Tina Knowles breaks her silence about her divorce from her ex-husband, Mathew Knowles.
In her new memoir, “Matriarch: A Memoir,” talked about her marriage to Mathew revealing that they got married in 1980 but it wasn’t always blissful. “There were already problems in our marriage that first year. But the suspicions I had would get washed away by the fact that our love was stronger than a misstep…It was us against the world, taking on what life brought us,” she wrote.
She continued, “The marriage was deteriorating faster than I could possibly find ways or even reasons to make it work– even with the pregnancy.” Knowles went on to say that while she was pregnant with Solange, Mathew would be unfaithful and that she had, “gotten used to these extremes- incredibly joyous half the tie as we shared life’s adventure, then being disgusted and heartsick over how brazen his cheating could get.”
The mother of Beyoncé and Solange also explained that she was, “caught in this dance with him, eah doing the same steps over and over: He would cheat or act up, and I would say I’d had enough.He would beg for forgiveness, crying, and promising to get better… But this is what married people did, I told myself.”
Tina Knowles was a part of this cycle until 2009 when she learned that Mathew had a child outside of their marriage. “I screamed, ‘Get out! Get out!’ like he was some demon. ‘I hate you!’ … my world had exploded,” Knowles wrote when he tried to converse with her later that day. Two years later, Knowles filed for divorce, and they didn’t speak for three months. “I was deeply sad, not about him but about the marriage,” she wrote. “I felt like I failed. I failed us, my kids — myself.”
She added, This was different from the other times I had chosen to leave him. Now I had no choice. In the aftermath of that explosion, I kept pace with my life, as I had now for years, sticking to my routine and allowing work to numb and carry me.”
In 2015, Knowles married actor Richard Lawson but they got a divorce in 2023. Mathew Knowles married former model Gena Avery in 2013. “My journey has been filled with so many obstacles, so many hardships, but it’s also been filled with tremendous amounts of joy… It’s been an amazing ride, she said. ”I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.”