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June 24, 2025 20 mins

On this episode of Our American Stories, Sarah Wells, author of American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation, shares the story of how she restored her marriage after nearly wrecking her family through a marital affair thanks to mercy, faith, and forgiveness.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. And our next
story comes to us from Sarah Wells, author of American Honey,
a field guide to resisting temptation. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
I grew up on a farm in the frayed edge
of suburbia. I would say it was an Auburn township,
pretty traditional upbringing with a stay at home mom and
the working class dad. Kind of pull yourself up from
the bootstraps type of home life, and that was what

(00:53):
I expected the future to look like. I had one
degree in mind when I would graduate from college, and
that was my mrs. I had dreams of being a
writer of teaching, but it was always in the background
that what would really happen is I would meet the

(01:15):
man in my dreams and we would live happily. Ever after,
I would stay home and raise my kids just like
my mom had done. And so that was the mission
that I had coming into high school and into my
college career, always keeping in mind my dad. My dad
was this and is somebody that I've always looked up

(01:38):
to tremendously. I adored my dad and wanted to be
with my dad all the time, and he was kind
of my model for the kind of man that I
wanted to marry, and so I went through, like many
girls do, a boy crazy phase, where from probably the
age of thirteen to twenty one, I had a boyfriend

(02:02):
every month of long term boyfriend relationships, and as soon
as that one would end, I would start in and
find a new one, and I really craved love and adoration.
My dad was a hard working dad. He was always
gone early in the morning, working late into the evening,

(02:25):
and I think that I craved his attention so much
that I had kind of a gaping hole of desire
from a young teenager all the way through to college.
Eventually I met my now husband, Brandon. We met when
I was nineteen, and I was ready to marry him.

(02:47):
Ten days into dating him, I was certain that he
was going to be the one, but I was also
certain that every previous boyfriend was going to be the one.
So this is it actually amazing information that I had
met my husband. And so we dated for ten months

(03:10):
and got engaged and got married four months later. And
after my husband proposed to me, I was rifling through
his side dresser drawer looking for receipts for the dinner
that we had gone On the night that he was engaged.
I was putting together a scrapbook to memorialize our short engagement,

(03:36):
and I came across a receipt that I thought was
the dinner receipt. It turned out to be the receipt
for my engagement ring, which looked beautiful. It was shiny,
and I loved to look at it. I loved everyone
who complimented it, and I was like, yes, it is
a beautiful ring, thank you. But it turned out that

(03:57):
my ring was not that I thought it was. It
turned out to be on sale at a department store.
It was far less than what I thought he had
spent on my ring. And these things are things that
I didn't think mattered to me. I didn't think that

(04:18):
it was a big deal to wear expensive rings. I
didn't wear expensive jewelry. I was a kind of dirt
under your fingernails type of girl. But that mattered, and
the need to feel worthy and to be invested in
as his future bride mattered to me. It was really

(04:42):
hard to get over it, and I wanted to just
suck it up and go on and just get married,
but I couldn't do it. It was too big of
a block. To our relationship, and so I confronted him
about it and asked him like or I didn't ask him.
I told him I found the receipt for my ring,

(05:07):
and obviously he knew immediately that this was a problem.
So what I was used to. Another expectation that I
had growing up was that people didn't really say they're sorry.
They would be defensive or redirect blame. And when I

(05:27):
confessed to my husband my fiance at the time, that
I had found this receipt, I expected him to be
defensive and to make a big deal about it and
turn it back on me. And when instead he apologized
and asked for forgiveness, I was blown away, like, Oh,

(05:48):
this this man is not exactly who I thought he
was in a good way. But marriage ended up being
a whole lot more work than I expected, and then
having babies ended up being a whole lot more work
than I expected. It didn't work out just that you
got pregnant. It actually turned out that you got pregnant

(06:09):
and then didn't get pregnant and miscarried or struggled to
get pregnant. I had two miscarriages before we had our
first child, our daughter, Lydia, then I thought, oh, well,
this is it. I'm I'm back on track. I'm happily married,
my husband has a job. I'm going to stay home

(06:30):
with my daughter, who is beautiful and tiny and cute.
And about six weeks into my maternity leave, I felt
like half my brain had fallen out of my head
and I couldn't put half of a sentence together anymore.
And I called my boss and was like, I have
to come back to work. I don't know who I
am and I don't know how I'm going to do this.

(06:53):
And I was twenty four at the time. And all
of this turned into this early twenties, late twenties, a
season of thinking that I was one type of person
and discovering that I was actually a whole other kind

(07:14):
of person. I learned that I looked up to my dad,
not because that was maybe the type of guy I
wanted to marry, but the kind of person that I was.
I was a hard working person. I loved to invest
all of myself into a team of people or into
projects and that kind of thing. And my husband ended

(07:37):
up being the stay at home parent and being the
one who was raising our children, which was shocking to
everyone involved, including us, myself and my husband. I knew
that things at home when I took my full time
job were not great for my husband. He wasn't enjoying

(08:00):
being a stay at home dad nearly as much as
he thought he might. But I didn't have a real
good picture until one morning we were dancing around each
other in the kitchen getting breakfast ready. I was in
my pants suit with my travel mug and my phone

(08:21):
and my purse, and was ready to walk out the
door to the job that I loved and that I
felt like suddenly I was made for. And my husband
was in his warm up pants and an untucked T
shirt and he's not shaven for the last however many
days who knows. And our daughter's screaming in the high chair,

(08:44):
and my infant son is wailing in the rocker. And
I go to pass my husband on the way out
of the kitchen and say goodbye, I'll see you at lunch,
and he slams the kitchen cabinet and turns to me,
and I meet my life.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
And you've been listening to Sarah Wells tell the story
of her life and ultimately her family life. Well, we're
going to find out how that ends. And how that works.
When we come back with Sarah Wells story her book
American Honey, A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation. Her story
her husband's continues here on our American Story, and we

(09:39):
continue with our American stories and author Sarah Wells her
memoir American Honey, A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation. When
we last left off, her husband was expressing some discontent
with being a stay at home dead. Let's pick up
when we last left off, I need my life.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
And I'm like what I felt completely out of the blue,
and I didn't know what to say because I was
so shocked that the life that I felt like we
were was it kind of a dream life because I
had everything I wanted. I had the husband, I had
a job, I had children. I couldn't see how he

(10:23):
couldn't see the beauty of our life. He was struggling
to find work. We found a church community and started
to build friendships, and that helped. We started to go
on dates on a weekly basis to try to stay
connected in that way. But what he really needed was

(10:44):
to find another outlet and a work outlet. The stay
at home parent thing wasn't working for him. He eventually
found work and was and began working as a contractor
for ESPN and and Fox and started working on the road.
Sometimes I would get to go with him, and it

(11:05):
was heaven. We went to dinner, we would go out
dancing and sing karaoke and do all these things that
we loved together and made each other laugh. And then
we would come home in reality would sink back in.
He would go back on the road by himself, and
I would go back to work by myself. And in

(11:27):
the midst of all of that, other people became very
important to me. My friends became very important to me,
but also conversations with other people became really important. And
I was blindsided by a developing friendship with a friend
who was a man, and we totally hit it off.

(11:50):
I was in a writing community and he shared a
lot of the same interests and we just really connected.
He was funny. We started texting a lot, and suddenly
we were texting a whole lot, and all of a sudden,
I realized how much I was sharing of my life
with this stranger out of the kind of out of

(12:11):
the blue, and not with my husband. One day, I
had been texting with this person on and off Throughout
the day. I felt really uneasy about it and told
my husband, Hey, I'm gonna run over to my friend's
house for a little bit and I was telling her

(12:32):
about this relationship and she said, Sarah, have you said
good night to him? And the color drained out of
my face and I realized, yes, I just wished him
good night like fifteen minutes ago. And she's like, oh,
that's a bad sign. And she said you need to

(12:54):
end it and you need to tell your husband. And
I was like, what are you talking about. None of
these things. This is a big deal. This is so
not a big deal. And I told her I don't
think I can do that, and she's like, well, if
you don't do that, this will just keep happening where

(13:15):
you will find yourself drawn to someone else who is
saying all the right things but is the wrong person.
And so I told my husband what was happening, and
we had kind of a fight about it. He felt bad,

(13:37):
and then we continued on with our regular life. So
after nine years of being married to Brandon, we had
three children, we'd had four miscarriages, we had three dogs,
we had bought a house together, we had sold a
house together, we had refinished a house together, we had

(14:01):
invested so much of ourselves into our shared life, and
we had, on top of all of that, decided to
change our diets. And suddenly I was feeling fit and
fine and healthy and not pregnant. For the first time

(14:21):
in nine years, I was myself. And this created other
attention that I didn't anticipate from other people besides my husband.
So at one evening event, I was having a great

(14:42):
conversation with my colleague and he was starting to go
through a divorce or thinking about getting a divorce, and
I just felt really bad for him because my marriage
was great and I didn't want them to separate. And
so I found myself having to make a conscious choice
whether to destroy my life or preserve my life. I

(15:07):
never air quote, I never did anything. Nothing ever happened
but the emotional energy and the mental energy of washing
my daughter's hair and the tub and only thinking about
whether he was going to text me that night, or
whether he was going to send me an email that

(15:28):
said something inappropriate in it, and how would I handle that.
It came to another head, and there was another moment
where I was in the car with my colleague and
he started rubbing my back and we were in my driveway.

(15:52):
My husband wasn't home, my children weren't home, and it
was time for me to get out of the car.
Here's that intersection, here's the opportunity. Either you destroy your
relationship with your the rest of your life, or you
get out of the car. And I felt this. I

(16:14):
heard this voice say, Sarah, get out of the car now.
And it was not audible, obviously, but I heard it,
and I said, I have to get out of this car.
So I swung the door open. I said goodnight, thank
you for bringing me home, and slammed the door and
walked into the house. And as I walked through the door,

(16:36):
the light from his headlights scanned across my wedding picture
that was hanging on the wall, and I felt this
weight lift off of me, like freedom. You are no
longer enslaved by this thing you don't have, like you

(16:58):
don't have to resist this en more. It's done, it's over,
this will never be a thing again. And I felt
strong and ready to face whatever was going to come
next with my husband, which ended up being doing a
lot of confessing and having a lot of conversations where
we're standing in the middle of the kitchen together, holding

(17:19):
each other crying. I'm apologizing. It's like I forgive you
for whatever it is that you feel like you need
to be forgiven for. And that's the man that I married,
and that's the foundation that carried us through into healing,

(17:40):
into rebuilding trust, and into being able to confide in
each other about everything. To celebrate our tenth anniversary, we
headed out of town for one of Brandon's work weekends.
Right before heading out to dinner, he said, I have
something for you that I think you should wear to dinner.

(18:03):
And I felt embarrassed about this because it's been ten
years and I love my wedding ring. It's pretty. I'm
over the receipt. We're fine now, you know. And this
investment in a real diamond ring and a real engagement
ring felt extravagant. And so Brandon opened up this case

(18:27):
and it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful ring. And then he said,
I have something else for you and handed me an
envelope and inside was the lyrics to a song that
he had started to write for me, and I started bawling.
It was so touching to me to have him think

(18:51):
about what our marriage meant to him and what our
relationship was about. It was at far ex the price
of any engagement ring. The engagement ring ended up being
a real bonus course because no, I haven't on my
finger all the time, but the real gift of having

(19:11):
this start of a song that he had composed for
me touched me far deeper than any engagement ring could
ever have reached.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
And an excellent job by Greg on the production on
the piece and the storytelling editing. And a special thanks
to Farrewell's for sharing her story with all of us
and her story of her bouts with temptation and her
book is American Honey, a Field Guide to Resisting Temptation.
Go to your local bookstore or wherever you get your

(19:41):
books to get it. And there's that critical moment where
she says something so important. I was no longer enslaved
by this thing. And the enslavement was not her marriage.
The marriage gave her freedom. It's the temptation that enslaved her.
That's a deep Christian notion. But you don't have to
be a Christian who have experienced this notion. The story

(20:02):
of a marriage in the end and what saved it.
Farrewells's story, her husband's too here on our American stories
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Host

Lee Habeeb

Lee Habeeb

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