After more than 75 years, Boy Meets World stars William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett are revealing the unconventional ways they have kept the marriage strong.
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During a recent interview with the Daily Mail, Bartlett clarified what she previously meant when she said she and Daniels had an “open marriage.”
“It’s funny, the press will pick up on something and make more of it than it was,” she explained. “There was never any discussion as to what we were going to do, but in 75 years, the two of you together, you know, it would be abnormal if you… weren’t attracted occasionally to other people.”
The actress pointed out, “There have been times, yeah, both of us, on both sides.”
However, she also said that she and Daniels had never discussed the “open marriage” arrangement.
“Bill and I never sit down and make rules,” Barlett noted. “We never sit down and talk about these things. We just don’t.”
She then said that the couple just live their lives. “And if he’s away for a year, he’s away for a year. Our lives just went on, but we never got unhinged … We never got unhinged, but our lives did go in different directions occasionally.”
Barlett Once Referred to the Couple’s ‘Open Marriage’ As ‘Very Painful’ and ‘Didn’t Work Well’
During a 2023 interview with Fox News Digital, Barlett shared details about her and Daniels’ “open marriage” for the first time.
“I guess it was a little bit of an open marriage at first,” she said at the time. “But that was very painful. That didn’t work well. And it was a time when people were doing that. It was at a time in New York when there was a lot of sex and a lot of people doing all kinds of things, you know – very free.”
The couple married in 1951. Nearly a decade into the marriage, Barlette had an affair that lasted a few months” with an actor who was “slightly boring.”
The actress detailed the situation in her memoir, Middle of the Rainbow. “I never felt guilty because I never felt tied to fidelity, and neither did Bill,” she wrote.
However, she admitted that Daniels’ affair with a producer in the 1970s “devastated” her. That was when she realized she “could no longer tolerate any kind of open marriage.”
“It was very painful for the both of us,” she told Fox News Digital. “But it was something we had to go through because we never went through it.”
She went on to add, “When we got together, I was 18. Bill was my first boyfriend … We just had to go through all that, and still, we loved each other very much and always have. [We] have always been there for each other. That’s what matters — if you’re there for the person and help [them] along in a relationship, [have] respect for them and what they’re doing and being there for them… [You have to] be together on the other side.”