How To Avoid Destroying Your Relationship - Matthew Fray - #466

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Matthew Fray. He's a relationship coach, blogger and an author. Matthew's marriage ended because he left a glass next to the sink. Well, not exactly, but near enough. He spent the next few years recovering, reflecting and writing about how a relationship can fall apart without anything catastrophic happening, and also working out how to stop it from happening again. I expect to learn how even good people can be bad spouses, why men and women aren't speaking the same language in most relationships, why most divorces are initiated by women, why trust is even more important than love, why peace and contentment are better life goals than happiness, and much more. What I like about Matthew's approach is that it's fundamentally hopeful. I'm not a fan of taking a nihilistic or despondent, cynical view of the future of relationships. Even in a global dating market with Tinder and OnlyFans and Instagram and stuff like that, I still do fundamentally believe that relationships and marriage can work, and Matthew has taken the hard road to finding out some good tools for how you can keep yours together. In other news, this episode is brought to you by MyProtein. You need to start using their ClearWay. It is by far the best protein that I've ever found, and if whatever you're using at the moment is making you feel uncomfortable or bloated or you don't like the taste of it, this is the solution for you. It looks and tastes like juice. It's light and fruity, but it has more protein in than a normal protein shake, and they even do a vegan version. If you are in the UK, their orange and mango is great, and if you're in the US, their strawberry flavor is fantastic. Also, you already know MyProtein make the best bars on the planet. Their layered bars are fantastic. Their gooey cookies are amazing if you throw them in the microwave for 30 seconds. Basically, their entire range is phenomenal, and if you need to stock up, if you're looking to add more protein into your diet, or if you're looking for health and sports supplements like multivitamins or creatine, or apparel, like leggings and shorts and joggers and tops and all that stuff, you can get everything on one site. They ship internationally. They fulfill no matter where you are, America, UK, even in the USA, and you can get 37% or greater off everything site-wide. The maximum discount available is available with the code Modern Wisdom. And you can unlock that by going to bit.ly slash Protein Wisdom. That's my secret product page with everything that I use and recommend. And then the code Modern Wisdom at checkout will get you that big fat discount. That's bit.ly slash Protein Wisdom and the code Modern Wisdom at checkout.
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How did you end up being here, talking about divorce?

**Matthew Fray** (4:15)
In 2013, my marriage ended. And I don't wanna 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 her little boy. I always wanna make sure that people don't imagine like an angry woman kidnapping our child. She very peacefully and promising me that I'd see him tomorrow or the next day, you know, drove and said, I'm gonna be at my mom's, that's what it was. I don't wanna make it seem like she was a kidnap, kidnapping our son. 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 was 34 at the time, just about. And I don't know it. 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 my personal crisis.