Five years after the 2015 premiere of HGTV’s “Your Big Family Renovation,” the perfect-looking life its stars built together fell apart with a single phone call.
In her new memoir “Awake,” to be released on September 23, 2025, Jen Hatmaker, bravely opens up about the night in July 2020 when she discovered her husband Brandon was cheating on her. While appearing on Jamie Kern Lima’s podcast on September 9, she listened as Lima read aloud the shocking passage from her book.
Lima read, “At 2:30 a.m. on July 11th, 2020, out of a dead sleep, I hear five whispered words, ‘Not meant for me. I just can’t quit you.’ My husband of 26 years is voice texting his girlfriend next to me in our bed. It is the end of my life as I know it.'”
“To some degree, I almost disassociated,” Hatmaker, 51, told the New York Post about that moment. “It was so outside the realm of what I would have ever considered a possibility for our life, our marriage, our story.”
Jen Hatmaker Says She Tried to Salvage Her Marriage
Jen, 51, a sought-after author and speaker, divorced Brandon after 26 years of marriage, per The Post, and is now in a loving relationship with actor, author, and activist Tyler Merritt. With the release of her memoir, she’s bravely opening up about her experience of starting over and admitting how painfully imperfect her perfect-looking marriage really was.
In 2008, the Hatmakers founded an evangelical church in Austin, Texas, and Jen became a hugely popular Christian social media influencer known for encouraging women to use their voices. Months before her middle-of-the-night discovery, Jen was on Facebook Live, giving her many followers a tour of the 1908 family farmhouse she and Brandon renovated for themselves and their five kids. At the time, she told The Post, she was blind to the signs her marriage was crumbling.
After discovering Brandon’s affair, she writes in “Awake” that she spent the next four hours diving into her husband’s computer, where she found a “trail of betrayal.”
The Post reports that though she doesn’t give many specifics, Jen does say her ex’s infidelity occurred across a “devastating time span,” noting that Brandon had given his girlfriend countless “expensive and lavish gifts,” which drowned their family in “financial chaos.”
“It was so shocking and stunning, and I almost could not process it,” Hatmaker told the outlet. “I couldn’t even cry.”
The couple did go to counseling in April 2020 and Jen thought they were making strides toward healing their relationship, but she told The Post that it eventually became clear he was not interested in saving their marriage.
“There were a lot of unaccounted absences, and the phone was never ever, ever, ever out of his hand or sight,” she said. “All the warning signs were there, but I did not want to face those.”
Jen Hatmaker Says Life As She Knew It ‘Burned to the Ground in One Fell Swoop’
Hatmaker told Lima on her podcast, “It was devastating. I was married for 26 years and I was married to a pastor and together, we had sort of built this whole life. This will remain one of the most shocking things that has ever happened to me.”
After confronting Brandon about the evidence she found on his laptop of his cheating, she told Lima, he said he wasn’t ready to talk about it.
“And I said, ‘Okay, pack your [expletive] and get out,'” Jen recalled. “And that was the last night he ever spent the night at the house. We have five kids. Four of them were upstairs sleeping that night. The whole thing burned to the ground in one fell swoop.”
But out of the ashes, Jen says she rebuilt her life in ways that felt more aligned with who she had become.
“You just have to grieve,” she told Lima of heartbreak and loss. “But there’s a moment on the other side of that, not necessarily too far down the road where you go, ‘Okay, I can either decide to be the victim of this [expletive] story forever, or I can decide to look at a lot of my codependent habits, which helped build a whole house of cards.”
“And then that’s what I do with that is up to me,” Jen continued. “What do I want to build in the second half of my life? What do I want to take with me? And what do I want to leave behind? Because I was 46 years old when that happened. That’s a different woman than the 19-year-old bride who walked down the aisle and got married as a literal teenager. That’s a different woman. So, what does she want to do?”
