Jen Hatmaker knew there was no going back when she discovered her husband was having an affair — in the middle of the night. The HGTV star was married to her now ex-husband Brandon Hatmaker for almost 30 years, from 1993 to 2020, and the former couple welcomed five children together. However, everything came to an end one night, when at 2:30a.m., she woke up to him whispering on the phone to another woman.
Recently speaking on The Jamie Kern Lima Show podcast in honor of the release of her memoir, Awake, which covers the painful collapse of her marriage, Jen, 51, recalled of the moment she realized her husband was cheating on her: "Instinctively, I knew this marriage is over, and this is so hard to say, but I had to get to it."
"I didn't want to stay married. When your spouse creates such an alternative life for himself and abandons everything — his own character and will and story and marriage and family and place in the world — there are red flags. Something is wrong. That's not the product of a healthy, functioning marriage," she continued.
Looking back now on how her marriage to Brandon evolved even before she learned of the affair, and their relationship ended, Jen confessed: "There were so many parts of our marriage that have left us both lonely, disconnected, functioning as roommates," adding: "This is the most disastrous, catastrophic, painful thing I've ever experienced, and at the same time, I also didn't want to stay. I knew it."
Jen's memoir, out now, details the moment she learned of the affair, when she overheard her then-husband whispering to someone on the phone: "I just can't quit you," before going to sleep. Their marriage — and "my life" as she knew it — ended the following morning when she kicked him out of the house.
Speaking with the New York Post last month, recalling the chilling discovery, she shared: "To some degree, I almost disassociated, noting how it "was so outside the realm of what I would have ever considered a possibility for our life, our marriage, our story."
Per the post, Jen writes in her book how she spent the rest of the night going through her husband's computer, following a "trail of betrayal," one that led her to the realization that not only had the affair had been going on for a '"devastating time span," but also that Brandon had showered his girlfriend with "expensive and lavish gifts," subsequently plunging their family into "financial chaos."
Jen along with her ex-husband were previously the hosts of My Big Family Renovation, which aired in 2015 and ran for two seasons, documenting their Texas farmhouse renovation. In addition to being the author of several books, she is also the host of the For the Love podcast, which she hosts with her longtime friend Amy Hardin, and in which they reflect on reaching their "middle years."