Oh Look! We Found A Man Giving Relationship Advice To Other Men!
by The Candidly Team
FINE, this title is a bit harsh. But coming across a man who reads, considers, and WRITES relationship advice FOR OTHER MEN feels like stumbling across a unicorn at the end of a double rainbow.
And no, we’re not talking about dumb pickup artists who fashion themselves as “dating coaches” because that’s not real relationship advice from/for men in real long-term relationships. We’re talking about men who write articles and books FOR MEN on how to improve their marriages. Where the heck is THAT content? Why is it that the burden of improving the marriage always seems to fall on women?
Well ladies (and hopefully gentlemen brave enough to click into this article), we found one!
His name is Matthew Fray, and he literally wrote the book on how men ruin their marriages, called This Is How Your Marriage Ends.
So naturally, we had to bombard him with a slew of questions. So let’s get to it.
1. In your book, you talk about coming to this realization after your divorce that you were "a decent guy" but "a bad husband"? What event/incident, specifically, inspired this awareness?
It was less a specific incident—unless we’re counting the divorce itself—than a series of realizations.
The shorter answer? Blogging. I have a journalism background. After my wife chose to move out of our home and end our marriage, I was just trying to figure out how to be alive and regular again. Everything was very dark and ugly for a while. When everything feels bad, we all work to eliminate whatever pains we’re experiencing. In my case, I learned that thinking about, writing about, and talking about my failed marriage for the purposes of being able to explain it were the actions that both lessened pain, and eased my fears regarding how to avoid having this happen again in the future.
Writing stories for public consumption forced me to do the work of being able to defend my ideas. I spent months—years, really—piecing together the mosaic which told the story of how my marriage ended, and how I could have done things differently to achieve a better outcome.
2. What's your single biggest piece of relationship advice that you wish all men knew?
People can hurt even if you don’t think they should hurt, even if you would never feel hurt by the same thing, and even if you never intended to cause harm. The vast majority of relationships are comprised of people who would NEVER try to hurt each other on purpose. Healthy people do not subject others to intentional, overt abuse.
But sometimes, while not intending to cause harm, nor even being aware of it, the result of our actions can equal pain for our partner.
A failure to learn how to see this and take responsibility for the results of our actions is the missing emotional-intelligence skill many good people (mostly men) lack.
This is how good people inadvertently hurt their partners and destroy their relationships. Not intentional harm. But blindness.
3. What are the biggest relationship-killing behaviors of married men that most of them don't even realize they're doing? We all think cheating is the biggest issue for married men, but is it?
This isn’t exclusively a male problem, but men tend to invalidate their relationship partners whenever they disagree about something. When we say things which invalidate others, they trust us a micro-fraction less than they did before.
This is why one, two, or even a hundred instances of feeling invalidated doesn’t end a relationship/marriage. It’s a paper cut. A pinprick. This is how we destroy trust in our relationships without noticing it as it’s happening. The dangerously slow and hard-to-detect erosion.
Advice: Develop the skill of validating people even when you disagree with them. Validation and agreement are not the same thing. Disagreeing won’t end your marriage. Invalidation will.
It’s the worst habit people have in their relationships because it disguises itself as harmless disagreement. But what it actually is, is another paper cut. Add enough of those together, and people don’t get to be married anymore.
4. Most content about improving our marriages seems directed almost exclusively at women (including our own website). Why is that? Is it that men just aren't interested in "relationship advice?" Is it because it feels like a "chick mag" subject? Why does it feel like "fixing" the relationship is just another invisible burden for women, specifically, to shoulder?
I assume it’s a money thing. If a person or company in the relationship business relied exclusively on males to patronize their company, I’m pretty sure no one would make it.
Unfairly, shamefully, women most often bear the burden of relationship management in heterosexual couples.
Women know something is wrong when things feel off in their homes and relationships. Men often don’t know. Men often want their female partners to feel and behave contently to maintain the status quo. Women often NEED their male partners to validate and consider their needs in order to have the trust and safety required for a relationship to be healthy and sustainable.
5. Why is it that women seem to just take on the role of manager of the house? Is it just deeply-rooted traditional gender roles at play? What role does learned helplessness play in this?
I believe it’s behavior modeling. Growing up, I watched the adult men mow lawns, fix cars, repair fences, stain decks, and take out the trash. I watched adult women care for children, clean, cook, do laundry, etc.
Much of the domestic household tasks culturally, societally, became “women’s work.” So-called invisible work. Unpaid labor. So many men grew up having their grandmothers and mothers routinely take care of all of these things. They didn’t see or think about it, because they didn’t have to see or think about it.
So when their wives or girlfriends are suddenly asking them to do a bunch of shit their mom never asked their dad to do, it feels like some unfair burden, when what it actually is a young woman with healthy personal boundaries and self-respect demanding that she be seen and heard and respected.
He wants her to feel those things. He just doesn’t know how to equate domestic housework with those feelings because he’s under the mistaken impression that his mom felt loved and respected, when her suffering silently is the more likely explanation.
6. How can we get our husbands to manage the house without managing them or nagging them constantly? And even when they split duties equally, like doing half the grocery shopping or half the cleaning, how can they take on some of the invisible labor of making the decisions and planning, like deciding what needs to be cleaned when or putting together the week's grocery plan?
I didn’t value certain aspects of shared domestic responsibilities as much as my wife did. I could easily wait another week or two before spending an entire Saturday morning cleaning the house first thing after wrapping up the work week. I didn’t think it was fair that her preferences for how often things were done had to automatically win out over mine. So I sometimes acted like a child about it.
The idea that I lean into today is less about the details and specifics, and more about the theme. I may not care about dusting, or empty dishwashers, or perfectly mopped kitchen floors as my wife. That’s fine. However, if those things really matter to her? If those are things she values highly? My subtle or blatant disregard for what matters to her will ALWAYS erode trust and communicate disrespect in our relationship.
The details will always be different from couple to couple. Change a relationship partner, and she or he will like and dislike a whole new set of things relative to your previous partner. But this idea will always, always, always show up. We must behave in a manner that communicates mindful care and respect for what matters to our partner, or they will eventually find something more rewarding to do with their lives.
I want men to WANT to help their wives. Not because they love domestic housework. But because one of their highest lived values is that the result of their actions and words equals their partner feeling loved and respected.
7. One concept you talk about is “weaponized incompetency,” which is when people fake or exaggerate their incompetence to get out of doing a task, and get someone else to do it instead. If someone is weaponizing their incompetency against us, how do we respond so that we're not just giving them what they want (ie, we just do things for them)?
Willful negligence is only a step or two away from intentional neglect/abuse. My work is hyper-focused on the millions of people who genuinely love their partner and want to have a successful forever-relationship with them, but somehow struggle to achieve it because they lack a particular insight or skill.
Weaponized incompetence? People should not be in relationships on purpose with someone who would weaponize ANYTHING against them. We’re partners, not enemies. People should not voluntarily subject themselves to mistreatment. They’re worth way too much for that. Sometimes people don’t know how beautiful and important they are because they’ve spent an unfair amount of time with people whom they believed loved them, but whose words and actions communicated that they weren’t worth modifying any of their behaviors for.
8. How is modeling incompetence affecting our children? Does it help reinforce damaging ideas of the "fun" parent and the "responsible" parent? Does it give them permission to engage in weaponized incompetence themselves?
Everything short of both relationship partners feeling loved and respected is modeling behavior for our children that will set them up for failure in their adult relationships just like every generation before them.
Conflicts around inequity in the home regarding shared domestic responsibilities stands out as one of the biggest, most commonly cited reasons for the breakdown of relationships.
9. Speaking of which, why do men always get to be the "fun" parent? How do we even begin to undo THAT complex dynamic?
Men still frequently default to the idea that they’re “helping” to care for their own children, or “helping” their partners around the house with cleaning, cooking, and other chores.
It’s a mindset shift that needs to happen, not new behavior in several areas. We MUST learn how habitually consider our partner’s needs when we make decisions. Not sometimes. ALL OF THE TIME.
Romantic partners who habitually consider their partner’s needs each and every day would never make a parenting decision (or any other decision) that fails to calculate for how their partner or children’s other parent might experience it.
Women are often great at practicing empathy and consideration for other people’s needs. Men are often not great at it. Not because they’re assholes, but because they never learned the importance of it, or the skills to achieve it. It’s not something boys have historically been taught or had modeled for them growing up.
When we accept responsibility for pain others feel because of our decisions—even in our blind spots—then we become the kind of people who can be trusted and who can co-exist in lifelong partnerships.
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