It's not easy to move on after finding out your partner had an affair. In her memoir, I Want to Matter: Your Life Is Too Short and Too Precious to Waste, Kathie Lee Gifford waded through some of the emotions she felt. She opened up to Fox News how she turned to God and religion to overcome the painful betrayal when her husband Frank cheated on her.
"First of all, I loved Frank," Gifford told Fox News Digital. "I was pissed at him, believe me. And furious that he would take something as precious as our marriage into a hotel room with somebody. It was so unlike him. And he put his whole family at risk because of it. But I also knew that we had a family that we loved."
Gifford said that she turned to prayer and sought the ability to forgive him. She said that she turned her troubles over to religion. "I did it to save our marriage because I loved Frank," she explained. "I was not going to break up our family. Nope... A man said to me once, 'Kathie, if you can't forgive your husband, forgive your children's father.' I said, 'Well, that guy's wonderful. That guy is a beautiful human being.' He said, 'Then forgive that guy.' It worked."
Kathie Lee Gifford Forgave Husband
However, Gifford has never forgot what happened. She said that she was never the same afterwards. Frank cheated on Gifford in 1997. Gifford said that she avoided driving near the hotel where it happened due to the hurt emotions.
"I was never the same though," Gifford admitted. "People take sex so casually, and it pretty much did me in for a long time. But I just went back to work, thanked everybody for their prayers and tried to avoid any newspapers for a long, long time."
However, she ultimately decided to forgive him due to her faith in forgiveness.
"I prayed an almost impossible prayer," she wrote. "'Lord, please give me a deeper desire for Frank than I have ever had for him, even more than at the beginning.' This was an epic request. I was crazy in love with Frank then, and grateful to finally have the kind of exciting, thrilling, ecstatic love I'd only known about from books or movies. To my surprise, God answered my prayer and gave me a desire for Frank, unlike anything we had ever experienced. Every time we made love, it was truly healing for me."
"The laughter returned, and our children grew up to be the most extraordinary two human beings I've ever known," Gifford continued. "By the time they learned the truth of what had happened, they knew an even deeper truth: their parents loved them and each other enough to trust in God's healing."
