After Birdee Pruitt is publicly betrayed by her husband on national television, she takes her daughter and moves back to her small hometown. Traumatized and humiliated, she slowly begins the work of rebuilding a life she once believed was secure, all while confronting her past and the scrutiny of small-town eyes. Hope Floats portrays a woman whose hopeful outlook–not only in her marriage, but in herself—vanishes in a single moment.

I can relate. After my own discovery of betrayal, hope wasn’t at the forefront of my mind–nor was it for my husband. Those early months were disorienting and tumultuous. If someone had told us to look for hope, I don’t think either one of us would have known what to look for. The world had flipped on its axis, and hope, at that point, was nowhere to be found.

What Keeps Us From Hope After Betrayal
Looking back, I can see what kept us from hope then.
For one, hope felt fragile. It seemed risky—even a little dangerous—to hope for a future that might never happen, whether that meant our marriage recovering or eventually going our separate ways. It was hard to let myself hope when my body and nervous system had catapulted me into a state of survival. Like many betrayed partners, I reached for whatever semblance of safety I could find instead. Sometimes that looked like numbing or distraction–binge-watching shows late into the night, staying busy, or trying to control small corners of my life that still felt manageable. At other times, safety meant slowing down–taking walks, journaling, and reaching out for support. Both kinds of safety-seeking made sense at the time; they were my body’s way of trying to find solid ground.

For my husband, hope was overtaken by shame. It didn’t initially come out as regret, but as defensiveness, intensity, and moments when he seemed swallowed by the reality of what had happened. As the truth settled in and the weight of his choices became undeniable, he doubted whether healing—or redemption—could ever be possible.

We were both too busy treading water to notice that hope might still be there beneath the surface. All we could see was the deeper reality–that nothing about our lives could return to what it had been. We were facing a long season of uncertainty and grief, and a scope of work we couldn’t rush.

But as the shock of all of this softened, small traces of hope began to appear.

Once it did, hope wavered between extremes. One hour, we could see the faint possibility that something in our future might be restored, only to sink into darkness and despair an hour later. In our own ways, we both wondered:

Is it foolish to hope?
Is hope even possible anymore?
Would there ever be a safe time to hope?

There were days when it felt like we might drown under the years of pain and dysfunctional patterns between us. And yet, there was a quiet wondering if anything new–anything redeemable–could still rise from all of this.

So yes, hope felt risky—and eventually we began to understand why: we were placing our hope in each other. We were letting it be defined by the other person’s words, actions, and reactions—and it was too fragile to survive there.

Hope needed to become an inside job. We couldn’t outsource it to one another’s hands. It had to become a deeply lived, internal reservoir we could draw from within ourselves.

Even when hope felt faint—sinking under the weight of our circumstances—we began to hold onto the belief that it might still be present, even if we couldn’t feel it yet. Hope only began to rise to the surface when we tethered ourselves to this truth:

That was one of the harder parts of recovery for each of us. We had to learn to live without a guaranteed outcome. We had to loosen our grip on certainty and stay present in the painful, unresolved middle—trusting that hope could sustain us even when the future was unknown.

What Helps Us Turn Toward Hope Again
So how did hope begin to feel less risky, and more like something we allowed ourselves to grasp again?

Hope first began to rise as we became more honest with ourselves—about our pain, our patterns, and what was broken. It was only then that disclosure and truth-telling could move between us.

Hope emerged when we each chose to seek support. Getting help was, in itself, a hopeful act—a declaration that neither of us wanted to stay where we were.

For me, hope deepened as I invested in healing my betrayal trauma and began to notice changes in my body, my rhythms, and my inner world. Not all at once, but over time.

For him, hope surfaced as he confronted the pain he had buried for years and committed to doing the hard work of healing and repair.

And because hope had once been woven into our faith, we began to look for it in the ordinary and sacred moments of our lives. In nature, in our daughters’ laughter, in prayer, and in the times when we felt like we could finally breathe again.

Hope didn’t return loudly.
It returned quietly.
It floated.

By the end of Hope Floats, Birdee recalls something her mother used to say:

Recovery often feels like living in that middle space—somewhere between grief and rebuilding, fear and courage, loss and the possibility of new life. Hope doesn’t always arrive easily, and it rarely floats smoothly to the surface.

But when we give it room—gently, slowly, honestly—hope has a way of rising again.