Ina Garten’s 56-year marriage to husband Jeffrey is stronger than ever now, but it nearly fell apart when she opened her Barefoot Contessa specialty food store in 1978.
The 76-year-old celebrity chef said in her new memoir — excerpted by People magazine — that when they got married ten years earlier, in 1968, Jeffrey “expected a wife that would make dinner.”
“There were certain roles that we played, and I found them really annoying,” she said. “I felt that if I just hit the pause button, I would get his attention.”
She said that she first “shattered” their “traditional roles” when she quit her job at the White House where they had both worked and bought the shop in the Hamptons.
INA GARTEN FEARED HER FATHER WOULD ‘KILL’ HER AS A CHILD: ‘I WAS PHYSICALLY AFRAID OF HIM’
“While I was still cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing at the store, I was doing it as a businesswoman, not a wife,” she wrote. “My responsibilities made it impossible for me to even think about anything else. There was no expectation about who got home from work first and what they should do, because I never got home from work!”
Her husband had remained in Washington, D.C., and only came to New York on weekends, which she said at the time felt like a “distraction.”
“I didn’t pay enough attention to him,” she admitted. “I just wanted everyone to leave me alone so I could concentrate on the store. Jeffrey was fully formed and living the life he wanted to live. I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t be able to figure out who I was or what I wanted unless I was on my own. I needed that freedom.”
She said she eventually asked him for a separation, believing it would lead to the end of their marriage.
“I thought about it a lot, and at my lowest point, I wondered if the only answer would be to get a divorce,” she wrote in the memoir “Be Ready When the Luck Comes” out on Oct. 1.
“It was the hardest thing I ever did,” she said. “I told him that I needed to be on my own. I didn’t say whether it was for now … or forever. In true Jeffrey form, he said, ‘If you feel like you need to be on your own, you need to do it.’ He packed his bag and went home to Washington with no plan to come back. I buried my emotions and threw myself into my work.”
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She moved back to Washington, D.C., when the Barefoot Contessa closed for the winter that year. Jeffrey met her at the train station, and they sat on the front steps of their once-happy home “reluctant to go in because we were caught between two worlds: the way it used to be when we were Ina and Jeffrey, and the sad way it was now. A painful limbo.”
She said he asked what he could do to save their marriage with a hopefulness that didn’t match her grim view of their relationship.
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“I just couldn’t live with him in a traditional ‘man and wife’ relationship,” she explained. “Jeffrey hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just doing what every man before him had done. But we were living in a new era, and that behavior wasn’t okay with me anymore. I had changed.”
She told him if he saw a therapist and could see her point of view on their relationship, it might save them.
“One hour, that’s all Jeffrey needed,” she said, according to People. “He went once for an hour and totally got it.”
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She added that her husband’s “willingness” to see the therapist was as important as “anything that might happen during their session. He was that determined to convince me he was serious about making our marriage work.”
Garten said it took time and listening to each other, but they were able to move forward in their marriage as “equals.”
“Thank God I did,” she said of asking for a separation all those years ago. “I think how crazy that was and how dangerous it was, but we wouldn’t have the relationship we have now if I hadn’t done it.”
