This Is How Your Marriage Ends

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.