This Is How Your Marriage Ends Quotes

“We didn’t go down in a fiery explosion. We bled out from 10,000 paper cuts.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Every day—every conversation, every moment—is an opportunity to move closer to one another or further apart. You get to choose.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“It occurred to me later that I didn’t have to understand WHY my wife cared about the things that she did. (Though I think digging for that “why” is always a worthwhile exercise.) The only thing I needed to understand was that my wife did care. I needed to understand what was important to her and what was not important to her. And then demonstrate respect for things on her This Is Important to Me list.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Romantic partners or spouses who frequently, if not always, remember to consider each other in their decision-making each day are the kind of people who trust one another and who trust that their partnership or marriage will go the distance.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“In marriage and relationships like it, love is a choice we must make every day.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Too many of us don’t see divorce (or the end of a major relationship) coming until we’re choking on its inevitability. Until we find ourselves fighting for our next breath, wondering whether life is ever going to feel like life again.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“bestselling books, including You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. Tannen says that women, by and large, emphasize the rapport dimension in their conversations. They use conversation as a means of connecting with others—to build rapport with them. Men, on the other hand, can often be observed as emphasizing the “status dimension” of communication. Tannen observed that men are often seen trying to score conversation points. To “win” the conversation by making a great point or by saying things designed to increase their own status in the eyes of others. This is a profoundly important relationship skill. I don’t pretend to know whether these tendencies are sociological or biological, nor do I particularly care. I do pretend to know that trying to win conversations almost always results in poor listening habits, mental and emotional invalidation of others, and, therefore, frequent trust erosion anytime words and ideas are exchanged. It can’t be said enough times: Erode too much trust, and your relationship is over.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Hurt someone long enough or hard enough and they won’t even be the same person afterward. It’s a big deal.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Relationship problems are not usually occurring because of bad people doing bad things to the people they love. Relationship problems crop up among perfectly decent and well-intentioned people who are simply living our lives and failing to recognize that others are experiencing pain while we’re busy feeling comfortable and not paying attention.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“How can it be that we have entire education systems dedicated to teaching children and young adults important subject matter and skill building but we don’t address interpersonal romantic relationships that affect virtually everyone?”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“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.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Many—maybe even most—relationships that deteriorate do so in part because we avoid discussing private, vulnerable thoughts and feelings for fear of judgment or rejection. This fearful reluctance to share ourselves honestly results in our partners believing things about us that aren’t true. It’s difficult to have trust when one or both of us don’t know the truth. And without trust, everything falls apart. Not sometimes. Always.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“You honor your parents when you put your spouse first. You comfort them because they know you’re safe and secure, and that their grandchildren are well cared for. You honor your children when you put your spouse first. You teach them that they are, in fact, NOT the center of the universe and that the best way to live is to be aware of other people’s needs. You teach them what marriage is supposed to look like. You provide a safe and unbreakable home. You provide a lifelong foundation for them on which they can anchor and build their futures. You honor yourself when you put your spouse first. Because you are living for something greater than yourself and are less likely to die alone, sad, angry, and with herpes on your mouth.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day,”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Not paying attention is a habit. A dangerously comfortable one.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“If any of us want to succeed in dating, marriage, parenting, or friendship, we need to replace this habit of judgment with something else. Curiosity. Empathy. Encouragement.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“What question should we ask? “Do you know why I am upset with you?” Or. “When you think back to [insert personal experience] and how that hurt you—do you understand that I feel similarly right now?” Or a more cooperative exercise. “In an effort to try to understand you and not fight about this, I want to try to make your argument for you. I want to say what I believe you think and feel, and why you think and feel that way so that you know I understand you. I was hoping you would agree to do the same for me. Will you?” Until your partner demonstrates beyond doubt that they can articulate accurately your point of view, you can safely conclude that THEY DON’T KNOW HOW YOU REALLY FEEL. The significance of that can’t be overstated. I don’t think any of us sensitive to the other side of divorce could sleep at night if we had a true picture of the numbers of broken homes, broken families, broken people, broken children, broken spirits that have resulted from this one little notion . . . two people didn’t really know how the other felt. What if all the pain and dysfunction is just one big misunderstanding?”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“In the same way that individuals are stuck on a certain level of the hierarchy of needs pyramid until they’ve fulfilled a specific need, our relationships get stuck on those same levels—often Level 2. When there is no trust, there is no safety, and when there is no safety, then we cannot connect with one another on the Love & Belonging, or Esteem, levels.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“That doesn’t mean it’s cool to cheat on your partner because they won’t agree to threesomes or to get yourself off looking at internet porn at the expense of sex with your spouse because you claim they don’t satisfy your superficial sexual “needs.” Nor does it mean it’s suddenly cool to have an affair with Heidi from work or Brad from the gym because the attention they provide strokes your lovey-dovey, feel-good emotional needs. But it DOES mean that we should all be super-intentional about discovering our partner’s needs (not what WE think they are, but what THEY know they are) and commit to helping them achieve their personal five levels of the human-needs pyramid and become their best-possible selves. Either that or communicate honestly and clearly that we are unwilling to so that they can then pursue a life without us deliberately holding them down. Not supporting our partner’s pursuit of living their best life does not justify them betraying or abusing us. But does it justify them choosing a life in which we are no longer the obstacle in their way because we are unwilling or unable to move?”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“And the simple truth is this: 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.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Romantic partners or spouses who frequently, if not always, remember to consider each other in their decision-making each day are the kind of people who trust one another and who trust that their partnership or marriage will go the distance. And as we will discuss next, the quality of your relationship and its capacity for withstanding the ups and downs that adult life delivers will be influenced most greatly by the amount of trust you and your partner build and maintain with each other.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“caring about her = putting glass in the dishwasher. Caring about her = keeping your laundry off the floor. Caring about her = thoughtfully not tracking dirt or whatever on the floor she worked hard to clean. Caring about her = taking care of kid-related things so she can just chill out for a little bit and worry about one less thing. Caring about her = “Hey babe. Is there anything I can do today or pick up on my way home that will make your day better?” Caring about her = a million little things that say “I love you” more than speaking the words ever could.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“caring about her = putting glass in the dishwasher. Caring about her = keeping your laundry off the floor. Caring about her = thoughtfully not tracking dirt or whatever on the floor she worked hard to clean. Caring about her = taking care of kid-related things so she can just chill out for a little bit and worry about one less thing.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Home lives and partnerships that once felt safe and comfortable slowly morph into a life that does not. Relationships with people whom we trusted when they promised to love us forever no longer feel trustworthy. We will explore these ideas further in later chapters, but it is the erosion and eventual loss of safety and trust that create the conditions for the death of a marriage.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“What Grayson’s wife actually gave a shit about was being married to someone who keeps promises. If she is married to someone she perceives to be unwilling or unable to keep their promises, then there can’t be trust in the relationship. A relationship absent trust doesn’t feel safe because relationships without trust are unsustainable. People require safety. We need safety to function, else we focus time and effort on trying to eliminate the threat or flee to safety.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“By understanding that my wife experienced meaningful pain—just like all of the unpleasant shit I feel when things hurt me—from something like this glass sitting next to the sink, I could have communicated my love and respect for her by NOT leaving tiny reminders for her each day that she wasn’t considered. That she wasn’t remembered. That she wasn’t respected. I could have carefully avoided leaving evidence that I would always choose my feelings and my preferences over hers. Then, caring about her = putting glass in the dishwasher. Caring about her = keeping your laundry off the floor. Caring about her = thoughtfully not tracking dirt or whatever on the floor she worked hard to clean. Caring about her = taking care of kid-related things so she can just chill out for a little bit and worry about one less thing. Caring about her = “Hey babe. Is there anything I can do today or pick up on my way home that will make your day better?” Caring about her = a million little things that say “I love you” more than speaking the words ever could.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Suddenly, this moment is no longer about something as benign and meaningless as a dirty dish. Now, this moment is about a meaningful act of love and sacrifice”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“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.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Because this is not okay. Most people feeling extreme discontent in their most important relationships does not contribute positively to the world at large. I don’t know how to measure just how much all of the interpersonal fuckery is adversely affecting us on a societal scale (think civil and political unrest), but I struggle to imagine that there are very many members of violent, angry mobs who would report high relationship satisfaction at home.”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships

“Holy shit. Feelings can HURT, I thought. And if feelings can hurt this much, and this is how my wife was feeling, and every time she tried to help me understand her pain I responded as if she was dumb, weak, or crazy, all while refusing to adjust any of my behaviors—doesn’t it make sense that she wanted to end our marriage? If I were in her position and were experiencing that same level of pain while not receiving any support or concern from her regarding my suffering, wouldn’t I have made the same choice that she did?”
― Matthew Fray, This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships