I read a marriage book for men and it left me shook
Plus takeaways about abolition from adrienne maree brown
Last week I was sick for two days and missed most of a course I was looking forward to for months, but once the pain subsided, I went for long walks, saw friends, cooked, kayaked, worked; this week, I haven’t felt well enough to leave my apartment. I’ve got a case of the flu or just a bad cold, either way, my symptoms have amplified my joint pain. It is also the six year anniversary of the Quebec mosque shootings on Sunday, and this anniversary and my swirl of symptoms have made this a heavy week mentally and physically. Physically, it hurts. Mentally, it is difficult to feel too unwell to see people, to read, to attend online events, to write, and to reliably predict my time, but I am grateful for all of you in this little newsletter community. Thank you for each message, each comment, each share and each subscription. It means a lot.
Earlier this month I was in Seattle and saw a book titled “This is How Your Marriage Ends”. A few years ago the author Matthew Fray wrote an essay that went viral about how ignoring the dishes led to his divorce, and seeing this book reminded me of the essay and made me curious. I got it from the library, and spent an evening last week reading it in almost one sitting.
During a coaching session with Sheryl Petty of Movement Tapestries a few years ago she spoke about the importance of scaffolded learning opportunities for people with differing knowledge and expertise with regards to equity. Sheryl taught us that you can’t offer advanced equity content to people who are just starting their learning journey, you need to have content that meets them where they are at.
This book is the equivalent of that beginner text for people (though it is heavily geared toward men) who are not doing well in their marriages, and are starting to realize that even if they may be a “good person” they may be causing their partner a lot of pain. The sentences are short, the paragraphs are short, the reading level is simple, and the main points are repeated several times in different ways.
The author argues that a) we haven’t learned how to show up well in relationships, men especially so, and b) men are harming people they are in relationship with. This is not a book that helps readers think more deeply about things like attachment styles or other things that influence how we show up in relationships. Rather, from the perspective of this book, showing up differently is a matter of paying better attention to one’s partner, taking their experiences seriously and seeing the work of improving your relationship skills as a priority in your life. The intervention this book is making is at the level of awareness.
The premise of the book is that the author’s marriage ended when he was 34 and the father of a four year child, a divorce that he describes as “the worst thing that ever happened to him. There is no second-place thing.” After a lot of time blaming his wife, he started to read more and think about his own role in the demise of his relationships. This led to a blog, articles in other publications, a coaching practice where he supports men in becoming better at relationships, and this book. He is a man talking mostly to other men who are like him, who have also spent copious time playing video games, drinking, watching sports, leaving their partner to do the majority of the work in their home, who is now on other side of a life-shaking experience, trying to warn others about the things he has learnt through the dissolution of his relationship so that they don’t experience the same fate. Over and over again this book stresses that harm is real, and the feelings and thoughts and experiences of women matter. It matters if you don’t listen to your partner and see their concerns as valid.
I hesitate to say I recommend this book wholeheartedly because there was a lot that I didn’t like about it. Some of his examples are truly awful, there are basically no people of colour cited in this book, it offered a very binary view of gender (though the author tried to refer to all people at some points, this is definitely a book about heterosexual relationships with men as the primary audience), and at different points it felt like he was describing women in infantilizing ways. For example, there is a chapter about how one might respond to a child’s fear about monsters by looking for monsters under their bed that is an analogy for how one might reassure their partner, and that felt like a poor example. It also could have been a much shorter book.
Having said all that, I am still thinking about this book because despite all the negatives, what I found memorable and useful were the inner dialogues the author shared from himself and his coaching clients. There are many paragraphs in the book where he shares conversations in which one partner shares they feel unheard or frustrated or ignored, and the response from the (usually male) partner is some version of:
I’m a good guy. Family members, community members, extended family, friends, coworkers, they all see me in this particular way, and this identity is core to who I am. I try my best. And yet, the one person closest to me seems to hold an alternate view to everyone else. This person therefore, is the problem. They are ungrateful, do not recognise all that I do, and I need to explain to them why their expectations are unrealistic, why they are wrong/irrational/needy etc, I need to defend my actions.
Most of what this author described does not describe men I know who are committed to shared labour, recognize and are committed to non-patriarchal homes and are committed to social justice, and yet these narratives/dialogues still felt familiar. These narratives are a block to equitable, nourishing relationships and I found this a worthwhile read just to understand them better.
The book talks about how relationships are destroyed not through deep betrayals but through “a thousand paper cuts” that include not listening to one’s partner, not noticing their emotional labour, not getting to know them and what matters to them, invalidating their thoughts and feelings and being defensive (what Fray calls the invalidation triple threat) when one’s partner shares that they are in pain. The author stresses that explaining/ rationalizing to one’s partner about why they are thinking about a problem incorrectly is not useful or helpful. No matter how much explaining and rationalizing and justification is done to explain why being hurt is wrong, that unaddressed pain will remain and trust will erode. When trust is eroded and safety doesn’t exist, relationships die. And he warns that the absence of conflict does not mean that things are okay, because there is not such thing as coasting in interpersonal relationships. Relationships require active investment from both people. The author’s description of why invalidating is harmful is clear and useful, and I found myself reflecting on my own behaviour and these descriptions more than once after reading the book.
Below the jump: my full notes from the book, along with my takeaways from a great podcast I heard last week: On Being with Krista Tippett - adrienne maree brown “We are in a time of new suns