What Chrishell Stause Has Said About the 'Crazy Way' Her Divorce From Justin Hartley Happened

No one would have ever guessed there was trouble in paradise for Chrishell Stause and This Is Us star Justin Hartley when he filed for divorce in November 2019. Even Stause seemed to be caught off guard by the news when her failed marriage made headlines last year, and there doesn't seem to be that much clarity on why the couple split all these months later.

But fans of the Netflix reality show Selling Sunset, in which Stause is a cast member and realtor, at least get to witness Stause's heartbreaking reaction to her divorce. Reality TV cameras were on hand to capture the very moment Stause's divorce went public and her heartbreaking reaction to the news for the series' third season, which hit the streaming platform on Friday. And while she's remained relatively tight-lipped about her separation from Hartley, she opens up on how blindsided she was by the divorce on the show.

"I'm just kind of in shock with it all. I'm trying to keep it together, but it's just a lot all at once 'cause everybody in the whole world knows like at the same time that I knew. Have you ever been knocked over by a wave and you don't know which way to swim to get up?" Chrishell says during a confessional clip. "I don't think anyone ever gets married thinking that they'll get a divorce. I'm definitely a hopeless romantic, and I feel stupid even saying that out loud."

Stause's divorce bombshell arrives about halfway through the season on an episode titled, "Bad News Travels Fast," right after the real estate agent hosts a charity broker open house and auctions off "coffee with Justin Hartley," coyly telling bidders and guests that she was his wife.

Hartley never appeared on the show, but from the way Stause talked about him and their relationship with her castmate Mary Fitzgerald throughout the series, it seemed as if the former couple's marriage was on solid ground. When Fitzgerald goes to check on Stause after learning of the divorce during Season 3, Stause admits that she thought things were "totally fine" between she and her husband.

"We had a fight that morning over the phone. I never saw him since. We didn't talk things through. Before we had a chance to figure anything out, he'd filed," Stause recalls while speaking to Fitzgerald later in the season. "I found out because he texted me... that we were filed. Forty-five minutes later, the world new."

Hartley's success on the multi-award-winning NBC series This Is Us may have played a role in his deteriorating marriage. On Selling Sunset, Stause explains that "a lot has changed" since she first met and began dating Hartley more than six years ago.

"It's not normal to meet somebody and then they become wildly famous or they become wildly rich or all these things," she says in a confessional clip. "I don't, at the end of the day, think that those things matter. I can understand, god forbid your feelings obviously changed for me at some point, but I just feel like that's how you would treat the garbage that you throw out."

Despite the issues Stause and Hartley were experiencing off-camera, the 39-year-old soap star was initially hoping she'd be able to work things out with her husband, telling Selling Sunset producers, "You know, you work on things with people if they're not perfect—no one is."

"You work on it. You talk about it. You don't go out looking for greener grass; sometimes you have to water the grass that you have," she continued. "And that's what marriage is. Sometimes it can be hard. I don't think it should be more hard than easy, at all, but that's why I'm so confused because I didn't feel like that balance was off. I just feel stupid."

Hartley had apparently already checked out of the relationship by the time he filed for divorce, so taking steps to repair their marriage was apparently out of the question. When Stause found out that he'd lawyered up, she said she immediately left the ex-couple's home in the valley of Los Angeles.

"I don't think I really knew where I was going or what I was gonna do, but I just had to leave," she said in a confessional clip. "Now I have to find a place to live; now I have to scramble and figure this out."

Later in the season, Stause goes to St. Louis to visit her sister and confesses that part of her felt like "he had made a decision, and I wasn't given a say in this."

"Part of me can't wrap my brain around the fact that he would make such a hasty decision without sitting me down and talking to me. But then the other part of me... he had made a decision, that he didn't want to talk about it," she cries. "It has to be two people that want to be married; you can't just have one person. And I just feel like it was just me, fighting for something that was a lost cause because he didn't care enough to even sit me down and tell me."

Only adding to her sadness, Stause didn't get a chance to say goodbye to her 16-year-old stepdaughter Isabella Hartley. "I love her so much, and I had to write a letter to her," Stause reveals to co-star Amanza Smith.

Stause, who also starred as Amanda Dillon on All My Children and Jordan Ridgeway on Days of Our Lives, goes on to tell Smith that she changed her life goals to make room for her relationship with Hartley. But now that the marriage is over, she believes that she's headed to an even greater purpose, bigger than anything she may have dreamed of before.

"I know it is lame and cliché to say everything happens for a reason, but it does make me think of things that I depended on him for," she says. "I had a plan, but then I met him, and I love him so much, so I changed my plan for him. So it just makes me think that maybe there is a bigger plan for me."