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

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Until I got divorced by being an asshole. And THEN, eight or nine years later, you could make the case I’m being rewarded for it.

You know, it’s funny, I’m, I’m a pretty sensitive about discussing specificity with his mother, like where I’m not trying to like rehash that so much, but it, but he gets it and he’s, he’s 13. He’s well aware of the work I do now, him and he’s, he gets it. He understands fundamentally that my work’s based on my regrets, that my marriage to his mother didn’t last. And in real time, I’m trying to educate him on lessons and empathy and compassion and mindfulness. Uh, when I see things that pop up, there’s a lot of conversations about racism, about sexism, uh, jokes in movies. Um, even that, like, we, I don’t know if you remember the movie, the sand lot. There’s a joke where a kid insults another kid by saying he plays ball like a girl. And I remember specifically pausing it after that. And we’d both laughed, cuz it’s like funny in the scene, but I wanted him to understand.A married man 1 does something that his spouse doesn’t like (“the event”; in Fray’s case, making fun of his wife in front of their friends or not putting his dishes in the sink) You, you definitely hone in like your parents divorced. You didn’t, you know, when you were young, that’s kind of the story of a lot of us, um, at some point in our lives. Um, and you also talk about this. This is what you said. Maybe I was hypersensitive because of my parents’ divorce. Maybe I was worried about what my friends and would think of me for failing at the most important job I had, maybe I was afraid of being alone. Maybe I just missed my wife and son, you know, thinking because as a person of divorce myself, parents, myself, you know, it definitely hit home that this was a failure and that your children observed the, of their family unit. How do you now, or, you know, I don’t know how old your son is. How do you approach this subject of relationships with your son now so that he doesn’t feel like, oh, this is just expected. We don’t like each other. We divorce, you know? Yeah. How do you go about that?

The editors at the New York Times thought late May was the perfect time to run the story, which was super-inconvenient since I hadn’t yet shed my quarantine weight. Not only did the pandemic not lessen people’s interest in the subject matter I write and talk about, but it actually increased it in a counterintuitive way that I never saw coming. 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. One husband's confession you might be tempted to hand to your other half next time he does something infuriating' Daily MailPDF / EPUB File Name: This_Is_How_Your_Marriage_Ends_-_Matthew_Fray.pdf, This_Is_How_Your_Marriage_Ends_-_Matthew_Fray.epub But, no matter how bad being the third party to a divorce is… going through it is a ripping apart that words aren’t designed to truly describe. The author, Matthew Fray, did a lot of soul searching after his divorce, and I'm sure he, his son, his ex-wife, and any future partners will benefit tremendously from that honesty and difficult emotional work. Fray has made tremendous progress in understanding many aspects of interpersonal dynamics that occur within long-term, committed relationships, but, despite coming incredibly close, I think he's still missing the most fundamental piece.

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.Being a good person does not equal being a good husband (or wife). You can provide for your family, be a great parent, and refrain from committing Major Marriage Crimes (adultery, murder) and still make your partner unhappy. Fray was married for 12 years until his wife asked for a divorce and blindsided him. He blogged about it – She divorced me because I left dishes by the sink - which eventually became this book. Is it the most well written book I’ve ever read? No, but it is worth a read. Skim the parts that repeat themselves if necessary. Give it to your hubby. Discuss it. It gave me new ways of explaining how I feel when our relationship inevitably falls into one of the traps humans can’t help but stumble into. Not everyone will identify, unless you deal with pretty conventional gender norms, that’s also worth noting.