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

by Matthew Fray

My overarching premise is that good people who want to be married accidentally hurt one another and betray each other’s trust without either partner being aware of it as it is happening until their marriage slowly becomes toxic and/or ends.

it is the erosion and eventual loss of safety and trust that create the conditions for the death of a marriage.

About 70 percent of people who marry will suffer from a dysfunctional relationship and/or from its eventual end. (This 70 percent figure accounts for the people who end up divorced as well as the people who remain married but are unhappy within their marriages.)

Sometimes we don’t tell the truth—not to be gross and deceptive in a con-artisty way—but maybe to avoid advertising the shame we’re trying to hide or to politely spare the people we love from our baggage.

I didn’t figure it out until long after our marriage had ended: Good men can be bad husbands. Good people can be bad spouses.

There is only one reason I will ever stop leaving that glass by the sink, and it’s a lesson I learned much too late: because I love and respect my partner, and it really matters to them. I now understand that when I left that glass there, it hurt my wife—literally causing pain—because it felt to her as if I had just said, “Hey. I don’t respect you or value your thoughts and opinions. Not taking four seconds to put my glass in the dishwasher is more important to me than you are.”

Then maybe I would have figured out before it was too late that me loving my wife in my brain and feeling love for my wife in my chest wasn’t nearly as important as conveying that idea through acts of love.

When there’s no trust, there can be no safety. People who do not feel safe will always seek safety. In marriage, that means our partners must leave us and find a new living arrangement that brings about security and contentment. Conditions in which pain is not the daily experience.

When you choose to love someone, it becomes your pleasure to do things that enhance their lives and bring you closer together, rather than a chore. It’s not: Sonofabitch, I have to do this bullshit thing for my wife again. It’s: I’m grateful for another opportunity to demonstrate to my wife that she comes first and that I can be counted on to be there for her and that she needn’t look elsewhere for happiness and fulfillment.

When we are obstacles to our partners’ pursuit of their own needs, or when we neglect to fulfill any needs that fall to us as their partners, we are complicit in their decisions to pursue those needs elsewhere.

When someone feels perpetually mistreated and unloved, it’s both sensible and healthy for them to consider whether voluntarily choosing that every day forever is the right thing to do.

But that is not the equation for Trust. The equation is: Safety + Belonging + Mattering = TRUST

Good people can be bad spouses. Good people unwittingly destroy their marriages. And one of the ways that happens is when spouses (in my experience, it’s usually husbands) are “surprised” by their wives’ expressed sadness or anger. Over and over and over again.

please consider that moments of conflict and the pain of trust erosion are the result of accidentally inflicted wounds—NOT intentional abuse or neglect. One of the greatest lessons from divorce and adulthood has been the realization that unintentional pain and unintentional trust betrayals will end your relationship as surely as intentional ones will, only slower.

If you value your relationship with someone, it will be helpful to come to terms with this truth. When we love people, we must honor THEIR experiences—THEIR reality—to connect with them on an emotionally healthy level. More on that in a bit.

Most people are born; grow up without the information they need to have healthy, functioning relationships; get married with a bunch of people patting them on the back and congratulating them; bring children into their flimsy world; and then even though most people are well intentioned and trying their best, it often breaks and turns to shit. Why? Because we were unaware. We just—didn’t know better.

When we don’t know our spouses—when we’re not experts about who they are, what harms them, and what brings them pleasure or joy—then we are a constant threat to hurt them regardless of how much love we feel for them and regardless of our intentions.

I am both allowed to disagree and capable of disagreeing with someone while still validating their very real experience with whatever we’re discussing.

the choice I’ve decided I want to make is to be the kind of person who prioritizes my loved ones’ feeling safe and trusting me instead of trying to sell them on how right I am about their beliefs or feelings.

when I think about my behavior—and others’ behavior—not as some genetic fatal flaw I’m stuck with but as a habit I can practice changing to something positive and healthy, I find my sense of direction. A North Star.

We don’t have to worry about being a hopeless asshole incapable of ever having healthy, loving, pleasant, connected relationships. We must simply recognize that we have habits that inadvertently harm others, and then practice new habits until they take hold, replacing the accidentally harmful ones. It’s a choice we make because the people we love deserve that from us.

How to Compose a Successful Critical Commentary You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). You should mention anything you have learned from your target. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Every day—every conversation, every moment—is an opportunity to move closer to one another or further apart. You get to choose. Doing nothing is a death sentence. Because when we do nothing, we are NOT sitting still, biding our time waiting for something to happen. While we wait, we move apart. And I think couples—often men—are unaware of this constant, dangerous drift.

The biggest influence on how good our lives are is the quality of our human relationships.

Maybe being compatible means that two people are awake to the needs and wants of one another and that simple demonstrations of respecting and honoring those needs and wants—these little things many people never think about—create as a by-product all the feel-goodness that makes a person feel connected and compatible.

And divorce takes it away. The end—whether abrupt or from slow decay—takes away that life and that story and that normalcy and that dream. It drugs you and robs you of your safety and security. It leaves you confused and wanting to cry in a dingy, barren concrete stairwell trying to open a locked door that won’t budge.