“How To Stay Married” with Harrison Scott Key

When Harrison Scott Key discovered his wife was cheating on him, he wasn’t about to break his wedding vows. He was going to save his marriage, and that quest involved taking a good hard look at how he’d failed his wife too. The result? A happily ever after — well, sort of — and the memoir How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told.

Harrison joins Nora to talk about the extremely wild ride called marriage and why he decided to let his wife write the (second to) last chapter in their not-quite divorce story.

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Nora:  On your wedding day when you're standing up in front of your nearest and dearest and getting ready to recite your vows, you're probably not thinking about infidelity. You're probably thinking about the seating arrangement. You're thinking about the uncle who showed up in Carhartt overalls. You're thinking about if that uncle is going to drink all the Jameson take a microphone and make his own speech. Maybe you're thinking about the shapewear that is pinching or butt into the strangest shape you can imagine and how you're going to get it off your body later. Or the beads of sweat trickling down your back. Or maybe. Maybe you're laser focused on your partner and the future in front of you and all of its infinite complexity. Is all of them good? Marriage is, to put it mildly, a wild ride. The absolute tamest marriages in the world have their share of drama. And even if you are a pitch perfect made in Heaven match, it's not going to be that pitch perfect. You are tying your family, your finances, and your very truest, grossest raw self to another person for ever. That's insane. That's nuts. Even though movies and TV are always game for a very juicy, cheating storyline, real or scripted, the nitty gritty of infidelity is not something we want to talk about honestly and publicly. It's all very hush hush neighborhood gossip over a bottle of wine or in the group chat. The fact of the matter is that infidelity happens. People cheat. Their partner finds out or they don't or they confess or they don't. They go to therapy or they don't. They sweep it under the rug. They move forward or. And this feels like it's the most likely outcome. They get divorced and they try it all over again with a new partner. But Harrison Scott Key wasn't going to give up on his marriage that easily. When he found out that his wife was cheating on him with a neighbor, a man he knew, a man who wore cargo shorts, he not only had to deal with the shock of a lifetime, he had to confront the many ways his marriage had failed, how he had failed, and how he was going to right the ship. Where had their marriage gone wrong? What do you tell the kids? What do you tell each other? And most importantly, how do you find the humor in the most devastating discovery of your life? And come out on the other side willing to laugh about it. Today on Terrible Reading Club Harrison Scott Key answers the eternal question Whose fault was it? His new book, How to Stay Married, takes everything that we thought we knew about life after infidelity and pokes it full of holes in the best way. It is funny, it is honest. It is a book you don't want to leave out on the nightstand. If you're not ready for some awkward conversations with your partner or children. I also want to note that I spoke with Harrison Scott Key in the very midst of the hype around scandal of All on Vanderpump Rules. So you better believe that I talked about that with him as well. Harrison Scott Key. The subtitle of your book is The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, and I have to agree that it's at least a top five insane love story that I've read. What makes it such an insane love story? 

Harrison Scott Key: You know, I like to describe this book as it's like Old Yeller, except from the perspective of the dog. Because what makes it insane is just all the vulnerability and the transparency and. I could not have. If this was a novel, I could not have invented more ridiculous circumstances to describe. I mean, there are lots of affairs and lots of broken marriages. But when you think about the fact that this guy was our neighbor and the circumstances of our wedding and my wife's mother dying three weeks before we got married, and the fact that she cheated on me with this guy who had been my buddy who lived next door, and the fact that I couldn't kick her out because she was about to have a hysterectomy. And then after I took care of her, I had gallbladder surgery and then she left me with the kids. And I'm definitely the worst parent of the both of us. Everything was just insane. That's, of course, why we chose that subtitle. It just it seemed insane in a bad way. Now it just seems insane in a funny way. 

Nora : Yeah. When you're in it, when you are in any disastrous situation, when you are in the middle of your world falling apart, you do have this sort of strange acceptance of the circumstances in that it can be so bananas that you describe it to. Another person would sound as though you were describing a novel or an HBO show with a few too many plot twists, but you somehow just roll with it and. The infidelity piece of this story is, I think, what a lot of readers will find perhaps the most insane, because we do have, I believe, in the in the West, like this cultural script around marriage, around commitment, where to cheat on your spouse or your partner, whoever you've decided to love forever and be faithful to you forever is huge and unforgivable and always seemingly inexcusable. I think it activates in us. An incredible sense of righteousness. 

Harrison Scott Key : In Dante's Inferno. You know, the ninth level of hell was reserved for those who committed betrayal because you can't betray those you are supposed to be loyal to. So you betray your spouses, you betray your friends, you might betray your employer or your children. It awakens like this sense of righteousness, like like justice and righteousness like those are good things. Now, self-righteousness obviously has negative connotations, but this idea that you have been so wronged in such a personal way, I mean, it's the most vulnerable relationship that you're in is with your spouse in the sense of you're a snail without a shell when you're married because you see everything bad about your partner and let them see everything bad about you. You know how your breath smells in the morning, how you look naked. Every little quirk that you have that you hide from everybody else because you don't want everybody else to hate you. They see you at your worst. They see you at your weakest. They know what foods make your tummy hurt. They know how long you spend on the toilet. They know everything bad about you. That's what creates trust and intimacy and all those other things, too. But I really believe that your spouse becomes your greatest enemy at some point in your marriage. And what I mean by that is they're the ones who know how to hurt you the most, and they know your weaknesses and they know what's actually wrong with you. You know, your spouse, after enough time together, has a legitimate beef against you. They know things. You have hurt them and a lot of you might have ignored them. You might have made fun of them at a party or whatever weird thing it is that makes you you these sort of petty cruelties that everybody inflicts on other people in different ways. You commit those against your spouse and they know it. What's so painful is that essentially, you know, for every minute you live with another person in a committed relationship, you hand them one more piece of yourself and these pieces can be used as weapons against you. They can be used as ways to know you and to love you more. And so what hurts about a betrayal is that you give all those things to the spouse and then they turn them into a weapon and they destroy you with them. And what's so weird is that in so many cases, you know, if you get cut off in traffic or somebody is a jerk to you in a meeting, your sense of righteousness or of anger might be riled up a little. But you're like, you know, it was a weird day. It was a weird situation, or I don't know what that person's going through. Maybe they're on the way to the hospital. But when your spouse cheats on you, there's no question about the rightness or the wrongness of it. And I got to say, and this I don't want the listeners to take this the wrong way. It's kind of exhilarating to be cheated on in a very strange way because it's so real and it's so true and it's so undeniable. We spend so much time in our lives, kind of not sure of what's going on in the world. Does this person like me? Do they not like me? Is my spouse annoyed by me? Do they like the sight of me naked or are they sickened by it? You know, all these questions that everybody has on any given day, but when somebody cheats on you, you are presented with the naked truth about how they feel about you and about where you stand in your relationship with them. And because the truth is really scary, but it's exhilarating. It's like a drug. It's like, wow, that really is what they think of me. You know, it's like it's like if somebody handed you a recording of what everybody had said about you when you left a party. You know, imagine if, like, you were wearing some weird nude jacket that you were kind of nervous about, and then you left a party and somebody was like, All right, here's a digital recording of every conversation in which your name came up after you left this party. You would be horrified, but you would have to listen to it and it would be it's this weird, like butterfly thrill because you're seeing the truth and you're finally learning the truth. And that's what it felt like to learn that my wife was having an affair. It was this weird exhilaration of Now I know what she thinks about me. I know what she really thinks about me. And granted. And that wasn't the whole truth. Sometimes people commit adultery and they don't even know why they're doing it. And in my experience, that's true most of the time. But it was it was exhilarating because I knew that that I was at the beginning of a sort of great and terrible journey. The moment I found out my wife had had an affair. And that part was horrifying, but kind of weirdly exciting. I was like, All right, here we go. Let's see what we find out about myself, about my wife, about the world. 

Nora : I was really surprised and kind of heartened by your reaction to finding this out. Obviously, it hurts. It's painful. But the way that you responded to your wife. Yes, there was, you know, righteousness. Yes, there is sort of like, you know, a punitive element to it. I was nodding when you said it was exhilarating because, you know, on smaller scales, I'm in high school. I know that my boyfriend's been on instant messenger, you know, chatting online with a Polish girl who goes to another school named Barb. Okay. 

Harrison Scott Key: Dan. 

Nora: I know that. I know that when I find out, I'm like, I knew it. I knew you wanted a girlfriend with big boobs. Yes, I knew it. 

Harrison Scott Key : Okay, that's it. It's the exhilaration of the. I knew it. You you know, and you feel it's the exhilaration of knowing that you are at least not insane. That you're not crazy for thinking what you thought or having the suspicions. Like I had long had the suspicion that my wife just didn't like me. I struggle with that for a long time in our marriage, because she didn't she didn't communicate well at all. She definitely was more stereotypically masculine in our marriage, at least in terms of not communicating, not sharing her feelings. And I was more stereotypically feminine. I mean, I'm a writer, very expressive, but I'm the one who comes home and wants to talk for an hour about my day. She didn't do that. And so when I found out that she was having an affair, it was like I knew it. I felt justified, at least in feeling and saying all those years. 

Nora: What surprised me was like the amount of gentleness where you did turn towards her. If you've been married for any amount of time, not any amount of time, but if you've been married for a long time and have really have not been married that long. I don't know. You do get this read on another person where you can kind of tell how they want you to react. And how does your wife want you to react to the affair? And how did you react to it? 

Harrison Scott Key: She was really angry that I did not explode. I think she wanted me to know she had a lot of misconceptions about me and she learned a lot as much about me in the aftermath of the affair as I learned about her. She genuinely thought I would be happy that she had had an affair and that she was conveniently ending the marriage for both of us. You do a lot of projecting when you're in the midst of an affair and you do a lot of justifying about why it's happening. When she told me and I didn't immediately storm out of the house or burn all of her clothes in the yard, I think she was shocked and she was angry because it would have made it so much easier for her to end the marriage. If I had blown up. I think she wanted me to put my all my stuff in the suitcase and leave, because then in a legal sense, I've left the home and left her with the kids. And I hate to to reduce it idea of who gets custody and all that, but those things really matter. In the aftermath of an affair of how you behave. And I knew that if I stormed off that it would probably put me at risk for any kind of custody fight we might have. Because, you know, her attorneys could say, well, this he la he's the one who left. You know, maybe she didn't want him to leave. She was mad and she was really mad that I showed love to her. This was very upsetting to her. She really wanted me to think she was a monster. And, I mean, you know, between you and me and the millions of people listening, I did. And I told her that, but I did not leave. But those are complicated questions. Why didn't I leave? Why didn't I storm out? What it comes down to is that I realized I was like, wait, you know, all of this sort of cliches of she's the mom. The kids are really her. She's the primary caretaker. The story that she had sort of told both of us about me is that I was kind of distant and disconnected and focused on work in my career. And I realized, no, this is my home. And I remember touching the walls while we were talking and I said, this is my my home. I bought this house, I bought it for you. And this is where I live with my children. And we're not leaving. Nobody is making you stay. If you want to leave, I can't tie you to the to the chair and make you stay. I'm not going to do that. But we're not leaving. It's like I had to turn all these sort of typical ideas of what happens in the aftermath of an affair, how to turn all that on its head. I was like, Wait, you know, if a man does anything in this situation, if the best of what we might call classical manhood, the best of what it means to be a man over history in literature, it's to protect your family. And I thought, well, that wouldn't be very protective of me to leave my children. Not that my wife was going to hurt them, but this is where I need to be. This is what matters most. Why would I leave this? And it was not just the three children, but it was also this abstract idea of family. The home represented that for me, this is a family and this is what it looks like. So I'm not leaving. And once I got that through my head, which happened like within the first 24 hours, I was like, Oh, this, I'm not leaving. She can leave, but I'm not. 

Nora: I think this idea that cheating is something that men do, that dads do, and that men are the people who leave men are the people who betray. And of course, things are always more complicated than that. But what I've observed in people that I know who have experienced this kind of betrayal is that there is so much shame on both sides of the equation that it can make it very, very hard to see the person whose poop scrapes you see in the toilet, whose puke you have probably cleaned up from some kind of surface, who has seen that sort of soft underbelly of yourself? All the worst parts of you, all the best parts of you to see that person as a person and not as an adversary. 

Harrison Scott Key: You have to fight your instincts when something like this happened. You know, you hear all these cliches about, you know, follow your heart. You know, go with your gut. And I guess there's some truth to that. But in my experience, my first instinct is almost always wrong. The first thing I want to do, my primal, natural reaction is anger, judgment, righteousness. 

Nora: The shame on both ends makes it so difficult to see the other person as a person. And it always feels like watching it from the outside. Like two people are trying to communicate through that glass brick from the eighties and nineties where everything's warped and you can sort of see the shape of another person, but somehow it's just nothing's quite getting through. 

Harrison Scott Key: In the book, as you know, that the affair happens twice and the first time it happened. It was for me it was more about. If we can just behave correctly, you and me, then everything will work out. We won't go deep into our trauma. I didn't know that we had to do that yet. I wasn't mature enough about that yet, but I thought, All right, you did something bad. So now you can go to therapy and then you can do the right thing and not leave us for this other man. And then I'll do the right thing, which is to maybe do some more chores around the house so that you're not killing yourself every day with sort of your obsessions about the management of the home. If we just do the right thing, we'll be okay. That wasn't enough. I still wasn't seeing my wife as a person. I was just seeing her as this person in my marriage who did a bad thing and there's something wrong with her and she needs to get it figured out. I was so focused on her, what she did that I still wasn't a singer as a person. And it was that it was the second time and the second affair and the second reconciliation where I and this is how I stayed married, ultimately was finally seeing my wife as a person and not as my enemy. And then I realized, okay, I had to accept a lot of things to get us through the darkest moment of our marriage. And one was this woman is probably not my wife anymore. Maybe on paper, but in no other way is she my wife. She doesn't live with me. She's living with another man. She has clearly not loved me for many years and there was no way to go. But out of this marriage, I'd done everything I could. So I stopped fighting that fight like I had to let go of her as as my wife and I had to look at her. I realized that I was one of the really the last friends she had in the world. I was the father of her children, and so I couldn't cut her out of my life forever. I mean, we were going to be going to graduations and recitals, and I couldn't cut her off. I couldn't delete her from history. She was going to be there forever. And I realized that the darkest moment of our story when she was all alone, she's with this other man, but she was all alone in the world. She had no friends. She had her entire family, I hate to say, was on my side. Nobody in her family was cheering her on in her decisions. They all felt great grief and sorrow for her and many of them were talking to her, but nobody was celebrating what she was doing. And then I realized that I was the person in the world that she had hurt the most, and I was the only person who could help her. You read a lot in the Bible about being brothers and sisters with other people in the faith. I just thought that was just a thing people said. But I realized in the darkest moment that this woman was hurting so deeply and grieving things from her past. It wasn't just her past that made her have this affair, but she was grieving so many things. She had experienced so much loss. And she describes that in her chapter in the book, all the loss and the death that she had had to process. It's hard to say why, but I felt very little anger toward her. It was just grief I felt. I felt like she was like a six year old girl who was an orphan. And it was like I could finally see her and all of her grief. And all of a sudden, her cold stoicism. The day she told me, her anger, that I wasn't angry. Every everything that I had seen that could have been taken in a bad way. I just saw as sadness and pain. And it wasn't, oh, I'm going to pity her and look at her as some child and go in and rescue her like a knight in shining armor. It was more like, I think I'm the only friend she has and this is the mother of my children. And if she needs my help, I'm going to help her right now, no matter what happens. That it was that turn that I think helped us see each other as people. And I think when that happened, she could see me as a person and she was like, Oh, wow, you should hate me right now. Why are you helping me? And it wasn't like I'm helping you so you'll fall in love with me again. I'd given that up, and there was no hope in that. I think this is the right thing to do, and I'm really sad right now, but I think this is the right thing to do. And when I say the right thing, I meant when she asked me. When she expressed interest in reconciliation or in helping her move out of this house that she lived in with this other guy. 

Nora: I think the hardest thing about being a person, especially a person who, you know, will build a romantic relationship, as most of us will, is that. We only know what we know when we know it, and then we just learn on each other. We make all our mistakes on another person. We trust each other with all of our vulnerabilities. I can look back at relationships that I started when I was really young or relationships that I was in when I was really young. And I can see those versions of myself and those other people as people. You start your marriage when you're really young. What do you think marriage is at that age? 

Harrison Scott Key: At that age, it's awesome because it's like you're both hot, young, sexy, and you're an idiot. That's by design, right? Everybody changes a million times in their marriage and you grow up and you grow apart and you grow together. And it's so odd. I think for both of us, this might sound like a negative to some, but it's about stability. I grew up in a nuclear family, so they were married for about 40 years and until my dad died. So I had good examples of what a family looks like. I really found a single life to be lonely. I've always been a writer and I love my own space and my own time. And I loved studying and love being in the library and writing at coffee shops late into the night, smoking cigaret after cigaret. It made me feel very hollowed out and I didn't feel like I had a purpose. I wanted to to be with somebody else. And I was really was not expecting to get married at all. But I had seen my grandparents, my parents and other family members and friends be married and seem happy. So I wasn't afraid of marriage at all. But I did not know what to expect. I was under the impression that marriage was like, If you don't fuck it up too much, you'll be okay. And I was really wrong about that. It's like a rental car. You know, you don't have to fix a rental car. It just. You drive it. You can do whatever you want to with it. Marriage is like a car. It's like it's the only car you have and you live, like, off in the desert. And so you have to fix it yourself and you have to learn how to fix a car. Nobody knows how to fix it When they get married. Everybody marries the wrong person. I know that now and everybody becomes hopefully less of an asshole the longer they're married, but that's not always true. So it's just wild that people get married at all. But it does seem to be one of the best inventions of human civilization for creating a kind of emotional, economic, psychological stability within the chaos of the world. We know that people with two parents in the House have better outcomes. They have better learning outcomes, emotional outcomes. But man, it's so hard and there's no way you can know how hard your particular marriage is going to be. You have to learn as you go. 

Nora : You make these promises and if you say, you know, the vows that come from the faith system that you were raised in, like I did, I said Catholic vows. Even though I got married in an art gallery by a former priest who had fallen in love with a parishioner. Because I love controversy, who also called my husband by the wrong name. But you make these promises and you really don't know what they mean at the moment. You don't really know what your worse or your better are going to be. And it is really easy to love someone when things are better and when there is health. 

Harrison Scott Key: You don't have to love people at all. When things are great, you both like each other. If you've got money, if you got a place to live and you get decent jobs and I mean that's not love. That's just like everything's coming up roses. That's easy. Love is love when the shit hits the fan. I just thought, Well, my sins are hard to see. I don't gamble. I've never had a temptation to cheat. I'm not physically violent. I don't spend all my money on golf clubs or fishing poles or gravel bikes or whatever. Those are things that are sort of easy to point out and say that a guy shouldn't do that, that that'll hurt his marriage. My sins are much harder to see, and they were rewarded as virtues by most of the culture. Make good money at the university and I pay my bills on time. Those are things that my sort of obsession with performance and with having a great career as a writer and focusing 12 hours a day on my writing, even when I should be focused on what's happening with my family. My wife was one of the only people who could really see those crimes from the outside. It looked like a pretty good guy. So I really thought, Well, long as you don't gamble all your life savings away or drink yourself. Into a coma or have an affair than your marriage will be okay. I was very wrong because marriage can corrode from lots of things, not just those big crimes. 

Nora: The little things really do add up in this strange, invisible scale of what you did do and what you didn't do and what you didn't notice. And we we talked to very few men on this podcast for a lot of reasons. And one is that we do have a culture where men have historically not been accustomed to sharing things that could be considered weaknesses, and having your wife cheat on you is a different kind of shame than having cheated on your wife. How hard was it for you to share that with people? How do people react to it? And what did that teach you about the world that we live in? 

Harrison Scott Key: Well, that's a layered question. Definitely on the surface of it, it's just so humiliating to be cheated on because it's the ultimate weakness for a man to be cuckolded and just so awful. But I feel like I'm in a position to be able to talk about it publicly because of my vocation. In a sense, I've made a career out of a sort of healthy, self-effacing vulnerability. That muscle was pretty strong when this happened. I knew how to say, Wow, I'm terrible at something in public and own it. And if I could express that thing, that weakness or vulnerability or that humiliating thing, whether it be an affair or my inability to, you know, be a football hero or if I can express it in a poetically beautiful way, then in some way that makes it okay, that redeems the thing, it redeems the pain or the humiliation. Coupled with that, Nora, I have such an enormous ego that like, can shrink by 50% and would still be larger than the average person's ego. Like, somehow my ego is so enormous that I could tell people my wife had cheated on me and somehow not feel like less of a man. Isn't that weird? 

Nora: I love it. I mean, that did come through in the book. I was like, Oh, okay. So she's going to tell us, friends. That's great. That's great. 

Harrison Scott Key : There's that line in the book where I say, Is this my ego talking? If so, thanks. Ego. At least you haven't abandoned me too. I don't know where I got that ability, Nora, to be able to talk about vulnerable things in front of other people. My guess is that it comes from being a funny fuck up all my life and that if I grew up in a very virile and violent world in rural Mississippi, where it was all about guns and hatchets and knives and blood and farms and dead animals and hurting people on football fields, and and I wasn't good at much of that. But the one thing I was good at, which was also a virtue in that world, as it is in most places, and definitely in that world. I was good at telling stories and making people laugh, and men had to be good at a lot of things, and that was one of the things they had to be good at, was telling stories and making other people laugh. And I could do that. So all the stuff I did poorly. That was humiliating for me. I turned into a joke. And so, like one example, and this has been very much true for my wife having an affair and for me being cheated on. I'm not going to run from this. I'm going to own it and see if I can redeem it and maybe make it funny, maybe make it profound. I'll see if I can do that. And there was nowhere to hide. I mean, it's a small town. People are going to find out. I was always going to be that guy whose wife cheated on him, either to myself or to other people. So why not get out in front of it and own it and and run on that platform? So that's what I'm doing. 

Nora: I do think a part of that for a writer, especially this kind of writing, is that when you write about yourself this way and I might be projecting because I'm also talking about myself, of course, is that you're building this world for a reader and it is a real world. It's the world that you live in, but you do become a bit of a character in it, and you do as the author, as the writer, get to decide what parts of you to focus on. Good humor. Writing good memoir, of course, shows like Your Uglier Parts and the people in your life, like it or not, also become characters. What was your wife's character in your writing? 

Harrison Scott Key : Well, before this book came out, I mean, I've been writing about her for a long time because mostly what I write is creative nonfiction. She was always a foil, and we're very different, and I'm much sillier than she is, and she can be very silly, especially with our kids or with her close friends. But generally she seems much more got it together than I do. I'm much sillier and looser and more playful. She was always the straight man, sort of remarking on my behavior, giving me great comebacks. She was just a great comic foil. She was the Jerry Seinfeld to my George Costanza. I was always very careful not to make her look bad. Just didn't seem like a good look. You know, a funny writer making his wife look bad. Like, why would I do that? I mean, why shit on your own doorstep? And as our marriage got more real and as my writing got more real, I was able to. To make her look a little more dimensional. And so near the end of my first book, you start to see some cracks in the marriage. In my second book, she appeared several times and she's kind of a hypochondriac, and she's she's way more George Costanza than I am. In my second book, I started to show that side of her a little more like, you know what? She's not perfect. She's a weirdo, too. When I began writing this book, I knew it would be very different. It's much safer place for me to be the villain and me to be the weirdo in the one who screwed up. And for her to be the beautiful, funny, smart. Got it all together, wife. The biggest challenge in writing this book is not being able to make myself the villain of it, or at least not the only villain of it. There is a difference between you, the writer, and you the character in the book, because one is a concept and one is real. And there's a difference between your family member and how they appear in your book. There are certain qualities that they have. I needed to be as low or lower as any other character in this story about my marriage. And that was really hard because as soon as you say somebody cheated on you, how could I talk about this without sort of punching down to my wife who was powerless because she's not writing the book now? One answer is let her write the book. So, you know, she has this whole chapter. And what she originally wrote probably could have been about three chapters. And I even asked her at one point, maybe she should just annotate the book. And so, like throughout the story, she puts a footnote in and says, Well, here's how I remember that conversation. I thought about doing that way, that that might even up the score a little bit and not make me look like I was punching down. If she has this alternate voice in the book on every other page. But ultimately I realized that if I just focused on sort of my reaction and my own confusion, that would keep it from me being punching down. And in the first draft, I was much crueler to her and to this other guy naturally. Like I was the kind of stuff you would say to your best friend if you got cheated on. You're like, Let me tell you about this motherfucker, man. What a loser. So when I first gave it to her and I gave it the manuscript to my editor, my agent, I was really proud of my wife. She said, You know, it's really funny. It's very sweet. It's very raw. She says, You might be a little mean to Chad and the. Sorry. And she's like, I know, I know. I'm the one who had the affair with and I was in love with her. I'm just telling you, like it gets a little old after a while. And it was a really good point and actually went back and modulated and dialed some of that down. And I realized if I just threw all of that into one chapter and just got it out of my system, the book could move on without making me look better. And so that's what we ended up doing. 

Nora: Unless you've done so much work on yourself, your first instincts probably are wrong. They probably are wrong, but they feel so good. And I don't know how dialed in you are to the trashier side of life, but mine is quite a high, low mix. And I was reading this book as the Vanderpump Rules scandal of all cheating extravaganza was happening. I'd never watched Vanderpump Rules. I started that this season, and I'm going back into the historical archives. It's 2013. That's a simpler time. We've got statement necklaces, we've got bubble dresses. I'm loving it. But this. Every day, betrayal activates within the country. Everybody's first instinct, which is shame. You punish, you, crucify you. And one person is a hero and one person is a villain is a really similar story. Tom was with Arianna for ten years, and then he has an affair with Raquel, who is Arianna's friend and somebody that she trusted. And she sort of like heard rumblings. And but watching it become a sport for everybody is like a macrocosm of, you know, you live in a relatively small city, a small city where people know you, they know your wife, they know what they think your marriage is. And they also know, like how they think this should end or what you should do if you are on the outside of a situation like this. What are the ways that you can be supportive of a betrayed friend or a betray your friend? How can you be supportive to the parties in this relationship? In a productive way. 

Harrison Scott Key: So it really sort of depends on what your philosophy of life is and who your friend is and sort of what they feel about marriage and divorce and love and commitment and those things. I think you have to be careful with giving advice because most people are idiots and most people are bitter in some very specific way. And you have to be careful that you don't give bad advice. You also have to be careful. We'll call the friend John. John is cheating on his wife or John has been cheated on. You will be compelled by the power of Taylor Swift and, you know, contemporary. Psychobabble to feel like you need to empower your friend and and sort of lift them up and bless them and whatever they do. Kind of a you go girl or you got this or you don't need no man or John, you don't need a woman. That's almost always bad advice. Inflating the ego of the person who's been betrayed or the betrayer. So, you know, there were people who told my wife, You go, girl. Like, if you. You got to do what you got to do. If you do need to end your marriage, you go ahead and do it. I'll support you. Quite often, the betrayer doesn't know what they want to do, and they really don't need somebody saying no, go ahead and burn it all down. I think it's more important to keep your friend the betrayer or betrayed from doing anything rash in the heat of the moment. So some of the best advice I got was from my best friend and my pastor who said, Don't have sex with your secretary. And I said, you know, I don't have a secretary. And he's like, That's good. I'm glad you da. Of course, all he was saying was, don't use this as an opportunity to punish your wife in some vague sense by going off and having a sex bender with the first hot piece of tail, you see. And it was a point in our separation where I was so lonely and needing affection. I would have had sex with a potted plant if I thought it would have felt good, I would have done it. So that was good advice. What he was saying was, you have a lot of fire in you right now. Don't let it burn you up. Just take a B, Do what's important. Raise your kids. Maybe join a yoga class if you need to. But, like, chill another body. It was basically the same advice. You know, he'd talk about his friend who had been cheated on, who just went on a bender in Vegas. And this was like a pretty normal family man. Before then. He was like, Yeah, his life is not going well at all. It's already bad. If you've been cheated on or if you're cheating, so why would you make it worse? Why would you drag other people into it? Some of the best advice I got as one of my best friends who's a therapist, you know, he said, In my experience, both spouses have to own their part in what happened if they're going to reconcile. And that really it's very easy for the betrayer to be able to see what they did wrong. We had sex with somebody else and they cheated and they fell in love with somebody else. That's very easy to point your finger at. But the betrayed spouse has done their part in it, too. He goes, Does it mean you caused the affair? Like, what did you do to drive your spouse away? What did you do that might have made your home not a happy place? What did you do that closed you off to hearing your spouse's pain? That was another thing that saved us, is that as a Christian, I'm really comfortable with the idea of confession and testimony. You know, Jesus says you're complaining about the spark in your brother's eye and you've got a whole two by four in your eye like chill. I mean, that's like one of the great lessons of Christianity. And so I was comfortable with the idea of sort of looking at what was wrong with me. I mean, I've been doing that all my life with writing, too, and pointing out failures, but that was pretty hard. That was a hard place to be in. But that was really good advice because it made me do a lot more reflecting, meditating, praying. In some ways, that's where the book was born. I started just reflecting about my marriage and what was hard in the first year, what was hard in the second year, what might I could have done differently? And all that writing is sort of what became the book. Another thing you can do is just to shut up and listen. That's so hard to do. But like, all right, here's some really helpful things people did for both of us. When my wife left. Somebody called and they said, I'm sending a housekeeper over. What time can they be there? Because this they knew that I was a single dad with three young kids in the house and two jobs. They didn't ask. They didn't say, Can I send somebody over? They said, What time can she show up? That's huge. Several people brought us food. Other friends invited us out to dinner or to their houses. Being around another family that was not in the throes of existential and real hell. It was really beautiful to be around a normal family who wasn't imploding. One guy just left a bottle of whiskey on my front porch. One of the guys at my church, he didn't ask. He said, Hey, I left you something. If you want somebody to drink it with, let me know. So, gifts. Listening, Ear. Kindness. Those gifts are also create a lot of psychological stability. Just to know that you have these people who are there to help. You don't feel alone. It was really funny. Nora is when my wife came back. My wife was not getting as many bottles of liquor and invitations to dinner. She had intentionally isolated herself from our community. You have to do that if you want to make bad decisions. You can't tell your friends or they'll stop you from making those decisions. We moved all of her stuff back to the house, but then she stayed gone for a while, like at friends houses, hotels with her sister. She went and visited family. We couldn't just immediately come back together. It was too weird. But she was out of this other relationship anyway. So she came back to the house just to drop her stuff off and to figure out where she was going to go. And she walks into the kitchen and she sees all this food and she's like, What is all this? I was like, Well, people have felt real bad for us, so they're bringing us food that did more than any accusation I could have made for her to see that. We had this great community who are loving us because of something that she had done to us. It was pretty powerful and she was like, Nobody brought me food. I was like, Well, I wonder why. I mean. 

Nora: You have these three daughters who I mean, kids learn so much by osmosis. Kids know things about their parents that we've never said out loud. What have your daughter said about this time in all of your lives? 

Harrison Scott Key: My two oldest kids follow me on socials so they see stuff that I post about the book and they're very aware. But we've been very intentional about not keeping things hidden from them and making sure they are the first to know when something is going to happen. The number one thing your kids need is to feel safe. And that's your job as a parent is to ensure that their safety and their feeling of safety. So dumping problems on your kids in the middle of a separation. It's not wise. Even though you think you're being vulnerable and transparent with your kids, you're actually just freaking them the fuck out. When we tried an in-home separation at one point and so we had to tell them, This is why your dad and I are not eating dinner together. And we just said, We're not getting along right now. Our youngest, she's the one who raises her hand when she has a comment at the table and she raised her and she was like, are y'all getting a divorce? And we're like, No, not right now. We're just trying to work some things out or we're not getting along. So they knew that two weeks later, when their mom decided to move out, we had to sit them down again. And obviously they had to say, Hey, I'm moving out. Here's how it's going to work. Here's when you'll see your mother. You're going to go over there a couple of nights a week. She'll pick you up from school, whatever. That's when they really freaked out. I describe that really awful scene in the book, and then when she came home, we had to talk again, obviously. And I felt so bad for my kid, like we had more family meetings than succession. It was awful. These kids, they've got to be like, Can you guys just figure it out? We didn't yell. We don't we're not big screamers or yellows or fighters like that. But we sat him down and we said, okay. So obviously we were separated and she moved out. She said, I'm moving back in. And she told them that she had an inappropriate relationship with Chad. And they knew Chad because we used to be neighbors. And she said, We're getting therapy and working it all out. We didn't sugarcoat anything, but we also tried not to scare them. So they understood that when we go to therapy, we wouldn't hide that from them. There have been times when we would fight in the car and like you could tell, especially in the first year after we reconcile, that the girls were really freaked out by us fighting, because to them that was a warning that we were about to separate again. We've had many great conversations with them about what good fighting looks like and that maybe one of the reasons that our marriage had suffered for a long time was that we didn't fight enough and a good, healthy way. And then when. When the book was starting to happen. We talked to them about that. We actually had a day in 2021 where Lauren and I each read a chapter in front of our friends. Our community knows everything. And we told our kids, like, tomorrow night we're going to do this at church. Some parents may end up saying something to their kids who say something to you. So we want you to know what we're talking about. They, of course, have known for years and years that their dad write stories about his life. They've been in books. They've signed books at bookstores. They're aware of that persona and what it means to write a story that you're in. And when I was about to do my first post about the book deal, I was like, All right, girls, you're going to see a link to an Amazon preorder for a book. And Lauren said to them, You will see the word infidelity in that description. And we don't want you to be freaked out by that. We said you remember two years ago when she said she'd had this inappropriate relationship? Well, this is what this book is about in a way. And so we have just made sure to hold their hands through all of this and that they're the first to know and that they don't get blindsided. We've tried to be transparent, but not completely fully naked about it all. That's the G-rated version of what happened. 

Nora: We only see certain aspects of our parents marriage, which is appropriate, of course, but most of us never see or a lot of us will never see a relationship. Come together either. Your kids have sort of seen the beginning of a new marriage, too. Which is interesting. What is your marriage like today? 

Harrison Scott Key: The simplest way to describe it is that comedy is what attracted us to one another. I mean, we're both really funny people. And I'd never met a beautiful woman who was funny. I didn't think those existed. It felt very unfair. Beautiful people are supposed to be dumb. Ugly people like me get to be funny. Her humor and my humor, I think that's what attracted us to one another. But over time, it grew very caustic. We were both sad people when we got married, and our jokes were a way to deal with pain. They became a way to inflict pain and little knife wounds and paper cuts on each other. We do a lot more laughing with each other now while making fun of other people, which is much better. It's a big difference. We're both still funny, but I also think we're less sensitive. We still make so much fun of each other. I bought a leather jacket. I've been trying to buy a leather jacket, Nora, for 20 years, and when I wear leather, I look like a character in police academy. I look like one of the guys like this at the biker bar. It just does not look right. So I finally, like, bit the bullet, and I got, like, a serious leather jacket with, like, Michael Jackson level's zippers. And I was like, Screw this. This is who I am. I'm wearing this jacket. I don't care what people think. And I like, try it on. And I go in there and I show Lauren, and I was like, I was like, What do you think? And she said, You look like you're in a musical. You look like you're about to start singing one of those songs from Grease. And so five or ten years ago, I would have gotten my feelings hurt when she said that, But I laughed about it. You know, we're still funny people, but I think we're less defensive. We're less sensitive because obviously you get defensive and your feelings are when you have a beef with the person. How else is our marriage different? My wife definitely sort of obsesses about the management of the home and the schedules and who's doing what, when and what medicine do they take and when do they need to be at a recital. And she's very organized, I think can become kind of manic. And I have made her give me some of that responsibility. So I've taken on more of that, which means that emails from the teachers come to both of us now. And I have to say, Hey, are you going to handle that thing that she needs for class or do you want me to do that? The best thing about our marriage now is that my wife no longer has a boyfriend. That's probably the best thing. It's more traditional. 

Nora: Do you feel like hugging your spouse right now or calling up your parents to thank them for making their marriage work? When you apply for a marriage license, they should probably give you a copy of this book before you make it legal, because after the wedding and the honeymoon and kids, if that's a part of it, comes the really hard and unglamorous stuff, like the stuff that makes you question yourself. Question your partner. Question your life together. Could you turn the tables on yourself and let your partner tell their side of the story so publicly? Harrison had the courage not only to fight for his marriage, but to confront the fact that his wife had become a character in the story of his life. And so for an entire chapter, he handed her the pen. How to Stay married is a cautionary tale and a happily ever fairy tale for the modern wedding industrial complex. This is a story about changing your view of love from something you feel to something you do every day. Or richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. When you cheat with the neighbor who wears cargo shorts or when you are a self-centered writer who thinks the world begins and ends with them. There are a million different conversations to be had about infidelity, marriage, monogamy. And we will keep having them here and over on. Terrible. Thanks for asking. Thank you so much to you.