Ina Garten’s divorce revealed? No one thought this would happen!
From Britney Spears’ book to Prince Harry’s royal statement, the world’s most famous celebrities have a lot to say.
The Barefoot Contessa has been a household name for decades. And Ina’s marriage to Jeffrey Garten has lasted even longer.
After Ina confessed she “took a baseball bat” to her marital roles and weighed separation vs. divorce, fans are paying attention. What went wrong?
When did Ina Garten think about divorce?
These days Ina Garten and her longtime husband Jeffrey Garten are still very much a couple. But they have thought about divorce.
In his new memoir, Be prepared when luck favors youThe iconic Ina Garten reveals how she and Jeffrey split up — and almost got divorced.
It was the 1970s. Ina was already busy running Barefoot Contessa, a specialty food store that would one day make her a household name.
As People A preview of Ina Garten’s new memoir reveals the couple were on the verge of divorce in the 1970s while she was still busy professionally.
Ina recalled that during those years Jeffrey “expected a wife who could cook.”
“We did some role plays and I found them very disturbing,” he said. “I thought if I just hit the pause button, I’d get her attention.”
Ina Garten takes a ‘baseball bat’ to her traditional marriage roles
Ina and Jeffrey Garten both worked in the White House. However, they left their DC jobs to run Barefoot Contessa. Jeffrey lived in DC during the week, coming home to the Hamptons on the weekends.
“When I bought the Barefoot Contessa, I broke our traditional roles — went up to them with a baseball bat and cut them to pieces,” she writes in her memoir. “While I was still cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing the store, I was doing all of this as a businesswoman, not a wife.”
Ina Garten explained: “My responsibilities made it impossible for me to think about anything else. There were no expectations about who would get home from work first and what they should do, because I would never get home from work!”
“When Jeffrey came over on the weekends, he would distract me. I didn’t pay enough attention to him,” Ina Garten explained in her autobiography. “I just wanted everyone to leave me alone so I could focus on the store.”
His book elaborated: “Jeffrey was fully grown and living the life he wanted to live.”
Ina then wrote plainly: “I didn’t belong, and I wasn’t able to figure out who I was or what I wanted until I was alone. I needed that freedom.”
This is how the separation happened
“I thought about this a lot, and at my lowest point, I wondered if getting a divorce would be the only solution,” Ina Garten confesses in the book. “I loved Jeffrey and didn’t want to shock or hurt him, so I suggested we wait until we’re separated.”
She says: “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I told him I needed to be alone. I didn’t say if it was for now or forever. In true Jeffrey fashion, he said, ‘If you feel like you need to be alone, then you need to do that.'”
Ina Garten writes: “He packed his bags and went home to Washington without any plans to return. I suppressed my feelings and threw myself into my work.”
Eventually, the two sat down and talked. “I couldn’t stay in a traditional ‘husband-wife’ relationship with him. Jeffrey had done nothing wrong. He was just doing what every man had done before him. But we were living in a new era, and that behavior was no longer okay for me. I had changed.”
He said that, if they wanted to stay together, they would need to sit down with a couples therapist. He did. And, Ina admits, it took him “an hour” to understand.
It’s a powerful story. And, perhaps, a valuable life lesson for those who think couples counseling is a waste of time. One session even said, half century Ina Garten has been married for half a century.
Moreover? this is a good indication that patriarchal discourses about gender roles and submissive wives are more likely to end marriages than to prolong them.