Saturday, during an episode of Iyanla: Fix My Life, life coach Iyanla Vanzant helped a Kentucky woman confront her gay husband about all the lies he had told her during their marriage.
During the broadcast, we meet a woman named Tiffany, who previously believed she had a strong relationship with her husband, Mitchell, who is also a pastor at a local church. However, when Mitchell confessed he was gay, the couple decided it was time to seek some outside help.
When Vanzant arrives to their town to facilitate a healing, Tiffany is visibly distraught, and things became further complicated when Mitchell later admits to having multiple affairs with men during the course of their relationship.
This leads Tiffany to ask the one question she has been grappling with for years: “Why’d you marry me?”
According to OWN,
“I married you because I wanted you to be my wife,” Mitchell answers.
Iyanla immediately steps in. “Oh, I’m just going to slap the taste right out of your mouth,” she says to Mitchell. “Look at this woman and tell her the truth. Look at her and tell her the truth!”
Though Mitchell insists that this is the truth, Iyanla shakes her head. The real truth, she tells him, is that he doesn’t know why he got married. “Tell her why you don’t know,” Iyanla says.
“I mean, I wanted to be married and I thought she was a super wife for me,” Mitchell says.
Iyanla turns to Tiffany. “Don’t believe a word of that,” she tells her. “That is not true. That’s what he needs to say, but that ain’t true.”
Tiffany looks directly at the man she married more than 10 years ago.
“I just want to know, at what point did you ‘get it’ that you shouldn’t have been married?” she asks.
“2006,” Mitchell responds.
Shock reads on Tiffany’s face as Iyanla refocuses the conversation back to Tiffany’s initial question when they first sat down. “You need to look at her and say, ‘I married you because I was in denial that I was gay,'” Iyanla instructs Mitchell.
Mitchell repeats the statement in an even tone but quickly buckles under the weight of what he has just acknowledged. Tears begin falling down his face, he shakes his head and lets out a heavy sigh.
You can check out a clip of their tense exchange here.
The continuation of Tiffany and Mitchell’s conversation will air on this Saturday’s installment of Iyanla: Fix My Life airing at 9 p.m. ET on OWN.