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Bonnie Bartlett Daniels is opening up in regards to the “painful” begin to her 72-year marriage to William Daniels.
The St. Elsewhere star, 93, revealed how she and the Boy Meets World actor, 95, struggled as a pair after tying the knot in 1951.
“I guess it was a little bit of an open marriage at first, but that was very painful,” she advised Fox News Digital whereas selling her new memoir Middle of the Rainbow. “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.”
“But I don’t know if there was a lack of commitment a little bit, and that’s not good,” she continued. “So there was a lot of pain connected with any transgression, with any extramarital thing.”
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In her new memoir, Bartlett Daniels revealed “she never felt guilty” about extramarital affairs “because I never felt tied to fidelity, and neither did Bill,” per the outlet.
She admitted to having “an affair that lasted a few months” with one other actor in 1959 however her husband’s affair with a New York-based producer within the early Seventies finally left her “devastated” and adjusted her outlook on their relationship.
At that time, she stated she “could no longer tolerate any kind of open marriage.”
The two finally overcame their relationship difficulties — one thing Bartlett Daniels credited to their capability to “grow up together” and embrace their evolving marriage over the past seven many years.
“Life is all about solving problems,” she stated, per Fox News Digital. “We had a very good relationship, [but] Bill was an angry young man, a very angry young man. And that was tough… Bill always said, ‘We had three different marriages. We’ve been together for so long, more than 70 years – a long time. I’m 93, and I met Bill when I was 18, so we had to grow up together.”
She added, “Bill and I have moved forward day-by-day and eventually, the days added up. We’ve been happy together and sad together, and somehow stayed together for seven decades.”
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Reflecting on these early difficulties in her marriage, Bartlett Daniels advised the outlet why she felt they have been essential to expertise.
“It was something we had to go through because we never went through it,” she stated. “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,” she added. “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.”
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In March, Daniels opened up about their relationship, revealing the key to their long-lasting marriage and their “very content” life collectively at their dwelling in Southern California.
“At first, there’s a lot of struggle and there’s a lot of uncertainty of whether you’re in the right business at all when you can’t get a job and you can be difficult — difficult to live with because of all this uncertainty,” Daniels advised Forbes. “What you really have to do is learn to respect the other person and their feelings and try to be as easy (laughs) to live with as you possibly can.”
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“So much happens and you live — the good things, you hurt each other,” Bartlett Daniels added on the time. “We’ve hurt each other but you recover and you grow and you change and you adapt. You have to be able to adapt to the other person. You have to think of them first. It doesn’t happen overnight. It took us years to get to a real companionship marriage.”
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