Harrison Scott Key felt his stomach drop when his wife of 14 years, Lauren, sent him a text that stopped him in his tracks.
‘Tonight, after the girls go to bed, can we talk?’ it read.
He replied, ‘Yeah, of course. About what?’ Lauren’s answer was cryptic: ‘Life.’
At first, the father of three assumed she might be pregnant again. But as he turned the possibilities over in his mind, darker scenarios crept in. Was she hiding a secret? Had something gone terribly wrong?
When he stepped through the front door that evening, the atmosphere in their home felt heavy. Lauren’s demeanor was uncharacteristically distant. She didn’t greet him with her usual kiss, and the unspoken tension hung over dinner.
Later, after tucking their daughters into bed, the couple settled in the living room for ‘the talk’.
Lauren got straight to the point. ‘This is not about anything that you’ve done or haven’t done. I want a divorce,’ she said.
Harrison was stunned. ‘What are you talking about? Why?’ he asked.
Author Harrison Scott Key (right) discovered his wife Lauren (left) was having an affair with a family friend in 2017
Her reply hit like a bolt from the blue: ‘I’m in love with someone else.’
Harrison asked who it was. She revealed she had been having an affair for three months with their family friend Michael*, who was also married with children.
The entire history of their relationship raced through Harrison’s mind in that moment. How could this happen? What did I do that was so wrong?
He had met Lauren in college, they had their first date in 2002, and married just 10 months later. He was a 27-year-old PhD student and she was just 25.
They both knew it had been a rushed courtship. Their wedding had been pushed forward because of Lauren’s mother’s battle with cancer.
‘She swept me off my feet. Beforehand I wasn’t interested in getting married or having kids but everything changed when I met her. I was in love. Before we met, I was I was dating women but never clicked with anyone like I did with her,’ he tells me.
‘We’re complete opposites – I was deeply immersed in my studies, reading and writing books, and she had her own interests. But that’s what I loved about her.’
When they wed life was perfect. The couple bought a home in the suburbs and went on to welcome three daughters. Harrison was the breadwinner and Lauren took on the role of stay-at-home mother.
Harrison never suspected anything was going on between his wife and their ‘boring’ friend
From the outside in, they had a normal, happy marriage.
But his life changed forever that night in 2017 when his wife revealed she was having an affair Michael.
The news rocked Harrison to his core. It made him question everything he thought he knew about himself, love, and their relationship. His first thought was that it must have been his fault somehow.
Harrison had never suspected anything was going on between his wife and Michael. The two were friendly with one another, sure. They watched the same TV shows and would talk about them. He assumed it was nothing more than that.
Any doubts he had, he pushed down. He told himself it would be foolish to assume anything was going on because he had women friends and Lauren had never accused him of having an affair.
‘I’m not a suspicious or paranoid person. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m clearly pretty trusting, almost to the point of naïveté. But our family friend worked from home and so did my wife,’ Harrison recalls.
‘They had been in love with each other for several years without expressing it. The affair started three months before she told me and she wanted a divorce.
‘I asked her when she first has sex with him but she lied and said they hadn’t yet. At that point she believed they were soulmates and wanted to marry him.’
Harrison had liked Michael, but he never thought much of him. He was average – no, less than average. He didn’t understand it at first.
‘He didn’t have a great job, he wasn’t good looking and not very intelligent. He’s like vanilla ice cream without the vanilla. But they just hit it off. They had a similar sense of humour, she preferred a simple life and so did he,’ Harrison explains.
‘This guy was married, we had them over for dinner in previous years and we watched football – I even let him borrow my lawnmower. While I’m flying around the world for work, she was at home and felt worshipped by him.’
The couple spoke for three hours that night – about their marriage, about what was going to happen next.
As Lauren spoke, Harrison’s mind wandered: How many times was I lied to? How many times was she somewhere else? I thought we were happy.
His wife had banked on Harrison leaving the house in a fit of rage. That’s what she wanted him to do – so he would be out of the picture. But he didn’t.
‘It was my house, my family, my children,’ he tells me. ‘Obviously she was not really my wife anymore, but I told her, “Why would I leave? This is where I live and where all my clothes are. It sounds like you should leave – you’re the one who left the marriage already. You’re leaving us.” She slept in the guest bedroom that night.’
In a situation like this, most would think, ‘How could you possibly stay married after an affair?’ But as Harrison explains, it’s more complicated than that.
The next morning, before even speaking to Lauren, he took practical steps to make sure Michael didn’t take anything else from him besides his wife and his pride.
He made sure Michael didn’t have access to their money and changed the passwords to important accounts. The next thing he did was leave the house and talk to his church pastor – but the conversation wasn’t as productive as he’d hoped.
Harrison says his pastor’s attitude was that ‘if you’re cheated on, you immediately become the good guy no matter who you are, and the other person is the bad guy. But I didn’t like that polarity. I didn’t like the judgement that was placed on her.’
That same day, a friend called to tell him something that ‘changed everything’.
‘You’re going to fight for her, aren’t you? You’re going to fight for your wife?’ they said.
‘I had never thought of it like that. When you find out the worst news of your life, you’re trying to decide how to feel and work out what’s going to happen next,’ Harrison explains.
‘All I knew is I believe in marriage and she was the mother to my three children. I told my wife: “You can leave if you want, but I want to try to figure out what went wrong, and I want to see if we can fix this. I know it’s going to take years with a lot of therapy, and probably a lot of tears, but I want to try.”‘
The next day, she agreed. She ended the affair with Michael and the couple started therapy.
Despite the hurt and betrayal, the couple started to build trust again – it took time, but eventually they got to a point when they were happy together again.
But their troubles weren’t over.
Lauren fell pregnant with their fourth child but lost the baby. She was rushed to hospital with blood loss. The trauma of that experience almost tore the pair apart, but they made it through.
All was well for a few more years – then Covid hit.
In July 2020, as lockdowns brought the world to a standstill, Michael contacted Lauren after years of silence. He wanted to arranged a meeting in a car park so they could have ‘closure’. It marked the beginning of their second affair.
‘I had done a lot of growing over those three years. I tried to be less of an idiot, less naïve. I tried to have higher emotional quotient in my interactions with my daughters and my wife, became more sensitive and listen better,’ Harrison tells me.
‘I started to think something is going on with my wife and I didn’t know what it was. She would go get her nails done and be gone for three hours or go furniture shopping but take longer than expected.
‘I didn’t want to be paranoid but I also didn’t want to avoid this weird feeling in my stomach. So we went out to breakfast to talk.’
Harrison cut to the chase and asked his wife of 18 years if she had really gone furniture shopping the other day. She said no.
‘It was almost a relief when she said that – and I knew she was having an affair again,’ Harrison recalls. The pair left the restaurant. Lauren told him everything when they got back to the car. Harrison slumped over, his head down in despair.
‘This time it wasn’t about love or happiness – she seemed scared and frightened. I felt pity for her,’ he adds.
Again, Harrison told her again he wouldn’t be leaving their house or his children.
But Lauren couldn’t leave either because she was days away from undergoing a hysterectomy and begged Harrison could take care of her after the surgery. He agreed. Christmas passed then he underwent gallbladder surgery two weeks later and Lauren had to return the favour.
‘It was much worse the second time. As soon as I recovered, she moved out into her own apartment she bought. I became a single father of three girls. It was a lot. I felt sorry for her. She didn’t know who she wanted to be with,’ he says.
‘We agreed to not communicate for at least two months besides school drop-offs and pick-ups. My friends surrounded me with love, I had two jobs, I went to therapy, and I started dating.
‘I literally fell in love with every woman I met for about a month. I was so thrilled at the thought of being with someone who hadn’t cheated on me. I was so starved for affection.’
Two months into the separation, Harrison discovered Michael was now living with his wife. He knew their marriage was irretrievably finished. It was devastating.
They agreed to a divorce but right before Harrison was going to sign his papers, his phone rang. It was Lauren, asking to see if he could pick her up.
She sounded worried. ‘I can’t leave, I don’t know how to leave. He’s not here but he’s on his way. Can you please come now?’ What was going on?
Harrison drove to the apartment, bringing along a friend because he feared for his safety. As he walked through the front door, he heard his wife’s sobs from the bedroom and entered to find her crying on the bed.
She wasn’t in danger – that was a relief. But she felt she needed to escape from Michael. She said their intense affair had translated into a relationship that was dangerously co-dependent.
Harrison bundled her into his car and they drove off before Michael got home. Lauren went to stay with her family.
To process the emotional rollercoaster Harrison put his experience into words and published ‘How to Stay Married’ (pictured)
But a few days later, something happened that Harrison he never saw coming.
He opened his front door to find Lauren in the driveway holding a suitcase. She was coming home, she said.
‘This is my home, and I know that now.’
A stunned Harrison replied: ‘Do you really want to be married to me? Because it seems like you don’t.’
‘I’d like to try.’
He describes that moment as ‘the most honest part’ in their entire relationship.
To this day, Lauren’s ex-lover has made repeated attempts to contact her. His most recent approach was three weeks ago. But Lauren always tells Harrison whenever he does – there are no more secrets between them.
As for the lessons learned from his wife’s two affairs, Harrison says he has now found ways to ‘balance career and family in a much healthier way. We talk a lot more, our fights our healthy now. You still get mad at each other even when you’re happily married.
‘We’re really happy. We’ve now been married for 22 years. It took work to get here but life is really great.’
To process the emotional rollercoaster Harrison put his experience into a book, How to Stay Married. He has also appeared on several podcasts, including Cheating: When Love Lies.
*Name has been changed