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

Product Information

Compromise is truly key in marriages. Sometimes, things can’t always go our way. However, if you dig your heels in and refuse to compromise, there can be consequences. Namely, it can start to kill your relationship. Couples’ therapists see partners all the time that have trouble compromising, which can cause rifts in the relationship. Being flexible and having the ability to sacrifice a little bit for your partner is key to a long and happy marriage.

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. The overall thesis he argues throughout is that "good people can still make bad partners". This is due to how we aren't actually taught these fundamental skills in school or anything. As a result, people [in romantic relationships] accidentally hurt one another and betray each other's trust without either partner being aware of it till it's too late--there is an accumulation of tiny betrayals. The failure to identify the root cause of this "dooms us to repeat the same behaviours in future ones." The general message is basically “listen more to your spouse and act on equal footing”, which is good if rather obvious advice. 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. Opening in 1963 New York, to Renaissance Florence, to the birth of theatre in fifth-century Athens, and the Sex Pistols shattering Thatcherite Britain - take your seat for the history of performance.P49 My wife, over and over again, head me promise to hurt her again in the future. I thought I was intelligently sharing a different way to think about it so that my wife could adjust her silly feelings so she wouldn't be inconvenienced by them. Puts words to the human experience in a way that allows us to feel not only witnessed, but also to have hope rise from our all-too-common relational tragedies' I will be honest, I read the title of this book, and thought to myself, “okay, Matthew Fray, tell me what went wrong in my marriage!” On May 18, 2020, the feature story about me and my coaching work ran in the New York Times digitally, and it ran in the print edition on May 21.

Because the number of engagements every year shows that we really want to believe in the idea of everlasting love. And the number of divorces every year shows that we don’t know how to actually walk the walk.

P211 as long as men collectively believe that The Things You Must Do to Have Healthy Relationships are "girl things," then I think heterosexual marriage is doomed.

I greatly enjoyed the simple yet effective "Invalidation Triple Threat" he referred to throughout the book. This is made up of 3 distinct ways people commonly respond to their partner that invalidates them: judging their thoughts/recollection of events to be wrong, judging their feelings to be wrong, or justifying/defending one's own pain-causing actions. The more these invalidations occur repeatedly (even if over seemingly 'little things' that actually matter a BIG deal to your partner)--safety is eroded over time, and then there is no trust.So 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. And something magical happened. People "got" it. My story was their story. My dysfunctional relationship looked and sounded and felt like their dysfunctional relationships.