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

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And even though it strikes me as a little bit cringy and selfish now, I remember having the thought a week or so later: Figures the New York Times would reach out to me, and then the biggest news thing ever would happen, ensuring that no one will ever give a shit about some divorced idiot writing things on the internet. I had experienced some attention from large online publications in the past, had been invited on a handful of podcasts and radio shows, been mentioned in a couple of books, and certainly from the viral blog post She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by the Sink. But this was different. As a former newspaper reporter, I was like: “Holy shit. The New York Times.” I wanted my wife to agree that when you put life in perspective, a drinking glass by the sink is simply not a big problem that should cause a fight. I thought she should recognize how petty and meaningless it was in the grand scheme of life. I repeated that train of thought for the better part of 12 years, waiting for her to finally agree with me. This author reminds me so much of Mark Manson. Which is ironic because it's the author's favorite author. So how much of him is he ripping off? That's the real question. This book identifies real problems and has some good advice, but ultimately it is fundamentally flawed.

The concept that being a good person is not the same as being a good husband was really interesting. It’s easy to assume people judge us based on who we are as people, when all they really care is about how we perform in the context that matters to them. E.g., if you are a good / nice person but incompetent at your job, your coworkers won’t care that you are a good person. What are you doing for them ? 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. What he realized is that the fights they enacted again and again were down to him not taking his wife into consideration when he made decisions, and so she didn't feel respected. In what he dubs the "Invalidation Triple Threat," spouses 1) contradict their partner's intellectual experience, 2) contradict their partner's emotional experience, and 3) defend their own actions. This doubling down only makes things worse. Fray’s framework is to explain how the way he hurt others helped him become a better person and attempt to guide others towards self-improvement. Fray relies on self-deprecating humor to describe the ways in which his actions hurt his wife, emphasizing his poor character to establish credibility for the advice he gives. This has two negative effects: First, it makes readers feel uncomfortable and guilty to support, with their time and money, someone making a career and profits off of treating his wife poorly. Second, it erodes readers’ trust in the author. I love that he says over again that men are "good men" even when they are lousy husbands. This books is not for you if you're in a marrage to a "bad person". It's for the marrages that don't have a villain.I think sometimes these little things blow up into The Same Fight because maybe we don’t think it’s fair that our partner’s preferences should always win out over ours. It’s as if we want to fight for our right to leave that glass there. Perfect for a trivia night or a long trip, #TrainTeasers will both test your knowledge of this country`s rail system and enlighten you on the most colourful aspects of its long history. Meet trunk murderers, trainspotters, haters of railways, railway writers, Ministers for Transport good and bad, railway cats, dogs and a railway penguin. This is NOT a book for number-crunching nerds. Many of the answers are guessable by the intelligent reader. It is a quiz, yes, but also a cavalcade of historical incident and colour relating to a system that was the making of modern Britain. There are also some factual errors (ex: the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian is not nearly 83% or whatever he claims, at least not in decades…) and there is definitely a note of “I’m not a bad guy! I’m a great guy! I WAS a jerk but you can’t judge me for that because look how much I understand now! Did I mention I’m really a good guy??” Being from the Midwest myself, though, I think that’s a common affliction for guys this age. They reeeeeally want to be admired and thought of as good and moral at all costs.

Then something funny (not ha-ha funny, more ironic-funny) happened—people were quarantining together, romantic partners and families, and for the first time in everyone’s lives, most people weren’t getting the space, time away, or diverse social and professional interactions with other people that they were accustomed to. And I think we can do better. With more awareness. With better habits. With improved relationship skills. Filtered through the lens of his own surprising, life-changing experience and his years counseling couples, This Is How Your Marriage Ends exposes the root problem of so many relationships that go wrong. We simply haven’t been taught any of the necessary skills, Matthew explains. In fact, it is sometimes the assumption that we are acting on good intentions that causes us to alienate our partners and foment mistrust. Fray offers a frank and refreshingly modern view, one that never makes dated, flippant assumptions…It's instead the story of hard earned lessons, and how to be a truly present, active partner in a healthy relationship. It also truly delivers on its title promise of hopefulness. I have never read a book about marriage that makes a better case for it than this one, an achievement all the more impressive for being written by "the guy who found out too late." — SalonSo this is a relationship book that is very definitely written to men. Fray writes with kind of a dude-bro voice, a very 'I'm just like you' attitude. This is not to say that there's nothing here for women to benefit from (I think I did), but really this is a guy writing to other guys, trying to give a different perspective. I wrote this book for my ex-wife. For my son. For my mother and father. For my friends. For my clients. For you. I was surprised by how much I liked this book about a guy whose wife divorced him, and after getting over the anger and bitterness realized that he was almost entirely at fault and was able to look at inward and fix the problems. He’s now a life coach on relationships, and I think this entire book is very valuable for couples. Like usual, I saw my own behavior in his bad behavior. So that was eye-opening. That said, I don't think married heterosexual men are the only people for whom this is suited for, since I am not one myself but still recognized some of these marriage-eroding behaviors in myself. I've come around to working on them via other methods, but I could certainly see recommending this book as a useful reading assignment that's part of pre-marital counseling. The core position that "you can be a good person who is currently bad at the skills for a healthy, happy, long-lasting romantic relationship, here's how to do better" isn't one you hear about that often in detail beyond "relationships are hard work."