Ina Garten and her husband Jeffrey's 56-year marriage is stronger than ever, but their relationship nearly fell apart when she opened the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store in 1978.
“I was a very shy person,” the 76-year-old celebrity chef wrote in his new memoir. People Magazine — When he got married 10 years ago, in 1968, Jeffrey “expected a wife to cook dinner.”
“Some of the characters we played were really annoying,” she says, “and I felt like if I hit the pause button, that would get his attention.”
She said they first “shattered” their “traditional roles” when they both left their jobs at the White House to buy a store in the Hamptons.
Ina Garten was scared her father would “kill me” as a child: “I was physically scared of him”
Ina Garten and her husband Jeffrey's 56-year marriage is stronger than ever, but their relationship nearly fell apart when she opened the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store in 1978. (Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images)
“While cooking, cleaning, shopping and running the store, I was doing it as a businesswoman, not as a wife,” she wrote. “My responsibilities prevented me from thinking about anything else. No one knew who would be the first to get home from work and what to do, because I was never the one to get home from work!”
Her husband remained in Washington, DC, and only came to New York on weekends, which she said at the time felt like an “intrusion.”
“I wasn't paying him enough attention,” she admitted. “I just wanted everyone to leave me alone so I could focus on the store. Jeffrey was fully mature and living the life he wanted. I wasn't. And without being alone, I didn't know who I was or what I wanted. I needed that freedom.”
Celebrity chef Ina Garten didn't have a family because she “didn't want to recreate” her childhood
She said she believed it would lead to the end of her marriage and ultimately asked her husband for a separation.
“I thought about it a lot, and at my worst I wondered if divorce was the only answer,” she writes in her memoir, “When Good Fortune Comes, I'll Be Ready,” which was released on October 1.
Garten said she “shattered” “traditional roles” in her marriage when she left her job at the White House, where she and her husband worked, to buy the Barefoot Contessa store in the Hamptons. (Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images, courtesy of the Webby Awards)
“It was the hardest thing I've ever done,” she says. “I told him he had to do it on his own. I didn't say whether that meant now or forever. Jeffrey, in true Jeffrey style, said, 'If you feel you have to do it on your own, so be it.' He packed up his things and went back to his home in Washington with no plans to come back. I suppressed my emotions and threw myself into work.”
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When The Barefoot Contessa closed for the winter that year, she returned to Washington, D.C. Jeffrey met her at the train station, sitting on the front steps of their once-happy home, telling her, “We were caught between two worlds, hesitant to go in. The world of when we were Ina and Jeffrey, and the sad world of now. A painful limbo.”
She said her husband had asked her what he could do to save their marriage, and his answers were full of hope, contrary to her pessimistic view of their relationship.
Garten opened the Barefoot Contessa Shop in 1978. (Nathan Congleton/NBCU Photobank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
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“I could never live with him in a traditional 'couple' relationship,” she explained. “Jeffrey had done nothing wrong. He was just doing what men before him had done. But we live in a new era and that behavior was no longer acceptable to me. I had changed.”
She told him that if he saw a therapist and got her perspective on their relationship, maybe it could help them both.
“All Jeffrey needed was an hour,” she told People magazine. “He just went for an hour and totally understood.”
Ina and Jeffrey Garten were married in 1968. (Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
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She added that her husband's “willingness” to see a therapist was just as important as “whatever might happen in the sessions.” “He was that determined to convince me that he was going to make our marriage work.”
Garten said it took time and listening to each other, but the couple was able to move forward in their marriage as “equals.”
“I'm so glad I did,” she said of asking to leave all those years ago, “I know how crazy and dangerous it was, but if I hadn't done it, our relationship wouldn't be what it is now.”
