Can the husband whisperer improve my marriage?

Photo / Chaz McGregor, Unsplash

Matthew Fray's burgeoning status as a relationship guru, a so-called "husband whisperer", is accidental. He got divorced nine years ago after a nine-year marriage. The break-up traumatised him. Having been a journalist, his response was to write about his feelings in a blog, rejoicing in the ambiguous title She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by the Sink.

"Initially as a trickle," he explains from his home just outside Cleveland, Ohio, "and to begin with as catharsis, it touched a nerve and became wildly popular." Four million-plus views led to a profile in The New York Times. "It was my first taste of people treating me like a thought leader in the relationship space. Which was very uncomfortable, because I didn't feel like one. I still don't really, but I'm easing my way there."

Just turned 43, Fray is about to publish his wisdom in a book, This is How Your Marriage Ends. "I believe I've figured out the accurate story for why my marriage ended," Fray says. If that sounds bombastic, by the way, it isn't; it's just typically American straight talk. Fray actually comes across as a modest, careful man, his theories and insights hedged around with qualifications and modifiers. After the New York Times piece, his following "morphed into a critical mass large enough for me to make a career out of coaching. That feels unbelievable to say out loud [given] my qualification is I failed at my marriage."

As that remark suggests, Fray's starting point is that his divorce was his fault, even though he was – and is not – a bad person and he didn't do anything egregiously destructive such as have an affair or succumb to substance abuse, let alone physical violence. His culpability lay in far more nuanced – and yet, he argues, more commonplace – failings. "I believe marriages fail because we destroy love and trust in incremental, subtle ways. Nothing is obvious about how most marriages end."

One of the reasons Fray's blog struck such a chord five or so years ago was he was clearly in anguish over his divorce and willing, indeed compelled, to point the finger at himself. That led to a wider reflection on "how is it possible that marriage as an institution, which has been around so long, where everybody understands the stakes, a voluntary agreement to be romantic partners for life, can fail 50 per cent of the time? Or 70 per cent if you include couples who don't divorce but are miserable?"

Matthew Fray. Photo / Supplied

Fray caveats what follows by acknowledging gay marriage, polyamorous relationships and the dangers of gender stereotypes, and how he doesn't want to demonise men, but then says, "Yes, a lot of the problems fall to male behaviour. Men have the responsibility to show up in a healthy way in a relationship. Instead they often betray their wives' trust in a series of paper cuts over many years."

While statistics reveal about 70 per cent of divorces are filed by women, Fray's experience (and my own) is that while it is women who often pull the plug, it is men who have usually poisoned the well.

That phrase perhaps makes the average chap seem far more malevolent than he is in reality. One of the key ideas Fray wants to convey is that good men can make bad husbands. "It can be dangerous to believe your intentions define how good or bad you are as a romantic partner. That was my defence. I had this idea that there are bad people in the world and I wasn't one of them. I wasn't hitting and cheating and doing vile things, so I couldn't believe how critical and hurt she was about things I thought were benign." Now, Fray says, he realises that, "It's the maths result of our actions that is more important than our intentions.

"In the context of marriage," he continues, "I have to measure the impact I'm having on the other person, regardless of how well intentioned I am. The fact is my wife hurt as a result of things I did or didn't do. Because I didn't try to hurt her, I held onto the notion that she shouldn't be hurt. So begins the conflict pattern in the average relationship." So indeed. I doubt there are many readers in long-term relationships who aren't familiar with the distinction Fray is making.

'This is how good people destroy their marriages'

I've been married, I tell Fray, for 24 years this May. "Congratulations," he interjects, "that's a good run." It hasn't, I confide, hoping to score a bit of free coaching, always been easy. One of our flashpoints, surprise, surprise, is the issue alluded to in the title of his blog: domestic tasks, who does them, when and to what standard. That title could be read as his wife being unnecessarily petty and, dare I say it, naggy. But Fray's insight is to realise that the substance of the dispute isn't that important – it was his reaction to his ex-wife's reaction to the dirty dishes that, over time, hollowed out their marriage.

"I think about it in the context of pain," he tells me. "What I did in my marriage was think about it in the context of agreeing to disagree about petty preferences and superficial wants. I wanted to have a difference of opinion with my wife and have that be OK. But what I did, in maths terms, equalled pain for my wife. And then her attempts to recruit me to help her not hurt any more were never met with words or actions that resulted in her not hurting any more. This is how good people destroy their marriages."

Here we approach the heart of Fray's argument. "Our tendency to invalidate our partners when we disagree with them is what starts this slow paper-cut bleed-out of trust in our marriages. 'I feel invalidated' was a common refrain of my wife [at this point I form a vivid mental image of my own wife saying precisely the same] and I resented it and thought invalidated was a bullshit namby-pamby word [cut to me nodding enthusiastically]. But I get it so much now." (Back to me looking anxious and betrayed.)

Fray goes on to elaborate what he calls his invalidation triple threat. "Your partner says, 'Something bad happened; I feel bad about it.' In version one, you disagree with what she says happened. In version two, you agree with her intellectual experience but disagree with her emotional experience: why are you making such a big deal out of it? Version three, you accept the facts and her feelings but defend your behaviour: if our wives only knew what we felt, they wouldn't be mad at us any more.

"These three response patterns," Fray argues, "invalidate our marriages. Every time my wife came to me [with a problem], if I didn't agree with what she thought or felt, I chose me over her. Every. Single. Time. She never got to win. She never got to be heard. She never got to feel cared for. She felt abandoned. She felt unloved. She only felt loved when I agreed."

Hang on a minute, I say: isn't this just a recipe for always agreeing with your wife? "Happy wife, happy life," that old cliché? Muttering, "Yes, dear," while rolling your eyes behind her back? I mean, I am a tidy guy, I'm forever wielding a dishcloth, but undoubtedly my standards are not as high as my wife's. So yeah, she's feeling pain about the fact I haven't done the extra 10 per cent, but what if I feel she's just wrong? Are you saying a good husband just has to agree?

"I don't advocate agreeing with your wife when you disagree with your wife," Fray responds, chuckling at my heartfelt outburst. "I believe there's a subtle but critical distinction between agreeing with someone and validating someone."

The monster under the bed analogy

He goes on to cite his favoured monster under the bed analogy. "I use this in my coaching and it lands with people. I imagine my son when he was 4 [he is now 13]. He's crying at night. I go in and he says, 'Dad, there's a monster under my bed.' My first option is what I did in my marriage. I say, 'Buddy, there's no monster under the bed. Tough it up. Go to sleep.' And if I'm in a hurry I leave him. The result is my son is still afraid, still crying alone in the dark. He has tried to recruit Dad to help him but Dad abandons him. Over time that erodes trust.

"I want to be the person he trusts. What do I do? It's nothing to do with agreeing with him. I staunchly disagree there's a monster under the bed. I love my son. I would never try to hurt him. But the result of my behaviour is: I hurt my son.

"So, what's the alternative? I don't focus on the monster. I don't get hung up on, 'I'm right. He's wrong.' Instead, I want to participate in someone I love not feeling shitty any more. I want to preserve safety and trust, because that's the glue that keeps people together. I say, 'I've been afraid too and it's horrible.' I make sure there's no monster. But I leave him with the critical idea that any time he's feeling bad or afraid he can call me or his mum and we're gonna show up. We may not be able to fix the problem, but he never has to feel alone in suffering. We have to apply that idea to our adult relationships."

I am confident I followed the correct option as regards my own children, now 25 and 23. I can't swear that I've always been so empathetic towards my wife. His thought experiment makes me want to try harder in future, tricky as that sometimes is when faced with a dishwasher that needs emptying late at night. "It is more difficult," Fray concludes wryly, "to respond empathetically to an angry wife than it is to a vulnerable child.

"But instead of getting hung up on whether I agree with my wife or not, what I want is to honour what she feels. In the context of domestic household responsibilities it gets more nuanced. It's a common refrain of married women [indeed it is] that they do most of the heavy lifting with [what should be] shared domestic responsibility. We opt out. 'If I don't do it,' many women say, 'it doesn't get done. Not only that, if I ask for help I'm invalidated. I get treated like I'm his mother.' " That last remark hits very close to home. Robert, I tell myself, you've got to raise your game, son.

Fray and his ex-wife, who is also from Ohio, met at college. Married at 25, they both worked similar hours for similar incomes. Their son was born after five years. The relationship deteriorated – domestic tasks were a major fault line, as was his habit of not respecting her minor social anxiety. "Eventually she decided, 'I'm married to someone who will always choose what he feels over what I feel.' People in that situation always leave. She did. Our marriage was a wreck. I'd been sleeping in a different bed for 18 months. I don't want to act like she pulled the rug out from under me but finally she was like, 'This is not going to get better.' "

His book, I point out, is subtitled A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships – but isn't it right that some relationships should not be saved? "Conceivably," he concedes. "I don't know. I just believe my behaviour eroded her trust in me. Undoubtedly there are people who are incompatible but a good and responsible choice in a marriage partner. Habits within the relationship are more likely to dictate the outcome than chemistry. I believe love is the work of choosing someone else, choosing to eliminate your blind spots on behalf of someone else."

Feedback from women

He and his ex are now on good terms. They share custody of their son and live four minutes apart. "It's a peaceful, positive, amicable relationship." She has a new long-term partner, he does not. She has been supportive of his new career and reputation but, "I wonder if you caught her in a private moment of honesty there'd be some resentment. I imagine there might be. But I like to believe I've earned her respect, forgiveness and trust over these past nine years."

I suggest that maybe they got married too young. "It didn't seem young at the time. My parents were younger when they got married." Did they stay together? "No. I'm definitely a statistic. I'm a child of divorce. I was four, the same age as my son when I divorced. The numbers are uncanny – how common it is for the children of divorce to divorce themselves.

"My parents' divorce was the second most impactful thing that happened in my life beside my own. It steeled my resolve that I would never get divorced. It was the one thing I would never do. I wanted children and I didn't want my children to experience what I did. My parents lived 500 miles apart. I didn't see my father very often. It was hard growing up that way." This broken promise to himself explains, I suppose, why his own domestic tragedy hit so hard.

As for why his blog resonates so loudly, as no doubt his book will too, he thinks, "Not a ton of straight men are writing first-person stuff about how fights over dishes and laundry and work schedules cause many marriages to die a slow death. The most common feedback I get is from women saying, 'Holy shit! I wish my husband would realise what this guy realised.' "

Women, he knows first-hand, are increasingly confident about calling out imbalances in the domestic burden. "I don't think relationships were ending in 1960 because of arguments about shared domestic responsibility. While women advanced in their careers, education and earning potential, they did not advance nearly as quickly in the domestic dynamics of raising children, washing dishes and cleaning toilets. I had to be asked to do things.

"I think most straight men opt out of domestic responsibilities and then fail to calculate for the trust that's eroded. I describe it as accidental sexism. I don't believe I did anything you could characterise as toxic masculinity, but I also think male privilege is a legitimate label."

If I'm honest about the division of labour in my own house these past three decades or so, I'd have to agree.

Written by: Robert Crampton
© The Times of London