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

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 of marriage counseling, This Is How Your Marriage Ends exposes the root problem of so many toxic relationships that go wrong. We simply haven’t been taught any of the necessary skills for developing emotional intelligence, 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 provides powerful relationship advice to help 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.

This brutally honest and unflinching guide reveals the invisible patterns that destroy relationships:

• The ‘Good Guy’ Paradox: Why a man who considers himself a decent person can still be a bad husband, and how a simple chore like leaving a dish by the sink can signal a massive betrayal of trust.
• Communication Breakdown: How to stop the cycle of invalidation—the #1 marriage killer—where conversations about small things become painful betrayals that erode safety and trust.
• Unseen Emotional Labor: The truth about the ‘invisible work’ in a partnership and why your wife doesn’t want to be your mother, your manager, or the one who always has to ask.
• Actionable Relationship Skills: Practical, counterintuitive skills to break free from destructive cycles, learn to truly listen, and show up as the partner your family deserves.

“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." - Salon

"This Is How Your Marriage Ends...takes aim at some of the conventional wisdom of coupledom as it seeks to expose the hidden threats present in many relationships."

"Matt Fray has a way of lacing truth with humor. He 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 have loved his writing and his advice from the first day I encountered him, and this book is no exception. Thanks for the amazing work you do in the world, Matt." - Mark Groves, founder of Create the Love

“Matt Fray bravely takes us on a tour of the male brain in relationships and how we can become our own worst enemy. By doing so, he reveals why we (men and women) get it wrong so often and what we can do to fix it. The truth is that when it comes to complex matters of the heart, we often don’t take the time to recognize the role WE play in conflict, and too often invalidate each other without truly understanding how our actions impact the person we love. This Is How Your Marriage Ends is the book we have been waiting for – an entertaining, honest, and truly practical guide for saving our relationships.” - Justin Baldoni

"The home can be deceiving because it presents so small (like dishes being left by the sink) and Fray beautifully unpacks this. This funny and poignant memoir and how to evolves into a beautiful exposition on partnerships, love, and unpaid labor. Fray highlights the larger systemic issues at hand and offers a program for fairness out of the toxic man box and forges a path to a healthy way forward." - Eve Rodsky

"How can a good man end up being a lousy spouse? And why do all of us, across genders, do things that can subtly undermine our most treasured relationships? Matthew Fray’s book—at turns sobering and inspiring, heartbreaking and hilarious—gets to the root of questions that can make or break a life partnership. Read it, heed it, act on it—for yourself and for the one you love." - Warren Berger, best-selling author of A MORE BEAUTIFUL QUESTION

“An important book! Especially for men (hand raised for leaving dishes by the sink many times) who rarely talk openly about their divorces. Matt's approach is refreshing and much needed in our world. He shines two lights, a black light over why marriages fail but also sunlight by injecting hope and encouraging couples to take ownership.”  - John Kim, author of Single On Purpose