A man has shared how his wife divorced him for leaving dirty glasses by the sink but he later realized that she made a wise choice as the problem was more than just that.

Matthew Fray from Ohio said that his wife left him after his 34th birthday.

“So what terrible thing did I do exactly? How did I mistreat my poor wife? Well . . . I often left used drinking glasses by the sink,” he said.

Matthew said he left plates only centimeters from the dishwasher, and there were times when he did not put his clothes away. Those were the things that made her leave, or that’s what it seemed on the surface.

He said that she was being ‘unreasonable’ for throwing their 12-year relationship over dirty glasses.

But it was only after some time that he realized it wasn’t the meaningless chores that bothered her even though she hated them. It was not about leaving the dirty glass by the sink. It wasn’t the laundry left on the floor.

“The thing is, the glass by the sink did matter to my wife — she hated it sitting there — but it wasn’t just about the glass. It wasn’t about dishes left for her to sort, or laundry on the floor. My wife wasn’t some insufferable nag who had to have her way all the time,” he continued.

“It was about what these things said to her. And what they said was: I would always choose my feelings and preferences over hers. That she was married to someone who did not respect or appreciate her.

“That while she rarely made a decision without thinking about how it might affect me or our son, I barely ever considered how my actions affected her. That not taking four seconds to put my glass in the dishwasher was more important to me than she was.”

He eventually learned that marriage does not just end suddenly.

“The fact is, when relationships become strained, it doesn’t happen quickly. The strain sneaks in slowly. Most of us legitimately love our spouses and want our marriages to succeed; we’re not intentionally sabotaging our most important relationships,” he continued.

“Instead, we’re doing it pinprick by pinprick. Love doesn’t die in a loud, dramatic way. It’s not bright or flashy. The ticking timebombs that destroy our marriages are often disguised as harmless, innocent, everyday behaviors — like leaving glasses by the sink.

“The reason we can’t see this is because far too many of us lack the number one ingredient for a lasting marriage.

“We lack empathy.”

He added: “I didn’t realize my wife was moving incrementally closer to ending our marriage every time she saw that glass, because I stubbornly refused to look at the world from where she stood.”

After the success of his blog, Matthew left a career in marketing and became a relationship coach.

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