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This Is How Your Marriage Ends book cover
This Is How Your Marriage Ends
A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships
2022
First Published
4.01
Average Rating
304
Number of Pages

A thoughtful, down-to-earth, contemporary guide to help partners identify and address relationship-killing behavior patterns in their own lives. Good people can be bad at relationships. 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. 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. Matthew started to gain a following. In January 2016 a post he wrote—"She Divorced Me Because I left the Dishes by the Sink"—went viral and was read over four million times. 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. With the humorous, entertaining, and counterintuitive approach of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, and the practical insights of The 5 Love Languages, This is How Your Marriage Ends helps readers identify relationship-killing behavior patterns in their own lives, and offers solutions to break free from the cycles of dysfunction and destruction. It is must-read for every partner no matter what stage-beginning, middle, or even end—of your relationship.

Avg Rating
4.01
Number of Ratings
2,351
5 STARS
36%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
19%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads

Author

Matthew Fray
Matthew Fray
Author · 2 books

I am a writer and relationship coach. I got divorced in 2013 and thought I was going to die. And that's maybe a little dramatic, but it's true. I struggled with normal stuff like breathing. The way I felt every day of my life had been replaced by some suckier feeling. And everything I was certain of—everything I was counting on happening tomorrow and the next day and next year all went up in smoke. So I went to work on figuring out what happened. Questions like "What did I do to contribute to this?" or "What could I have done differently to prevent this?" were routinely on my mind. So I drank too much one night and started writing about it on the internet. And something magical happened. People "got" it. My story was their story. My dysfunctional relationship looked and sounded and felt like their dysfunctional relationships. 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. And so began my journey to help people (and myself) show up more effectively in relationships in all of the subtle, nuanced ways that gone unchecked, lead to the slow erosion of trust and the end of our relationships. To play a tiny part in helping reduce all of the stuff that sucks about marriage and relationships, so that we can better enjoy all of the amazing and beautiful parts. When I'm not doing this, I'm reading books, drinking whiskey, listening to music, playing chess, watching movies or football, hanging out with friends, enjoying sunshine, and other rad things.

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