This is How Your Marriage Ends by Matthew Fray

Genre: Nonfiction
Length: 304 pages
First Published: 2022

Rachael’s Review

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Harper Collins through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Good people can be bad at relationships. Matthew Fray knows this first hand, after his article “She Divorced Me Because I left the Dishes by the Sink” went viral following his divorce. 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.

This is How Your Marriage Ends spends most of the book repeating the same lesson over and over in as many ways as possible – by not having empathy, you unintentionally hurt your spouse and then invalidate their experience, breaking their trust and straining the relationship. Fray’s book serves well his target audience, good men who are bad husbands, beating them over the head with his central message. However, the constant repetition drove me crazy and Fray’s sense of humor wasn’t my style.

Publisher’s Description

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.