Jen Hatmaker is opening up about the breakdown of her marriage in her new memoir, Awake, in which she reveals the exact moment she found out her then-husband, Brandon Hatmaker, was cheating on her.
In the book, per the celebrity.land, Jen writes that on July 11, 2020, at around 2:30 am, she woke up to the sound of her husband whispering on the phone to another woman. She says that he smelled of booze, and just before he drifted off to sleep, he whispered, “I just can’t quit you.”
Jen writes that that was the moment everything changed, describing it as “the end of my life as I [knew] it.”
After hearing the call, Jen explains how she got up and started digging through Brandon’s computer, where she discovered a “trail of betrayal.” She doesn’t say exactly how long the affair had been going on, only calling it a “devastating time span.” She also says Brandon plunged the family into “financial chaos” by showering his mistress with “expensive and lavish gifts.”
The next morning, she kicked Brandon out of the house, effectively bringing an end to their 26-year marriage. The former couple tied the knot in 1993 and went on to welcome five children, two of whom were adopted from Ethiopia. They founded the evangelical Austin New Church in Texas in 2008 and hosted the HGTV series My Big Family Renovation in 2014.
Brandon and Jen Hatmaker
Brandon and Jen Hatmaker; Jen Hatmaker Facebook
“To some degree, I almost disassociated,” Jen told The Post when discussing her reaction to her ex-husband’s late-night call. “It was so outside the realm of what I would have ever considered a possibility for our life, our marriage, our story.”
“It was so shocking and stunning, and I almost could not process it,” she added. “I couldn’t even cry.”
Jen told the outlet that the marriage “had been in trouble” before 2020, revealing she and Brandon hadn’t had sex for two years. However, after they started attending marriage counseling in April 2020, she thought they were turning a new leaf.
“I thought that we were deeply working to repair,” she shared. “We had kind of reconnected sexually … And so there, at the very bitter end, I thought that we were trying, but we actually weren’t.”
She added, “There were a lot of unaccounted absences, and the phone was never ever, ever, ever out of his hand or sight. All the warning signs were there, but I did not want to face those.”
Jen also revealed how Brandon made “no reconciliation effort” once she uncovered the affair. In her memoir, out Tuesday (September 23), she writes, “He [told] me clearly that ‘trying requires certain feelings to be there’ and they aren’t anymore and they won’t be coming back.”
Since the end of her marriage, Jen has left the church she founded, as being there was too triggering, and is now in a long-distance relationship with author Tyler Merritt. She also became a grandmother for the first time in August.
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