HGTV’s Jen Hatmaker reveals the shocking way she found out her husband was cheating

At 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, Jen Hatmaker woke up to the sound of her husband of 26 years whispering on the phone to another woman. 

“I just can’t quit you,” she heard him murmur before he drifted off to sleep, smelling of booze.

It was, as she chronicles in her new memoir “Awake” (Avid Reader Press) out Tuesday, “the end of my life as I [knew] it.”

Hatmaker was a pastor’s wife, a mother of five and a bestselling Christian author and influencer who preached religious values to her millions of readers and followers. She and her now ex-husband, Brandon Hatmaker, founded the evangelical Austin New Church, in Texas, in 2008.

“To some degree, I almost disassociated,” Hatmaker, now 51, told The Post of her middle of the night discovery. “It was so outside the realm of what I would have ever considered a possibility for our life, our marriage, our story.” 

Hatmaker spent the next four hours going through her husband’s computer, following a “trail of betrayal.” (She does not reveal many details in the book, except that the affair had been going on for a “devastating time span” and that Brandon had showered his girlfriend with “expensive and lavish gifts,” plunging the family into “financial chaos.”) 

When Brandon woke up in the morning, Hatmaker threw him out of the house.

“It was so shocking and stunning, and I almost could not process it,” Hatmaker said. “I couldn’t even cry.”

In the months that followed, she suffered from depression and anxiety while parenting five kids — three teens, one remote college student and one recent grad — alone during a global pandemic, all with no clue about the functioning of her own bank accounts.

After a decade urging Christian women to find agency, use their voices and establish healthy relationships, she felt like a failure.

“I did not know if I was ever going to be happy again,” she said.

Hatmaker grew up in Kansas, the oldest of four children. Though her father was a progressive Southern Baptist minister who got in trouble for inviting women to preach during Sunday classes, Hatmaker described the church itself as “conservative.”

“Inside of that culture, the men are the leaders,” she said. “They are the pastors. They are the leaders of the family, of the marriage. They are the spiritual authorities. And the women are essentially the support staff.” 

She married Brandon, who was studying to be a pastor, when she was 19. The two worked at a Baptist youth camp in Oklahoma, where, in 2008, they started their own evangelical Austin New Church.

They had three children and adopted two more, living life as a “cool” Christian couple who supported gay marriage and hosted their own HGTV home-renovation show,” My Big Family Renovation.”

But even before 2020, “we had been in trouble,” Hatmaker said. She reveals in the book that they didn’t have sex for two years.

In April of 2020, they began going to marriage counseling. “I thought that we were deeply working to repair,” she said. “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. 

“There were a lot of unaccounted absences, and the phone was never ever, ever, ever out of his hand or sight,” Hatmaker recalled. “All the warning signs were there, but I did not want to face those.”

After she uncovered the affair, Brandon made “no reconciliation effort,” Hatmaker 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.” 

A year later, he was engaged to another woman.

“Awake” is not just a divorce memoir. In order to put her life back together — financially, emotionally and spiritually — Hatmaker had to break up not only with her husband but also with the church that had so defined her life and career.

“I found the environment so triggering,” she said of stepping foot in the church she helped found. “I had to bear the weight of everyone else’s shock, their sadness and even worse, their pity. I just couldn’t handle it.

“I am not saying that I will ever go back to church, but I am also not saying that I will never go back to church,” she said. “Right now, I am finding a meaningful faith outside of those [traditional] spaces.”

Hatmaker no longer mourns her marriage and relishes her freedom. In August, she welcomed her first grandchild. She is in a long-distance relationship with author Tyler Merritt. And she hopes that her book helps other women during times of upheaval.

“I am in the driver’s seat,” she said. “I’ll never outsource my life again.”