In January 2018, Laterras R. Whitfield posted on Facebook. “Dear Future Wife,” he began. The post was long, written at 6 one morning after a holiday season that can be rough on single people, with its shiny reminders of happy coupledom. “As I lay in my queen-sized bed, it’s serving as a stark reminder my queen is missing,” Whitfield wrote.
He was about to turn 40. He’d been married once, and the divorce haunted him. He’d been dating a woman, but it had soured into one of those tortured situationships common to a 21st-century dating landscape low in trust and commitment. That morning, he let himself imagine more.
“I believe in and value family,” he wrote. “I want to build that with you.” He spoke of boundaries, priorities, honesty. “I want the whole you. You are doing a disservice to our relationship if you allow me to fall in love with a lie,” he wrote. The post got nearly 300 comments and 68 shares.
Whitfield didn’t know where this was going, but such a sincere mission, once proclaimed in the public square, cannot be easily taken back. He kept writing letters to his future wife; he wrote hundreds. The search would lead to a viral podcast — called, naturally, Dear Future Wifey — and a new book called Student of Love. And the hypothetical woman he’d been writing to along the way? Eventually, she became real.
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‘I Flunked Love’
On his podcast, Whitfield likes to say that “love isn’t about finding the right person, it’s about becoming the right person.” The act of becoming, for him, took a while.
He was born and raised in Pleasant Grove, the middle child of five siblings and the clown of the family. “Too talkative,” teachers complained on his report card. By his teen years, he was strolling through Town East Mall with his friends — all of them in baggy jeans, Karl Kani cross colors, a Cowboys starter jacket, sneakers that were called “Dopeman Nikes” — and they competed to see who could collect the most phone numbers from girls. He never drank, having seen his older brother struggle with booze, but girls were his weakness.
He flirted with other kinds of trouble. In his sophomore year, he got expelled from Skyline High School for trying to sell an unloaded gun at school. A knuckleheaded move, but it brought him to the Learning Alternative Center for Expelled Youth, or LACEY, a Dallas ISD pilot program where he thrived. Local writer David Marquis helped a dozen students pen a play called Real Life based on personal challenges like drugs, sex, peer pressure. The experience was a revelation to Whitfield. The drama bug had bitten.
Life was getting real, though. In his senior year, he became a father. The weight of the responsibility shook him, and he turned to his Christian faith. At 17, he pledged his life to God, a date he still celebrates as his “re-birthday.” He passed on college to spend more time with his daughter, LaTerria, and threw himself into theater, first as an actor and later as a playwright.
Laterras Whitfield is photographed in 2004 at the Newark Symphony Hall where a play he wrote and directed, “What Men Don’t Tell,” was showing.
Eric M. Jukelevics / Digital File_EMAIL
The touring Black stage plays of the ’90s and ’00s, sometimes called the urban theater circuit, mixed gospel and R&B music with uplifting comedy and Christian values. Tyler Perry got his start in this grassroots scene, which marketed directly to churches and sold out big venues at a time when Black faith-based entertainment was hard to find. In 2002, at 24, Whitfield became a rising star on the circuit, with plays about family and relationships that featured small-screen luminaries like Tisha Campbell (from the sitcom Martin) and Kim Fields (Tootie from The Facts of Life) and musical artists like gospel crooner Dottie Peoples and R&B singers Chante Moore and Kenny Lattimore. When The Dallas Morning News profiled Whitfield in 2004, he had two tours going on at the same time, one at the Newark Symphony Hall in New Jersey and another about to hit Dallas.
His shows examined men’s difficulty opening up, the dangers of promiscuity, how childhood trauma can shapeshift into compulsive behaviors around money, sex and power. Whitfield got married in 2006, but away from the stage, he struggled with his own temptations. He cheated on his wife, not once but several times, something he shares in his book Student of Love, a compendium of wisdom from experts and long-term couples that also traces how he made his way back from this low point. “I was convinced that I wasn’t just a bad partner but a hopeless one,” he writes in a chapter titled, “I Flunked Love.”
Whitfield and his wife divorced in December 2015, a few weeks shy of their 10th anniversary. His best friend died the same month, and the next years brought more challenges. He adopted his nephew in 2017, after the boy was placed into protective services (his sister was struggling with drugs). Then came January 2018, when he poured his deepest wish into the Facebook post that began, “Dear Future Wife.” If the hope was that this woman would magically materialize, she did not. But someone else did.
Laterras R. Whitfield (center) with his two adopted sons, Armani (left) and LaDarrion (right).
Tony Pettiford
In late 2018, Whitfield got a call from a producer at Wednesday’s Child, the long-running WFAA program about children needing family. A 15-year-old boy in foster care named Armani wanted to feed the homeless on Thanksgiving, and since homelessness was a concern of Whitfield’s, the producer tapped him to help. What she didn’t know is that Whitfield had privately told himself he’d consider adopting another boy if he was 16, an age that required less constant care, more mentorship. It also happens to be about the age Whitfield was when he brought that gun to school, when his own life went off-track.
“I heard the voice of God so clearly say, this is your son,” Whitfield recalls of the day he decided to adopt Armani in a short film nominated for a Lone Star Emmy in 2020. By then, Whitfield had pivoted his creative talents from stage to filmmaking, and this was his third Lone Star Emmy nomination. In 2018, he’d been nominated for a short film about his nephew called Dunkle: An Adoption Story, and good luck making it through either of these videos without crying.
Whitfield may have fallen short as a husband, but as a man, he was stepping up.
‘To discover, uncover and recover love’
Laterras Whitfield started the podcast “Dear Future Wifey” during the pandemic. He’s launching its eleventh season with a new co-host: his wife. He’s photographed at his studio on Monday, Dec. 29, 2025, in Cedar Hill.
Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer
The Dear Future Wifey podcast launched in April 2020, after the pandemic shuttered Whitfield’s side gigs shooting videos at weddings and schools. He owned a studio in Cedar Hill and kept trying to sell people on recording podcasts there. What if he became his own proof-of-concept?
He came up with a tagline. “I am on a journey to discover, uncover and recover love.” He brought on guests for an intimate rap session on romance — “Timing Is Everything” and “Love Heals” were early titles — but ended each episode with a letter. “Dear Future Wifey,” it began.
The podcast space is male-dominated, but those men generally cover politics, sports, history, pop culture. Podcasts about relationships and love tend to be hosted by women or gay men, and they usually aren’t explicitly Christian, so Whitfield was a novelty. His first episode to go viral, in July 2020, was with therapist Jay Barnett. Called “Heal, Brother, Heal!” it’s an hour-plus of two Black men opening up about heartbreak and the masculine pressure to “just suck it up.” Whitfield had 900 YouTube subscribers when he posted that video; by the end of the month, he had 10,000.
Over the next years, the podcast grew in numbers and scope. He booked big names from the Christian motivational circuit, like Sarah Jakes Roberts, daughter of TD Jakes and current co-senior pastor of The Potter’s House Church, and Priscilla Shirer, author and daughter of pastor Tony Evans from Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, and Gary Chapman, the pastor behind the blockbuster relationship book, The 5 Love Languages. Widows, never-marrieds, people dating after divorce joined him on the yellow couch of his studio, and what emerged was the sound of common struggle.
His book, Student of Love, is a brisk hopscotch through insight he’s gained over hundreds of these conversations. “Rejection isn’t always a dead end. Sometimes, it’s just a detour leading to something better.” “A man should pursue, not persuade. A woman should present, not pursue.” Like Whitfield’s guests, the book is a hybrid of therapy speak, Christian gospel and traditional values.
Laterras Whitfield has a new book based on relationship insight he gained over the years doing the “Dear Future Wifey” podcast. A copy is on display at his studio in Cedar Hill on Monday, Dec. 29, 2025.
Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer
Dear Future Wifey grew to nearly 650,000 YouTube subscribers and made Whitfield a star in faith-based communities. It grew so popular that skeptics — and Whitfield has his share — started to question if he even wanted a wife. Was this just some PR stunt?
He still ended each podcast with a letter to his future wife, reading the note into a microphone before sliding it into a wooden treasure box that was getting pretty full. Nearly 300 letters. Would they ever find a home?
‘I need to see if there’s more to us’
In November 2023, Whitfield flew to Los Angeles to record a live podcast at the California Worship Center in the San Fernando Valley.
Whitfield never regretted making his intentions for a wife so public, but a few overzealous interactions had put him on guard. Several women contacted his pastor, Eben Conner of Arlington’s Word of Truth Family Church, to explain that they were his future wife. Another moved to the Dallas area and joined his church. So he was eager to extract himself from a woman in line giving him her number when his eyes fell on another woman. She had a warm smile.
Her name was Ashley Woods, and she told him they had friends in common. Without thinking, Whitfield took her hand and walked her to the lobby to chat. It was only instinct, but later he would revisit that moment, wondering what had compelled him to do that. Was it God? Was it fate? At the time, he was privately shaking his head. “I just grabbed this stranger’s hand,” he thought. “I am trippin’.”
They became friends that day. Woods lived in Los Angeles, where she ran a VIP front-of-house service called DoorHawks, and over the next year and a half, they kept in touch over the phone and hung out when Whitfield came to town. One of the many pieces of wisdom Whitfield has gleaned in his search is that love often begins in friendship. Ashley sought his advice on guys she was seeing; he shared stories of his dating life. On Friday nights, they liked to listen to worship songs together on the phone, singing at the top of their lungs.
Then one day in February 2025, Whitfield woke from a nightmare where Ashley was with another man. He was consumed by jealousy, his subconscious tipping him off to an attachment he hadn’t admitted to himself. He called her. “I need to see if there’s more to us,” he said. “I want to take you on a date.”
Ashley was cautiously optimistic. She didn’t want to lose her friend if this didn’t work out, but she told him she was free on March 18. He booked the flight while they were still on the phone. That summer, he proposed. By November, they were hitched.
Laterras Whitfield launched his podcast “Dear Future Wifey” in 2020. In 2023, he met Ashley Woods — now Ashley Whitfield.
REEM Photography
Whitfield does nothing halfway, and that wedding was an event. Best man Kenny Lattimore sang, Ashley sparkled in a white Yumi Katsura gown, Whitfield looked sharp in a Don Morphy custom suit, and he was so overcome during the worship portion of the service that he dropped to his knees, his face streaked with tears. Two hundred and fifty guests attended the wedding at California Worship, the sanctuary where the couple met, but the ceremony was livestreamed on YouTube, promoted as “The Mystery Bride: A Film By God.”
This was the first time followers were seeing Ashley, whose reveal had been teased in posts that showed only her hand or back. Comments filled with glee and heart emojis, and viewers chimed in from Ireland and London, from Nigeria and Rwanda and Uganda, from Harlem and Arkansas. The search had been one man’s, but more than five years had transformed it into a shared quest to confirm the value of commitment and connection in a culture that seemed to be drifting away from that. (Twenty-eight thousand people livestreamed the wedding, the video of which has since gotten more than 400,000 views.)
There was one dangling question, though. What would happen to Dear Future Wifey now that Whitfield had found his wife?
The answer came Dec. 31, when Ashley made her first official appearance. “I’m so excited to be kicking off Season 11 with the woman who all these letters were written to, written about, written for,” Whitfield said, as the couple held hands on the show’s yellow couch. “Welcome to the Dear Future Wifey podcast, my new co-host, Ashley R. Whitfield.”
The search to understand love would continue, this time side by side.
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