Tina Knowles Details Decades Of Infidelity That Led To The End Of Her 31-Year Marriage To Ex-husband, Mathew Knowles

Tina Knowles is looking back on her love life with peace and clarity.

For the first time the fashion designer and businesswoman opens up about her tumultuous first marriage to Mathew Knowles, with whom she shares daughters Beyoncé, 43, and Solange, 38.

She said she didn’t know she would go there when she first started writing.

“Everything that happened in my life has happened to bring me to this point in my life,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s World’s Most Beautiful issue, opening up about the vulnerable stories of love and loss that she shares in new memoir Matriarch.

Knowles, 71, wrote:

“When I went into writing the book, it was very carefully written at first. But then it was like, this doesn’t even make sense because there’s only, you know, all the positive stuff. And there was a lot of positivity. But no, I didn’t plan on writing that. But it’s mystory. It’s just the truth.”

Mathew, a Houston salesman-turned-talent manager, and Knowles married in 1980. Cracks appeared in the couple’s marriage nearly from the start.

“There were already problems in our marriage that first year,” writes Knowles, who details how Mathew had a continuous problem with fidelity.

“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.”

Knowles goes on to share that once, when she was pregnant with Solange, she reached a breaking point.

“The marriage was deteriorating faster than I could possibly find ways or even reasons to make it work — even with the pregnancy,”

she writes.

According to Knowles, her husband became more reckless and she contemplated leaving.

“I had gotten used to these extremes — incredibly joyous half the time as we shared life’s adventure, then being disgusted and heartsick over how brazen his cheating could get.”

But the duo found perfect harmony when it came to helping their daughters reach stardom. A skilled hairstylist and fashion designer, Knowles spent most of the 2000s behind the scenes creating avant garde looks for the Beyoncé-fronted super group Destiny’s Child, helping define the hit R&B act’s unique style, before implementing the same winning strategy for their daughters’ solo careers.

Throughout it all, the ups and downs of her marriage continued.

“I was caught in this dance with him, each 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.”

Then in 2009, came news that gutted her. Knowles learned through the press that her husband had fathered a child outside of their marriage.

When he tried to speak with her later that day “I screamed, ‘Get out! Get out!’ like he was some demon. ‘I hate you!’ … my world had exploded.”

After 31 years of marriage Knowles divorced Mathew in 2011. She writes:

“I was deeply sad, not about him but about the marriage. I felt like I failed. I failed us, my kids — myself.”

But, she tells PEOPLE, eventually the split set her free and on a new path. She admits:

“In the early days I was very bad at balance, at taking time for myself. When I got to be around maybe 50, I started doing that. And when I got divorced at 59, absolutely. You know, for the first time it was a lot about nurturing myself and healing myself.”

Knowles went on to marry actor Richard Lawson in 2015, but they split in 2023.

“It’s been a rollercoaster,” she says of her life in its entirety.

“My journey has been filled with, Oh God, so many obstacles, so many hardships, but it’s also been filled with tremendous amounts of joy…It’s been an amazing ride. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.”