Love Is Blind season 11 star Sarah Williams is getting candid about why she really ended her marriage to John Shannon.
“It was quick, [and] I think I felt a lot of shame about myself, like, he would say things that made me feel shame about myself,” Sarah, 34, said on the Wednesday, November 11, episode of “The Viall Files” podcast. “I felt down … I felt like a meeker version of myself. I started being quiet, so even when he would say something that I felt was out of pocket or I disagreed with, I did eventually stop trying to have the conversation because it just didn’t feel worth it to me.”
Sarah and John, 33, were the only couple to get married during the season 11 finale. Their union, however, was short-lived after John admittedly crossed boundaries by exchanging three explicit texts with a stripper, who also worked as an escort. (John confessed during the reunion that he had been emotionally unfaithful but denied having a physical affair.)
As Sarah noted on Nick Viall’s podcast, there were also other reasons for the pair’s divorce.
“[His] behavior was enough for me. I needed to get out. I knew that,” she stated. “I think at first I was like, ‘I can fix this.’ There was a certain point where I was like, ‘What am I doing? Like, this is crazy.’ And then, [in] December [of 2025], he started accusing me of cheating in weird ways.”
Sarah claimed John thought she was having an affair because she kept the front door “ajar” when he left their home in the middle of her workday.
“I’d run down to get a package at some point, and he thought I was cheating on him in the 45 minutes that he was at the gym,” she alleged. “I was like, ‘What is going on?’ And there were a few more moments like that.”
By the time Sarah saw John’s text message chain with alleged “sexually explicit requests” with an unidentified escort, she realized her marriage was over. (Sarah said John briefly messaged the sex worker in February after going on a boys’ trip months before she found out in April.)
“John and I had an open phone policy, but I’ve never been through his phone. I found out because on boy trips, I’m fine with the strip club, like, it’s fine. And we explicitly talked about it,” she said of discovering the messages. “I was like, ‘Yeah, if you go and the guys go, that’s totally OK, just behave [and] don’t be weird about it.’ … [Instead], he lied for no reason because we had talked about it and I was like, ‘No, you can go.’ So then that triggered something in my brain.”
After John’s apparent lie, Sarah decided to look through his phone, where she found the aforementioned texts with the escort.
“I was like, ‘Oh, he lied about the trip. That’s weird.’ And then, it was very laid out for me. It was very easy [to find in his phone],” she said, claiming that John also had an active profile on Tinder with at least one match. “He says [he didn’t use the app further] and nothing physical happened and that, after the texting and stuff, he wanted to come home ‘cause that’s when he realized he liked being married.”
John has not publicly addressed Sarah’s claims about their marriage. Us reached out for comment.
Love Is Blind is currently streaming on Netflix.
