close
close

topicnews · September 18, 2024

Ina Garten remembers a “really scary” conversation with husband Jeffrey about their marriage

Ina Garten remembers a “really scary” conversation with husband Jeffrey about their marriage

Ina Garten speaks openly about a difficult time in her marriage.

The Barefoot Contessa recalled a difficult conversation she had with her husband Jeffrey Garten about ten years after their wedding, noting that the two once had a candid conversation about their relationship.

“You had to have a brave conversation with Jeffrey, the love of your life,” Hoda Kotb asked Garten in a clip from an interview that aired on TODAY on Sept. 18. “What was the conversation about?”

“We were taking a walk on the beach and I just said to him, ‘I need to be alone for a while,'” Garten said. “What made it even harder was that he said, ‘If you feel like you need to be alone, you need to be alone.'”

Garten, who married Jeffrey in 1968, said the conversations created a physical distance between them.

“He went back to Washington and I didn’t come back,” she said. Both had worked for the government in the capital in the 1970s.

Ultimately, Garten does not regret this conversation.

“No, I felt like I said the right thing, but it was really scary because I said it to someone I really loved,” she said.

Despite the difficulties, Garten and her husband persevered. Their relationship was marked by the explicit text messages he sent her. She also spoke openly about how romantic her husband was, noting that he wrote her love letters.

“He wrote to me every day when he was in college and then when he was in the military,” she told TODAY in April. “And I put them all in a box. And that’s what I had as a record. It was really quite extraordinary.”

You can see the rest of Hoda’s interview with Garten when it airs on October 1, the same day Garten’s memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, is released.

You may also like...