\u2018I Flunked Love\u2019<\/p>\n
On his podcast, Whitfield likes to say that \u201clove isn\u2019t about finding the right person, it\u2019s about becoming the right person.\u201d The act of becoming, for him, took a while. <\/p>\n
He was born and raised in Pleasant Grove, the middle child of five siblings and the clown of the family. \u201cToo talkative,\u201d teachers complained on his report card. By his teen years, he was strolling through Town East Mall with his friends \u2014 all of them in baggy jeans, Karl Kani cross colors, a Cowboys starter jacket, sneakers that were called \u201cDopeman Nikes\u201d \u2014 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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cre-birthday.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
![\"Laterras](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/OURPEZ55ABCELJIA3MFAJFQMGU.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Eric M. Jukelevics \/ Digital File_EMAIL<\/p>\n
The touring Black stage plays of the \u201990s and \u201900s, 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. <\/p>\n
His shows examined men\u2019s 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. \u201cI was convinced that I wasn\u2019t just a bad partner but a hopeless one,\u201d he writes in a chapter titled, \u201cI Flunked Love.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cDear Future Wife.\u201d If the hope was that this woman would magically materialize, she did not. But someone else did. <\/p>\n
![\"Laterras](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/MF2W5HYBRJDEFERJWZVJ4EN2EI.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Laterras R. Whitfield (center) with his two adopted sons, Armani (left) and LaDarrion (right).<\/p>\n
Tony Pettiford<\/p>\n
In late 2018, Whitfield got a call from a producer at Wednesday\u2019s 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\u2019s, the producer tapped him to help. What she didn\u2019t know is that Whitfield had privately told himself he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI heard the voice of God so clearly say, this is your son,\u201d Whitfield recalls of the day he decided to adopt Armani in a short film<\/a> 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\u2019d been nominated for a short film<\/a> about his nephew called Dunkle: An Adoption Story, and good luck making it through either of these videos without crying. <\/p>\n Whitfield may have fallen short as a husband, but as a man, he was stepping up. <\/p>\n \u2018To discover, uncover and recover love\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Smiley N. Pool \/ Staff Photographer<\/p>\n The Dear Future Wifey podcast launched in April 2020, after the pandemic shuttered Whitfield\u2019s 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? <\/p>\n He came up with a tagline. \u201cI am on a journey to discover, uncover and recover love.\u201d He brought on guests for an intimate rap session on romance \u2014 \u201cTiming Is Everything\u201d and \u201cLove Heals\u201d were early titles \u2014 but ended each episode with a letter. \u201cDear Future Wifey,\u201d it began. <\/p>\n 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\u2019t explicitly Christian, so Whitfield was a novelty. His first episode to go viral, in July 2020, was with therapist Jay Barnett. Called \u201cHeal, Brother, Heal!\u201d it\u2019s an hour-plus of two Black men opening up about heartbreak and the masculine pressure to \u201cjust suck it up.\u201d Whitfield had 900 YouTube subscribers when he posted that video; by the end of the month, he had 10,000. <\/p>\n Over the next years, the podcast grew in numbers and scope. He booked big names from the Christian motivational circuit, like Sarah Jakes Roberts<\/a>, daughter of TD Jakes and current co-senior pastor of The Potter\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n His book, Student of Love, is a brisk hopscotch through insight he\u2019s gained over hundreds of these conversations. \u201cRejection isn\u2019t always a dead end. Sometimes, it\u2019s just a detour leading to something better.\u201d \u201cA man should pursue, not persuade. A woman should present, not pursue.\u201d Like Whitfield\u2019s guests, the book is a hybrid of therapy speak, Christian gospel and traditional values. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Smiley N. Pool \/ Staff Photographer<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 and Whitfield has his share \u2014 started to question if he even wanted a wife. Was this just some PR stunt? <\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n \u2018I need to see if there\u2019s more to us\u2019<\/p>\n In November 2023, Whitfield flew to Los Angeles to record a live podcast at the California Worship Center in the San Fernando Valley. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n 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. \u201cI just grabbed this stranger\u2019s hand,\u201d he thought. \u201cI am trippin\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t admitted to himself. He called her. \u201cI need to see if there\u2019s more to us,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to take you on a date.\u201d <\/p>\n Ashley was cautiously optimistic. She didn\u2019t want to lose her friend if this didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Laterras Whitfield launched his podcast “Dear Future Wifey” in 2020. In 2023, he met Ashley Woods \u2014 now Ashley Whitfield.<\/p>\n REEM Photography<\/p>\n 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<\/a> on YouTube, promoted as \u201cThe Mystery Bride: A Film By God.\u201d <\/p>\n 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\u2019s, 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.)<\/p>\n There was one dangling question, though. What would happen to Dear Future Wifey now that Whitfield had found his wife? <\/p>\n The answer came Dec. 31, when Ashley made her first official appearance. \u201cI\u2019m so excited to be kicking off Season 11 with the woman who all these letters were written to, written about, written for,\u201d Whitfield said, as the couple held hands on the show\u2019s yellow couch. \u201cWelcome to the Dear Future Wifey podcast, my new co-host, Ashley R. Whitfield.\u201d<\/p>\n The search to understand love would continue, this time side by side. <\/p>\n Q&A with the TikTok queen of dressing up, who escaped into her Preston Hollow closet and found her calling. <\/p>\n The Weatherford bareback rider blazed an unconventional path to the National Finals Rodeo, including a \u201cYellowstone\u201d cameo and clashes with authority. It\u2019s just the family way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In January 2018, Laterras R. Whitfield posted on Facebook. \u201cDear Future Wife,\u201d he began. The post was long,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,1881,12605,242,1637,4395],"class_list":{"0":"post-112675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-dallas","9":"tag-dallas-headlines","10":"tag-dallas-news","11":"tag-faith","12":"tag-high-profile","13":"tag-lifestyle","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-podcasts"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Laterras](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/44ZTTY35ARG4FFYS2HKA2ITT4E.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n![\"Laterras](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/X5LSV7ZWPBCWTOZJRPLARBENWI.jpg\")
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<\/a>Carla Rockmore went from Dallas carpool mom to fashion force<\/a><\/p>\n![\""I](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/G7A3AH3I7VC2VBBAXZS4CODL4A.jpg\")
<\/a>Hepola: Cowboy Rocker Steiner ditched school in fourth grade \u2014 and still won the world<\/a><\/p>\n