look back through the wreckage and discover what went wrong. 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? The book covers a lot of ground, but I think the primary theme is that Fray eventually figured out where his actions had contributed to the result he'd never wanted -- his divorce.

Marriage therapists have pointed out that if your only strong friendship or relationship is your spouse, then your marriage might be in trouble. 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. I thought this was an interesting take, especially since it was written by someone who is divorced and obviously living with a lot of pain and regret. Invalidation, fighting to be "right", misaligned priorities, inconsideration; these are the everyday habits that too many of us have that are slowly suffocating our closest relationships.

Not everyone will identify, unless you deal with pretty conventional gender norms, that’s also worth noting. The book is very open about being an attempt to keep other people (well, men, this is extremely cis male-centric as the author is a cis male) from making the same mistakes that killed the author’s marriage, and that is certainly a noble goal. This book is part memoir of how Matthew Fray was a "sh*tty husband" (his words), and part self-help book so that other couples don't let their marriage disintegrate the way his did. Seemingly content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over four decades.

Now a relationship coach and blogger, Fray explains how good intentions can cause us to hurt our partners and shows how to break the cycle of dysfunction in your marriage. If his wife professed not to care about the dishes, he would still leave them there; picking up is still just to appease her "preferences," and he's only doing it because he now appreciates that respecting her preferences (or at least appearing to) will keep him out of trouble. He spent a long time blaming everybody but himself, but he eventually realized that if he could see where he'd gone wrong, maybe he could ensure it wouldn't happen again. Even if there’s something in your union that isn’t working, marriage therapists know that with enough devotion and patience, those problems can be fixed. Offers a frank and refreshingly modern view, one that never makes dated, flippant assumptions about love languages or Venus and Mars .

Being open to learning and changing your behavior in a relationshipwill help you stay in love and keep your marriage long-lasting.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. There were some big things too, but what it had come down to, he finally figured out, was that he had consistently not respected his wife's feelings.