10 - The Harsh Reality of Divorce

"When two people start to not be on the same path, it’s death by a thousand cuts."

Opening the Door to a Hard Conversation
This episode is one of the hardest I've ever recorded. After 11 years together, my wife and I have made the decision to divorce. It’s painful, it’s messy, and it’s real. I’m not here to place blame—only to share my side of the journey and how resilience is built in the coldest moments of life.

When Paths No Longer Align
Divorce doesn’t happen overnight. It’s small cracks over time, a slow drifting apart. We fought for it, extended grace to each other, but at the end of the day, we realized we were on two very different paths. Staying together would have been forcing something that wasn’t meant to be.

Honoring the Good We Shared
T is still one of the kindest, most beautiful souls I've ever known. She showed up for my family and for me in ways I'll never forget. Our years together mattered—and nothing about our separation changes that truth.

Built for the Cold
This podcast is about being real with life’s toughest seasons. Divorce is one of the coldest. But resilience isn’t born from comfort—it’s built in the hard places. If you're walking through something similar, know you’re not alone.

If the information in these episodes has helped you in your business journey, please subscribe to the show and leave an honest review.

Chapters
03:18 The Journey of Reflection and Growth
06:37 Understanding Relationship Dynamics
09:25 Navigating Different Life Paths
12:18 The Impact of External Influences
15:41 Confronting Betrayal and Heartbreak
18:31 Finding Closure and Moving Forward
21:42 Embracing a New Chapter in Life

Make a Cold connection with exercise physiologist, sales coach, and much more @JoeWannerOfficial on Instagram

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:35

I already know sharing this one that this is going to be hard for for many of you, um, especially those of you who are close friends, family that I have not personally shared this with, that after 11 years of being together, my sweetheart, my girlfriend, my fiance, and then wife, her and I have decided to get a divorce. And when divorce happens, it's never easy, it's never clean. How do you get through it and still perform? Right. Welcome to another episode of Built for the Cold Podcast. Obviously, a little bit more of a somber one, again, not to you know bring her down everyone's mood, but just to share. Like this is uh people go through stuff and you don't recognize it, right? A lot of life experiences can feel very cold, right? And we like to say on this show, too cold for the average Joe, just right for me and the listeners of this show, where I'm gonna share with you the very real things that it can look like when two people are together for so long and certain things start to happen, right, that start to drift two people apart. I am not gonna sit here and say I'm any relationship expert because I'm not. Have I read a bunch of marriage books? Have I talked to marriage counselors? Yes. Have I been counseled by different people with good marriages? Yes. And I think I think the hardest part is recognizing when two people start to not be on the same path, right? And things just start to drift slowly over time. It's death by a thousand cuts. It's never just an automatic thing, right? So I want to share my story, if you'll allow me to. Obviously, this is gonna be my perspective. There are two sides to every story. I am not sitting here being like, hey, I was perfect. I absolutely wasn't. There were parts where I didn't handle things well. I was angry a lot. I used my words against her sometimes, and I'm very sorry for it. I'm so glad that T had given me the grace and space and forgiveness to overcome different things I needed to when I was experiencing some of the toughest moments in my life financially, people making fun of me, business coaches, mentors taking advantage of me, and even just how she chose not to be with her family so she could spend time with me and be with me. I'm never gonna forget the years we spent together. And I don't want this to be like, oh, like Joe's painting tea out a certain way. It's just my perspective, right? It doesn't mean everything is completely true. It's just based off of my perspective and my experience. So I want to share with you how I've gone through it, how I've overcome it, because it's been very recent and it's still at the recording of this podcast, still an ongoing thing as we sort this out and work to just, you know, move on in our lives. And to start this, because I know many of you are gonna be shocked by it, because I think on the outside, T and I did a very good job of hiding it from a lot of people, which that's just what we've always learned to be. You just show up and you be professional and you don't show people that necessarily when you're still trying to figure it out. So here's my invitation. If you're a family or a close friend, right, or even like someone that T and I have been a part of your life and you have questions, you're more than welcome to reach out to me, ask how things are going. I invite that. I just ask you to pray for both of us during this time because it's just not easy on both of our ends. I know for her and myself, we are no longer together, and it's important that I share this so we we can all kind of move forward, especially me and T. So as I shared before, right, the family dynamic we kind of walked into with her family. So she grew up in not the best environment as from an emotional standpoint, like how I understood things. I even experienced some of it as her mom screamed at her on the phone, was fairly abusive. Not fairly extremely abusive. To the point she didn't feel safe at home, and brother and dad were not there necessarily to protect her from it. It just kept happening. So it made it very hard when we were together and she decided to choose to be with me over her family and felt like she couldn't just couldn't do it. My baby T. She did everything. She did so much for me. We did a lot together. We did everything together. We really were best friends. Like she was like the one she still to this day is one of the most like beautiful, sweetest, like amazing people that I just pray whoever she ends up living her future life with can't can see that and provide her with the life that she wants, right? Because I know there's areas that we just didn't see eye to eye on, and it wasn't fair of me to keep her in something that we never we wouldn't have seen the same way on, right? But we had seen it for a long time in a very similar way, and I'll get into that story, but just to give you some memories that I've had that where she was really there for my family. I remember when my grandpa died, which was a very hard time for all of us, and T took the time over FaceTime to while my grandpa's on his deathbed, she played a song for him on the piano, made him cry, made all of us cry. We're all bawling our eyes out. We're in Hawaii, and she's at home in Illinois playing a song on the piano for my my dying grandpa. It just meant so much for so many of us. She was there for my sister when um our now brother-in-law, my brother-in-law now, he actually was in a tragic uh skateboarding, I think longboarding or skateboarding accident, hit his head, was in a coma, probably for about, I want to say it was six months. Forgive me, guys, if that's not the right time frame. But she was there for my sister through all of it, even more than I was, like making sure she was okay, helping her through the emotion, emotional roller coasters of like, if this is my future husband and he dies, I don't know what, I don't know what's gonna happen. And T was there for my family. I can list so many other stories, but a lot of them stick out. That's what I'm saying. She's such an amazing person. Us separating has nothing to do with T not being a good person. Now, do I think people make mistakes and people take actions and we end up kind of seeing after all everything, all the dust settles, that is this really working or are we trying to force this? That's more of what it turned out to be. Because of this. At the time we got divorced, and I'll share time frames here soon, but uh, I just I read this constantly in Proverbs. It was constantly in Proverbs. It's better to live in the corner of a roof than to live with a quarrelsome wife. We constantly fought. I think there are periods of like years where we'd like to break out in a pretty big verbal fight every like two weeks, and it wasn't healthy. The worst advice I ever got in the business we were in, oh well, it's better to fight than to not have not have something to fight for. Stupidest relationship advice I ever heard in my life. Because that's not what it's supposed to be. But we we listened to it and we took it as truth, and so we had been through so much, as you can see, just myself, yet alone T and all her things, there was so much there that a lot of our relationship was just survival mode and just getting through things together. Where that's actually we it's almost like we were in battle together for so long that we didn't really have the tougher conversations of what do we both want and what is the path that we're on. Remove the business because everything in that business was kind of like predetermined for you. This is your goals, this is what you're gonna do in life. And because it's already predetermined, you kind of just buy into it and you're just like, okay, this is the path we're on. So we felt for so long we were on the same path. As we found out, remove that business aside years later, we were not on the same path at all and wanted completely different things. And I think I think that's why it made it so much harder because not only did business coaches pin me and T against each other, almost in like very unhealthy competition. While we were living together, we had different standards of clean. I personally feel now people may disagree, but I feel like I try and keep things a lot more clean. Yeah, I have a lot more stuff, a lot more clothes or whatever, but I try and keep things more clean. And again, that's not to be a debated thing right now. It's more of just like that's my perspective, right? We had different life goals, remove the business, and all of a sudden we recognize like T wanted to kind of, it's almost like we kind of went out into the ocean. A wave brought us in, and I tell multiple people this story where like the waves of all the business turmoil we went through came crashing in. Now we're on the shore, and she wanted to set up life on the shore, which there's nothing wrong with, right? But I didn't want to settle on the shore. I wanted to go back out in the tumultuous waters of entrepreneurship, go into all these different realms of business, which I do now. And that just wasn't the life she wanted. I'm very in the public eye now, train on stage, train hundreds of thousands of people, right? Speak for some of the largest influencers in the in the country, if not the world. And she wants to live a life where it's like she's not in the spotlight, and our family isn't in the spotlight like that. So it made it very, very hard over time. Even to the point where, and I wear this, I wear this necklace because it sometimes reminds me like when you when you have a big weight on your chest, literally a weight on my chest right now. The biggest weight on my chest was when I would want to have conversations with her about where are we going in life? What are we, what were we destined to be together, what do you want? And so many times it was like she'd be watching TV at night, and it just it was too heavy of a conversation to have. And I think it was just because she started to feel it and see it that we weren't seeing eye to eye, so it became too heavy. But I felt if we didn't have that conversation, we're literally wasting each other's time. This is after we're married, by the way. Because we hadn't left that business environment until after that all had happened, because we wanted to set an example, we wanted to be a happy, married couple, like that's everything we we aspire to be. And we were. I really think our first year of marriage, we were very happy together. There were different times where different things came up, family dynamics, but I really truly believe we did our best to really make that work. Right. But like I said, remove the business we built together, and we were just on way different paths. I listened to this podcast recently, an amazing episode, like nine-minute episode, that Layla Hermozzi came out with talking about when two people are not on the same path, they're playing interference in each other's destinies for and the paths they want to take in life. Right. Where I felt multiple times this isn't just T for me, this is also me for T. Right. You can either have three of the supportive ones up here, they either partner with you in what you want to do, they're the cheerleader, they're supporting you in what you want to do, or they play zero interference. They're not interfering with the life that you want. The worst thing you can have is what's called an energy vampire or someone who's tons of interference. So this isn't to pin things on T, but as I am working to build businesses and everything else, she saw it as a threat to her security and us. Right? Where I didn't see it that way. And then for her, right, I'm playing tons of interference because I'm very focused on my businesses and pouring into people and all my responsibilities and being an entrepreneur. So for her, I was the same thing. It's not that I didn't support her. There were times where I had supported her in like her real estate career that she had temporarily invested 10 grand in that and she she hadn't sold a home, which is fine. She just didn't find it her thing, right? I felt I was supportive, but I couldn't provide for her in the way that she wanted to be provided for, even though financially and you know, never worrying about money, all that stuff was taken care of, right? So I felt I was here, but now kind of go in hindsight, like maybe I didn't fulfill things in this area for her. And like Layla said, if people are not on the same path, they're gonna be trying, it's like it's mutual sabotage, where they're mutually sabotaging each other and the paths they want. Again, remove the network marketing business we were part of and set it to the side. T and I didn't want the same things. And it started to bleed into other areas where all of a sudden, her wanting a more simple life, kind of wanting to like watch TV at night and like hang out and talk and everything else. Well, I'm literally an entrepreneur working 16 hours a day, networking, and then that's like almost sometimes seven days a week, like networking, studying, putting presentations together, like wanting to build a big life and be on the stages of the world. That's just what I feel called to do. And that wasn't what she wanted. So we started to drift. Even though I felt there were times where we would try and ignite it, we started to drift to more and more. Right. And it led to different struggles where it's like I felt she wasn't maintaining our our home to where it could be to support me, to not add extra stress on top of everything else I was doing. And it really started to show in 2023, where I call what the slow fade began. Right now, granted, this is my perspective. However, up to 2023 to give you guys context, her as her job, she had to leave a company because she wouldn't get vaccinated. I'm not going to go down that whole route. We just didn't believe in it at the time. Okay. She pursued real estate. I invested 10 grand of my money at the time to help her do that, didn't make any money from it. So then she just like, I need to do something, I want to work. So we started working at this gym, a local gym that we had been a member of for a very long time, know a lot of people there. And she starts to develop this new friend group. Now, I know these friends may listen to this podcast, and I'm here to tell you guys of everything that has happened, I forgive you. At first, I was very upset, very frustrated, a lot of you. How could you let all this happen? But I also understand people make decisions, and at the end of the day, I forgive all of you guys, even the guy that got involved with T. I forgive you. Doesn't mean I necessarily forget, it's still very raw and real, but I forgive you, right? And I I wish you all the best. Probably not going to be friends with any of you anymore. That's just the reality of it, but I wish you all the best. My opinion at that time when T was starting hanging out with them is they were starting to rob her dream. I thought she wanted to support me and we wanted to build this legacy of a life and everything else, be entrepreneurs, everything we wanted to do. And she just wanted to go with cops with them on Fridays. I would have date night planned, and she would miss our date nights to go hang out with these friends. And it got to a point where there was this one guy in the group, right, who basically fell in love with her and expressed that to multiple people in the friend group. But everyone told me, hey, he's innocent, he doesn't mean anything of his just feelings, they'll disappear, yada, yada, yada. So I just kind of believed that. Even though like people would jokingly call him T's work husband and everything else, which did bother me. And I expressed that to multiple people, and but I was like kind of outnumbered, and everyone was saying I'm kind of overreacting in multiple moments of time, right? Where she would actually start working late at night at the gym, sometimes not getting back from the gym until two or four in the morning. I felt so uncomfortable. I expressed this to one of the friends, still nothing. Didn't didn't think they were just like, hey, whatever. And I asked T and I trusted, I asked T and that guy, like what? Because he was in the friend group too, like, what's going on? Why are you guys there so late? But I I I suspected things deep down, but everyone else told me not to worry, so I didn't. Even though something felt a little off. And to protect everyone involved, I'm gonna keep these details very limited because a lot of these people and have different sides of the story for how things all went down. I'll let them keep those stories. It doesn't really matter, just know that it kind of led to different things and ultimately led to us realizing we just didn't want the same things. This is like the the physical representation of what was going on internally in T and myself. So fast forward to the end of 2023, we end up moving to Arizona because I got promoted into management to help run and build an office out there, right? And I remember when that happened, that was toward the end, then the beginning of 2024, she would actually like fly back to finish some like shifts at the gym or whatever, only to get a phone call from one of my best friends to tell me it's like, hey man, um I don't know how to tell you this, but uh, I think she's cheating on you. And I'm like, I couldn't believe it. And I'm sitting there literally in the office learning how to now manage all these different reps on top of sell myself, having to deal with this. Talk to T, talk to the guy, because I had his number two. I was like, you need to tell me right now, like nothing's going on. Like I that you need to stop talking, stop seeing each other, yada yada yada. So that's how that ended. I'm still not, I'm I don't have any proof. I'm not blaming T for anything, right? It's just what one friend felt. Not until June of 2024, when I was assured that everything wasn't happening, they weren't communicating more everything else. God one night woke me up and he's like, You need to check her phone. And I'm like, I'm not gonna check her phone. But he's like, No, you seriously need to check her phone. If you're in a marriage or relationship and this has ever happened to you, I'm really sorry. I can't explain what it feels like to what you thought and you trusted all these people only to find out it was all wrong and to find out that your gut was right. I'm not gonna cover what was in those texts, I'm not gonna cover any of that because it's not important. I just remember the feeling of absolute betrayal of everything I felt I had done and provided for gone. Found the text, constant communication, even though I was told nothing was going on, I was heartbroken, I was confused, couldn't believe my gut was right. I hated that my gut was right. This was three days before our three-year anniversary. Right. We went to Hawaii and Oregon that summer and no no one knew what was going on. I believed in forgiving tea and working through different things, and we sought therapy and everything else. Right. We did everything we could. I end up we ended up moving back to Wisconsin. She didn't like Arizona at all. She actually hated Arizona, so we moved back. And um, yeah, that's a whole I'm not gonna get into a lot of details of that because that that could just lead to a ton of different side thoughts here and make this way too long. But she didn't like it. We moved back to Wisconsin so she could be close to her family in Illinois. And during all of this, I like held everything together that I could while managing an office about 30 to 40 reps and in my first year back selling about you know five million a premium, on top of speaking on stages, on top of training hundreds of thousands of salespeople, on top of my sleep apnea and almost dying a couple times. That's what I held together despite everything that was going on, because even when shit is going on, you are responsible for a lot more and people are counting on you. That's what it means to be a professional. And I share this, not to be like, oh, look at me and how great I'm no, I'm not. But one thing I did have during this whole time was God. And God gave me an ability to see things bigger than what they were, and I'm still going through a lot of this stuff with the divorce, right? Because on December 19th, this is literally a couple months ago, right? The day I almost died in that car accident on black ice. After everything we had worked through and decided we're gonna work on our marriage, and like six months later, to discover that there's communication again with the same guy, and then that was it. That was the final nail in the coffin, right? As on my birthday, we're discussing the logistics of the divorce. She shares she's gonna move back to Phoenix. And I'm like, that's funny. You hated it. You made us move early, cut our lease super early, right? I know I shared, I wanted to support you in that, and now all of a sudden you're moving back. Oh, I see. And I learned about, and this isn't this isn't to target T. So please hear my heart. This is not to be like, hey, she's not a good person. No, she's a good person. I think just sometimes like just decisions, not understanding the consequences of certain decisions, and had started talking to this guy from her office. And I would see some Teams chats between them, whatever, didn't think anything of it. She'd bring him up in stories. I didn't think anything of it until she said she was moving back to Phoenix. And I'm like, why is that? Part of it was for her job, but then also discovering there's now another guy involved, right? And so heartbroke again, right? It took, I'm not gonna go through all this. It just took me so long during the holidays, probably spent three weeks averaging 12 hours of sleep a week while still showing up for my clients as best I could. Now I'm in my business full-time, everything else. I journaled, I prayed, I worshiped, I leaned into God, and He gave me so much clarity, right? To the point that I had forgiven tea, but we were we were for sure getting divorced. I couldn't trust someone that was going to keep holding things back, keep not telling the truth about different things. And I did my best to make it as manageable as possible for her. Like when she, because she she was making less money than me, right? But I was still providing for like, you know, health insurance, her car, like all that type of stuff, like paying for dinners or whatever, even like helped her with her plane ticket to go out so she could find places in Phoenix. Because I did not want this, this is my best friend of 11 years. I'm not gonna let this just like. Go to the wayside and her experience all this because of my what bitterness, right? I took a personal retreat myself, right? I spent a ton of time with God and I still am. And there's still things that I need to heal from. It's a long relationship. She knows so many of my family and friends. And I know many of you hearing this are probably either crying or heartbroken or don't understand. That's why I'm here to share this with you, to give you a space to heal with me, but also understand that I have things to process as well. I'm not perfect. I'm human. I had a part in this where it's like for some reason, shape, or form, she did not feel safe enough or secure enough to share things with me that were going on and felt she needed to not purposefully necessarily hide it, but like also not tell me. At the moment that I'm recording and releasing this podcast, right? This is almost two weeks ago now, right? To give you a time frame. I remember leaving for Boston to go see my family, go see friends, go see Elevation Worship, which was very hard because they played the song that we got married to at our wedding. And just a lot of emotions I've been sorting out. And I remember before I left, because we were still to like living together, being like, hey, there's there's extra food if you need it. Here's this, this, and this, and I'll hey, I'll be back on Wednesday. I come back Wednesday night. And she's gone. She left, hacked up everything she had. Oh no, didn't tell me, stopped sharing her location, and I only found out through my family that she was safe. But it left me with a lot of administrative headache because I'm still sorting out all the different logistics of what you know, just I have pretty never no one ever has to go through any of this. Like all the divorce proceedings, like the administrative stuff to her car, everything, like, and I I was just like, I was helping her transition. And for it to end like that really hurt. Just note, T, if you're listening to this, like I forgive you. I love you, and you're always gonna have a place in my heart. And I don't regret any of the years that we spent together because you've been my best friend for 11 years. And I just pray that you find what you're looking for. I pray that you get the healing that you need. I'm still gonna be healing. There's gonna be a lot that I have to really reflect on and move forward through as I move forward in my life. But I'm just praying the best for you. And I just want you to know that I'm really sorry for my part in what happened. But I just want you guys to know as I share that and conclude on that, is that it's an ongoing process. I'm gonna be okay. I know T's gonna be okay. It's gonna take time. Please just pray for both of us as we navigate this time and work through different things. But just know that when you go through life, and this is probably one of the most real D's recently for me, God has a bigger plan. He has a bigger plan for me. He has a bigger plan for T. And he has a bigger plan for each one of you if you've ever gone through something like this, a lot more than you'll ever realize. Because it's through on the other side of you being obedient and feeling it and going through it and using it as a story to inspire people, not to hide it from everyone, but to just be transparently human. God's going to bless you. Hope this helped you. Especially if you're in a somber mood right now, definitely go get that next cup of Joe to not drag you throughout the rest of the weekend wherever you're listening to this. I love you guys. Thank you so much for all of you, family and friends, that have given us support during this time. I continue to ask for your prayers and support, and we'll see you on the next one.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

Go for the goal, you say that dance great. The lessons, the love, the insights from above. We take up and grow.