Bethany Joy Lenz Cindy Ord/Getty Images
Bethany Joy Lenz revealed she dipped her toe back into the dating pool.
While gushing over her new beau, the 43-year-old One Tree Hill alum opened up about how she balanced writing her memoir, Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!), with parenting her teen daughter.
“I’ve been seeing a wonderful man, and he was incredibly helpful, very supportive, and helped with things like after-school pickup, so I could keep writing until 5,” Lenz told Variety on Tuesday, October 22.
“I tried to put myself on a schedule so that I knew what days I was picking her up from school and helping her with her homework or taking her to different activities, so I could make sure it still felt like I was a part of the daily routine,” Lenz continued. “Then there were other days where I was like, peace out, I’m writing from 7:30 until 6. So I did have help. And she, thank God, is at an age where Mom is not cool, and the last thing she wants to do is hang out with me.”
Robby Klein/Getty Images When Bethany Joy Lenz started to question parts of her life, her “justification” for being in a cult started to crumble. “Enough times you hear the word ‘cult,’ but the justification of it can’t possibly be that I’m actually in a cult,” Lenz, 43, told People in an interview published on Tuesday, […]
Lenz welcomed daughter Rosie in 2011 with her ex-husband. In her memoir and interviews about the book, Lenz got candid about her past marriage, revealing she was married to the son of the leader of the cult she belonged to at the time. (She referred to her ex as “QB” in the book.)
“We didn’t have a lot in common. There wasn’t a lot of intellectual stimulation,” Lenz said during an appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast earlier this month. “I kind of run out of options. … It just became this sort of arranged situation.” Lenz and QB later ended up on a sex schedule, led by his dad, “Les.”)
Bethany Joy Lenz Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Entertainment Weekly
After a decade, Lenz ultimately left the religious cult around 2013. “I was done. I walked out of that group and I questioned everything — my whole upbringing, all religions,” Lenz exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of her memoir’s release. “I’m a really deep thinker. I spend a lot of time using reason to try and understand behavior patterns and belief systems. And I was done with God.”
In the book, Lenz detailed her anger with God after leaving the cult and having a three-year custody battle with her ex, but now, she explained that she is “unlearning” a lot of what she was taught including establishing her “trust with God again.”
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“That took years and I’m still working on it,” she said. “I’m still finding areas in my life where I’m holding onto control so tightly and realizing this is because I don’t trust that God’s actually got me [and] that I can let go. And if I make a mistake, it’s a mistake and there’s a plan B. And if I don’t make a mistake, great, I made the right choice.”
Still, she knows Rosie was worth it.
“If I had to go through that 10 more times in my life in order to have her,” Lenz told Us, “I would do it because she’s worth it and she belongs here.”