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The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and #MomTok star Mikayla Matthews gained a reputation online for her wholesome content and on the Hulu reality show for her sarcastic, deadpan responses. While some of her costars and influencer friends are quick to stir drama, she’s on the quieter side, but still unafraid to tell it like it is.
Mikayla has also stepped into the spotlight more throughout the reality hit’s run. In addition to becoming more comfortable with standing up to the other #MomTok women (ahem, Whitney) and revealing her fourth pregnancy in season 2, she also began to speak more candidly about surviving childhood sexual abuse. In seasons 3 and 4, even more of her personal issues come into the fold. Below, read on to find out everything you need to know about Mikayla on- and offscreen on SLOMW.
Mikayla Matthews is a Utah-based influencer and content creator.
Mikayla, 26, is a content creator with over 3.3 million TikTok followers. Her content explores motherhood and documents her journey with chronic illness. She announced that she and her husband, Jace Terry, were expecting their fourth child in February 2025, and the early days of her pregnancy are shown towards the end of season 2. When we see Mikayla again in season 3, she’s seven to eight months pregnant, and she filmed season 4 at four weeks postpartum. Like some of her SLOMW costars, including Jessi Ngatikaura, Mikayla was raised Mormon, but has stated on multiple platforms that she no longer practices.
Mikayla married her husband Jace Terry when she was 17.
Mikayla married her husband Jace in 2018 at 17-years-old. In an episode of "The Squeeze" podcast with Tay Lautner, Mikayla describes moving out of her mother’s house to live with her sister at 15. Shortly thereafter, she met Jace through her sister, who worked with Jace’s roommate. Within “less than a month” of meeting Jace, Mikayla found out she was pregnant at 16. Though the two “barely knew each other,” Jace expressed support when Mikayla said she wanted to see the pregnancy through. She gave birth to their first child, a son named Beckham, in July 2017. They married a few months later.
“I think all that was traumatizing, but also it was so helpful being with someone like Jace because, again, he's been so patient with me,” Mikayla shared on "The Squeeze" podcast. “He truly wants me to be the best version of myself.”
The two are also parents of daughters Haven (born in 2019), Tommie (born in 2021), and Lottie (born in July 2025).
Mikayla and her husband Jace spend season 3 struggling with intimacy issues in their relationship.
Mikayla reveals in season 2 of SLOMW that she was sexually abused from age 6 to 15 and, within the “last six years,” sex began to trigger her trauma. She explains that she still struggles with the abuse she survived and attends therapy for the first time about midway through season 2.
In season 3, Mikayla explains that she has intimacy issues because of her past, and she and Jace spend the majority of the episodes navigating the impact those struggles have on their relationship. In episode 5, Mikayla attends an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy session in hopes of starting to unravel her struggles. During the session, she explains more about her difficulty with being vulnerable and how there’s a lot Jace doesn’t know about her abuse. Jace, meanwhile, says in a confessional that he has a hard time developing an emotional and vulnerable relationship with Mikayla, saying it “just leads to me feeling like my wife doesn’t love me.”
Things come to a head when the #MomTok women and their partners go to Stagecoach Music Festival together. At that point, Mikayla had not yet scheduled a couples therapy appointment for her and Jace, despite her EMDR therapist recommending it. So while they’re away, Mikayla and Jace attempt to orchestrate an intimate night for just the two of them in their room’s jacuzzi. After encountering some technical difficulties getting the jacuzzi jets to start and a migration to the hot tub, Mikayla finds her sexual bravado has dissipated, leaving her feeling vulnerable once again and wanting to go to bed.
The next day, Mikayla gets annoyed with Jace for being “cold” towards her and having fun with the rest of the group without her. When Jace tries to talk to her at the festival, she brushes him off, saying she “doesn’t want to talk” to him. Jace tells the camera he wants to be “as supportive” as he needs to be, but that they’ve been “at this for years with her not working on things.” “I’m honestly at the breaking point,” he says. The two fight off-camera in their room later that night about not being on the same page.
“I feel a lot of pressure and guilt around my marriage and our sex life right now. I feel like I have a lot of broken pieces that I haven’t fixed yet,” Mikayla says in the show. “Even though I know that it comes from the abuse and the way I was raised, I think growing up in the church, I’m always trying to chase this idea of being a perfect wife or being perfect for him. It just never feels attainable.”
Jace and Mikayla finally attend couples therapy together in episode 8, “The Book of Awakening.” During the session, Mikayla explains how she oftentimes views sex as an obligation, whereas Jace says he views it as a way to be connected to his wife. Later in the episode, Mikayla tells Jace about the abuse that happened when she was 6 (he had previously only known about the abuse that occurred when she was 15), as well as the identity of her abuser, which is not said on camera. “Although it’s really scary to get all of this off my chest, I feel a lot of relief at the same time,” Mikayla says to the camera. “By no means do I think that it’s going to be a one-and-done fixed deal, but I feel like Jace came into my life at a time that I really needed it.”
During the season 3 reunion, host Stassi Schroeder asked if there had been any improvement in Mikayla's struggles with physical intimacy since season 3 was filmed. While Mikayla answered that it's still a struggle, Jace chimed in to say that she had welcomed their fourth child in the few months between the season and the reunion.
"Since that time, I feel like I haven't had my body or felt in my body for a long time, because of my health issues," Mikayla explained, adding that her struggles with chronic illness had flared up following the birth. (She has spoken out about her lifelong struggles with eczema throughout SLOMW's run.)
"After having the baby, it's like my health stuff all came back 180, overnight," she said. "And then for [Jace], it's still hard because we're still having the intimacy issues. And I'm like, 'I don't know how to overcome it.' I think that's what's hard."
Mikayla and her husband Jace decide to separate at the end of season 4.
Mikayla and Jace's intimacy issues continue to affect their marriage throughout season 4, which began filming just a few weeks after Mikayla gave birth to their fourth child. Early in the season, Mikayla explains that she experienced an intense flare-up of her chronic illness after giving birth. With so much else to deal with, Mikayla's scenes in the first half of season 4 mostly focus on her repairing her friendship with Whitney Leavitt, after Whitney expressed her support as a spouse of someone who also experienced childhood sexual abuse.
"Whitney and Jace are in a very similar place, having to deal with what happened to me and Conner and the implications that it's brought into our marriage, so I feel like we have that shared experience," Mikayla said in an episode 6 confessional. During a stem-cell treatment, Mikayla told Whitney that her flare-up made it "hard to focus on anything else and be motivated to fix anything else while I'm in this state."
While speaking with Mayci Neeley in episode 9, Mikayla opens up about a couple's therapy session she had with Jace, which seemed not to help the situation. "When I get really angry, I'm like, 'Okay, fine, go have sex with someone else. Like, leave me alone almost,'" she shares. "I feel like I'm working on so many different things outside of just sex, and I know that obviously he can't just be like, 'Okay, well we can go without that.' We both get to a point where we get to a point where we feel really helpless about it. [When he says], 'I don't feel like you have the motivation to do it,' I'm like, 'I don't think I have the motivation to do it right now, because I know it's really hard to work through."
She adds in a confessional, "I'm obviously very attracted to Jace, and I want to be married to him. It makes me sad that I'm not able to meet his needs, and I know there's only so long that he can be patient with me for," she said in a confessional, before telling Mayci, "Kissing is harder for me than sex, because I think kissing is more intimate for me and I always have triggers with kissing."
Mikayla and Mayci's conversation is intercut with Jace opening up to Whitney's husband, Conner. When Conner asks what he wants, Jace says, "More than anything and more than the actual sex, I just want to feel like I can connect with my wife again. And I want to feel loved by my wife."
Later in the episode, viewers see Mikayla pack up and leave their home, as the pair decides to separate. When Jace asks Mikayla what she hopes to get out of the separation, she says that she wants to work on her health without the pressure of Jace reminding her about the intimacy issues.
"I think it's hard anytime you bring up the stuff with the sex and the intimacy. I feel it's hard on me because again, my nervous system is already in fight or flight, and I'm already maxed out. My bucket is full," Mikayla explains.
Jace responds, "I know, but for me, it seems like the solution to that would be to commit to trauma therapy until you're at a point where it doesn't make your nervous system freak out." He later adds, "For something like this to feel effective for me, maybe we don't get back together until you feel like you can commit to our relationship?"
Mikayla initially seems upset, pointing out that the "pressure of when it's going to be fixed" stresses her out. But both she and Jace add that it will be better for the kids to see their parents have a healthy connection. (Although Jace highlights an "intimate connection," while Mikayla emphasizes an "emotional connection.")
When the season ends, Mikayla stays at Mayci's house, and only Mayci and her husband, Jacob, know about the separation. Mikayla also intends to communicate with him and visit the kids every single day. She concludes via confessional, "As sad as it is, I do take comfort in knowing that I do have such a great support system in #MomTok. I don't want to have to tear our family apart, but I also know that I have to be selfish for a period of time so that I can heal."
In a post-season-4 interview with Cosmopolitan, Mikayla reveals that she and Jace are still separated and "definitely a work in progress," despite the pair sharing recent family vacations and holiday celebrations on Instagram.
"We’re still working on it. I think it’s something we’re going to be working on for a while," she explained. "The intention of the separation was not to be separated forever. I mean, we have kids. I wasn’t going to go a day without my kids."
