How To Avoid Destroying Your Relationship - Matthew Fray

I believe trust usurps love, that it ranks higher. If you had to, like, rank the conditions that need to exist for relationships to thrive, to survive, to last, I just think trust ranks number one. I think people routinely end relationships with people they love all of the time. (wind blows)

Matthew Frey, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. Appreciate your time.

How did you end up being here talking about divorce?

In 2013, my marriage ended, and I don't want to say that I didn't see it coming because there was an 18-month lead up to it where it was sort of like a slow decay and it was pretty awful and we were in different bedrooms. But there still was nothing that had prepared me for the experience of my wife literally, like, moving out, packing a suitcase, taking our little boy... I always want to make sure that people don't imagine, like, an angry woman kidnapping our child. She very peacefully an- and- and promising me that I'd see him tomorrow or the next day, you know, drove and said, "I'm going to be at my mom's." Th- that's what it was. I don't want to make it seem like she was a kidnap- kidnapping our son. But- but she left and it was brutal and I had a really difficult time with it. We'd been together for 12 years, married for nine of them, and I- I was 34 at the time, just about, and I don't know. I- I never had, like, a frame of reference for anything that sucked that bad before, that was that sort of awful. And that was it. It was- it was my personal crisis. The... Everybody can only know what they know, everybody can only have experienced whatever, um, adversity or pain that they've experienced. And I don't want to make excuses for my relatively non-resilient, fragile life up to that point, but it was simply the most difficult thing I'd encountered. I- I hated it and I had to get to work on figuring out what I'd done to contribute to it. I needed to selfishly protect my future self from having this happen again, and in that process, I believe I sort of evolved and came to some valuable insights and conclusions about ways in which I had a lot more power and influence in my relationship than I believed on the day she drove away, where I felt like a victim and I- I don't feel like a victim anymore.

It's interesting that you talk about the exit being, uh, unceremonial, unspectacular, you know? It wa- it- there- there wasn't... It wasn't a, someone threw a glass and then she stormed out and this, that and the other. And I think you mentioned about how you think most relationships end with a whimper rather than a bang.

Yeah, I think that there is... I mean, I don't, again, I don't like to try to speak for everybody. I'll speak for me and trust that lots of people also thought and felt this way. Growing up when marriages ended and I heard about it, I always assumed somebody had done something sort of overtly horrible, sexual infidelity, physical abuse, a crime, you know, just major deceit. Something- something really bad that we would all, like, sit around a table and agree, man, they definitely should have ended their marriage because of that awful thing that person did. And what I've come to believe in my work and in my personal life is that- that the great majority of relationships do not end that way, that they end from things that people want to fight about whether they should end over them. And those are conversations around somebody leaving a dish by the sink or a piece of laundry on the bedroom floor or the state of the- the bathroom when somebody walks into it, you know, after somebody got ready and brushed their teeth in the morning. And these are the little things that are so easy to write off as benign, as inconsequential, as no big deal, and because one person cares about it and because the other person insists that it's not a problem, the... It never gets repaired. The- the disharmony never heals, never gets repaired, and it's my strong belief that those pile up hundreds of times, thousands of times over the duration of a relationship, they erode trust in a way that I think of as like a paper cut each time and that the accumulation of these paper cuts compromises the stability, the integrity of the relationship. And then, you know, often it's something da- really overtly bad does happen. And I don't necessarily mean infidelity or something, but, like, an external trauma, like, uh, o- often the death of a loved one or- or, um, sickness, you know, somebody gets diagnosed with, like, a really scary disease and those break relationships in which the foundation of, like, safety and trust has been eroded.