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With nearly 15,000 Facebook followers rooting for him, a cheating husband was able to earn back the trust of his estranged wife, after he posted a photo of himself holding a note admitting to his infidelity on his personal Facebook page.

“With him doing that, it really showed me that he loved me and it really didn’t matter who else was in his life,” Sonya Gore told NewsOne in a phone interview Wednesday night. “It showed that he loved me, and he put it all out there. It kind of touched me.”

As originally reported by NewsOne, Ivan Lewis was at his estranged wife’s home several weeks ago pleading with her to take him back, after she discovered that he had been cheating during the first 10 months of their marriage that began back in 2010. Gore kicked him out of her home soon after and he had been trying to get her back ever since.

But late September, Gore, 40, told Lewis that if he really loved her he would post a message admitting to the world that he did her wrong. And while Lewis had taken Gore out to eat and to the movies, neither seemed to make his hurting wife budge. So when she wrote out a hand-written note that read, “I cheated on my wife!!! (and she was ugly),” and asked Lewis to post it, he did so without hesitation.

“I was doing it to get my wife back,” Lewis, 33, told NewsOne over the phone with his wife sitting nearby. “I’ll do whatever.”

He added to the status, “Sonya Gore said I got to get 10,000 (Likes) before she takes me back.”

(Gore told NewsOne that the 10,000 Like threshold was Lewis’ idea, not hers.)

In a matter of days, thousands of people liked the post, hundreds shared it, and plenty of people had something to say about the couple putting their business on the Internet streets.

“I didn’t think that it was really that serious to some people because it really wasn’t that serious to me,” Gore said. “It went everywhere. All over the place. I thought, Oh my god. This is bigger than I thought.”

So far, 14,888 people have liked the post. The trend of people taking to the very public medium of social media to settle personal disputes is becoming commonplace, something that one university professor, whose research focuses on social media infidelity, says is linked to people’s need to feel supported by others.

“As human beings, the one thing that we crave is validation,” Jaclyn Cravens, a professor at the couple and family therapy program at Alliant International University in San Diego, told NewsOne in an interview. We want to have someone sit us down and tell us, ‘You’re entitled to feel the way you feel. Your partner cheated on you. You should feel hurt. You should feel angry. You should feel mad.’

“So I think we go on social media and Facebook these days and seek out the likes and if someone likes my status or agrees with me, they hear what I am saying. If you think about what infidelity does to our relationships, it kind of takes away that validation that our partner cares about us and wants to be with us. So if we’re not feeling validated in our primary relationship, we go to social media to seek out that validation.”

Still, many of the comments on Lewis’ Facebook thread were not supportive. Critics bemoaned Gore and Lewis for taking their relationship issues online, but the now-happy wife says she doesn’t care about the criticism.

“I don’t care about what people thought of him by doing that because he got a lot of slack about it, but it didn’t bother him and I see that as love because he’s not embarrassed at all,” Gore said. “I think that’s true love. If it’s true love, you should be embarrassed by it.”

And Lewis didn’t seem to be, either. Right now, he’s is in the process of moving back in with Gore and says he’s optimistic about his marriage.

“It feels good, man. It feels real good.”