A wife’s infidelity prompts ‘The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told’

If you have already perfected marriage—or any type of a committed romantic relationship—you can go ahead and skip this article.

Instead of reading this, you should probably write your own book on “How to Stay Married.” With divorce rates still hovering at roughly 42 percent, it is guaranteed to be a bestseller.

But for most of us who have ever slipped a ring on a spouse’s finger, there is one irrefutable, irrepressible fact about marriage: It is hard.

More often than not, our struggles and fights with spouses remain behind closed doors.

For author and humorist Harrison Scott Key—who has published two highly-acclaimed memoirs titled “Congratulations, Who Are You Again?” and “The World’s Largest Man”—his marital struggles and the nightmare that he incurred following his wife Lauren’s affair with a neighbor became the fodder for his third book, “How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told” (Avid Reader Press, 2023).

For Key, the decision to air his personal grief and humiliation wasn’t made in haste.

“For a year before the book came out until a year after, not a day went by where I didn’t wonder if I shouldn’t have published this book,” said Key in a Zoom call from his home in Savannah, Ga. “But I had to write [the book] to process the story of what happened.”

And what happened between Key and Lauren—and all of its sordidness—will feel simultaneously personal and hauntingly familiar for many couples.

“I felt the story, trapped in my head, was becoming a monster, and I had to get it out. I had to exorcize the demons and vanquish that monster,” Key said.

On an autumn day in 2017, Key was blindsided when Lauren told him that she was in love with another man, who was also married, and wanted a divorce so she could then marry her lover.

After the initial devastation, Key decided to fight for his wife instead of abandoning the marriage and their family, which includes the couple’s three daughters and a chocolate Lab named Gary.

While Key battled with the understandable urge to beat his wife’s paramour to death with a gardening tool, he also turned to The Bible and his faith in God for help figuring out how to forgive Lauren and move past this deepest of betrayals.

“Love, forgiveness, grace and faith, I knew if I was going to save my marriage, I had to find out if these things were real, and if they really work,” said Key, who still considers himself a bad Christian. “When something like this happens, you have to go to your rules of life and see if they hold up.”

Those rules were then tested a second time.

During the pandemic in 2020, his wife resumed her affair with the same man and set off another series of betrayals that would’ve tested even Job’s patience—there is a chapter in the book titled “There Was a Man in the Land of Uz.”

While Key writes quite a bit about finding strength in his faith, he never resorts to the type of holier-than-thou proselytizing that could turn off the secular reader. In fact—in an impressive sleight-of-hand—Key is able to present a husband’s worst nightmare with a little bit of levity and a lot of compassion.

“How can you write something like this and not make it funny?” Key asked. “Anyone who has ever been through this realizes that it gets absurd very quickly. It’s rife with ridiculousness, which makes it a doorway to comedy.”

Eventually, Key and Lauren reconciled with the help of a marriage therapist, who Key said has been in high demand since the book’s release, and continue to live together in Savannah with their daughters and Gary, the chocolate Lab.

And while Key said that the responses since the memoir’s release in 2023 have been largely positive, he also realized that some readers would disapprove of him seemingly “shaming [his] wife.”

However, Key was most surprised by the male responses. He said that about half of the PM’s, letters and emails he receives are from males, including missives from police officers, firefighters and one prominent politician.

“The most common message I get from other men is that this happened to them as well, but they never had the words to process it until I wrote the book,” said Key. “Men don’t talk about this. They don’t talk about failed marriages or being cuckolded. They don’t talk about humiliation.”

And while Key tried not to come across as too bitter about the affair in “How To Stay Married,” invariably some of his anger seeps through the page. “The vitriol and the acidity did come out,” he admits, “especially when I was describing Chad [the other man].”

Ultimately, the book, like relationships themselves, hinges on forgiveness. And if you’ve mastered forgiveness, you should consider writing your own book about forgiveness as well.

But some Christian guys already wrote one. It’s called “The New Testament.”