Some marriages end with screaming fights or tearful conversations. Some end with lawyers and divided assets. Some end with quiet resignation at the kitchen table, long before the parties realize it. For Jen Hatmaker, the celebrated author of the New York Times bestseller, For the Love, it ended with five whispered words at 2:30 in the morning.
Hatmaker, who once hosted the HGTV series Your Big Family Renovation along with her husband Brandon and their five children, and essentially built a brand around their solid Christian family life, has chronicled her experience with divorce in a new memoir titled Awake.
The author woke up one day in July 2020 to her husband of nearly 27 years murmuring into his phone beside the bed to another woman, reeking of alcohol. “I just can’t quit you” were the five words he said, and just like that, the curtain fell on what Jen had thought was her picture-perfect life.
What followed was the kind of night that rewires a person’s entire understanding of reality, where Hatmaker spent around four hours excavating his husband’s computer and uncovering a “trail of betrayal” through emails, messages, and bank statements. It was, as she writes in her memoir, “the end of my life as I [knew] it.”
She keeps the specifics rather vague in the book, but the affair had apparently been going on for a “devastating time span,” with the father of five showering his girlfriend with “expensive and lavish gifts” and hemorrhaging the family money to the point of driving them towards financial collapse.
By morning that day, she’d kicked him out. Their 27-year marriage, wherein they’d found an evangelical church in Texas and raised five children (two adopted from Ethiopia), was over just like that.
“To some degree, I almost disassociated,” Hatmaker later told the press of the experience. “It was so outside the realm of what I would have ever considered a possibility for our life, our marriage, our story.”
What made the betrayal especially brutal was the clues that she, in her own words, refused to see. The couple hadn’t had sex in two years. They’d started marriage counseling in April, and though she thought they were fixing things, there were “a lot of unaccounted absences” and other red flags, like Brandon’s phone being surgically attached to his hand.
Brandon apparently made no effort to reconcile and was engaged to another woman within a year, though he later clarified on his personal Substack page that this was a different woman. He also recently published a post urging his followers to take everything they read with a grain of salt due to the amount of misinformation currently pervading the online sphere.
As for Jen, she has been trying to reconcile her past life as a “cool” Christian couple who supported gay marriage to the new reality, dealing with anxiety and depression, and helping raise the children.
She’s since left the church she co-founded, explaining that she found everyone’s shock and pity to be a little too overbearing. “Right now, I am finding a meaningful faith outside of those [traditional] spaces.”
Sometimes the life you thought was yours was never really there at all, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pick up the pieces. For Jen, who says she’s finally “in the driver’s seat” and has no intention “to outsource my life again,” the best renovation turned out to be not a house, but her own life.
