Pushing Hey, double date listeners, Marlow Thomas, here, we have something special for you today. Phil and I have spent the pasture interviewing other couples about what makes their marriage work. Well, we recently had the microphone turned on us. Joe Piazza of the Committed podcast had us on to tell our own love story, and we wanted to share that episode with you. We started at the very beginning on the set of Phil's show and talked about how we grew together over the next four decades. Joe's Committed interviews are an incredible glimpse inside what it takes to make a marriage work. Sometimes they're heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious, but always relatable. Joe finds couples who've gone through some of the most difficult challenges life can throw at you and still want to wake up together the next day. Her show will help you look at marriage and commitment in an entirely new way. So okay, here's the episode. Committed is a production of iHeartRadio. Marlow Thomas is back. It's been a couple of years since she last visited with us. You are so thin, am I thinner than I think last time? You've never been fat no, no, I eat a lot of food to try to gain weight. Excellent. You want me to move out, I'm in the way. Excuse me, I'm upstaging you. Doctor. Just love the Smooth Show. A clip right there is the moment that Phil Donnie Hue fell in love with marlow Thomas. That moment right on his show in nineteen seventy seven on a sound stage in Chicago. I'm sorry that we are out of time. You are really fascinating now. You are wonderful, I said when we were off there. And I want to say you are loving and generous, and you like women and it's a pleasure. And whoever is the woman in your life is very lucky. How many of us have a video of the moment that we first fell in love. Actually have a picture of me on a plane right when I first saw Nick right that moment, which is pretty special. I love this video. Their chemistry is insane and undeniable. Phil is a little stumbly and so obviously smitten. Marlowe is just so composed and insanely beautiful. You could watch this clip and not know anything about what happens next and still knowing your soul that these two people end up together for the next forty years. So I wasn't prepared because I had never seen his show because it wasn't in La So when he walked into the green room with those killer blue eyes and that great white hair, and he shook my hand and I thought, Wow, what a good looking man. And then we got out in the studio and he was so confident and just to watch him work the audience, and I was very attracted to him. I mean, we had a chemical reaction to each other right right there. You could see it. I mean, it's embarrassing to look at that show because you can really see it. And I think the most important thing is really in a marriage is that it starts off like that and that gets rekindled all the time, so that there is that sort of not just sexual but also attachment. There's a magnet between you that's you don't have with anybody else. It certainly was true with me and Marlowe. People just they do have that reaction to each other, not always but often. And I think when you start off that way, it's so exciting and well it's risky. Yeah, it's true. You know, half half of us get divorced, half of us, so you know, you and me babe forever. Yeah, that's that's a musical, kind of lyrical ideas. It doesn't consist with reality. And that's why making a marriage last can be such a challenging thing. It's just isn't easy. Marriage isn't just a struggle. It's a struggle every now and then. But again it's it's braided, you know, you braid it with love and joy and struggle and sadness and happiness and fun and humor, and then another sad thing happens. That's life. It's going to happen whether you're with this person or not. It's just whether this person is the one that is worth going through life with and allowing each other to be as vulnerable as you want to be. There is no such thing as a marriage that is smooth sailing from beginning to end. No, it just doesn't happen. You know, that's pretty obvious to all of us older folks, right, But I don't know if it's totally something that young people are aware of. Joe Pianza and this is committed. Welcome to Season six Guys Last Month. After more than forty years of marriage, Bill Donna Hue and Marlo Thomas launched a podcast together, a podcast about long term love. It's a show that a lot of our listeners are going to be very very into. It's called Double Date, and on it they interview longtime celebrity couples to find out what really makes a marriage work. We wanted to know what makes a marriage last. So in order to find out what makes the marriage last, you've got to have people who've had some experience being married and who'd been through things. You know, somebody had been unfaithful. Kia Cedric and Kevin Bacon lost all their money to Bernie Madoff. Imagine that Michael J. Fox found out he had a lifelong diagnosis of Parkinson's Three years into their marriage. Jamie Lee Curtis was addicted to pharmaceutical drugs and her husband didn't even know it. I mean, people went through these terrible things, but they knew that they loved each other and they were going to help them through it without blame, without you know, anger, but to get to the other side. And somebody, and I said, I think it was Tracy Pollin's married to Michael J. Fox. She said, when you have a long marriage, you get through something hard and there's kind of a relief in it. You think, well, wow, we got through that, we'll get through the next thing. So I love their podcast. What I needed to know was more about Phil and Marlow. I wanted to know how they made a marriage work for forty years, what makes them tick, how they made it, how they blended a family together of Phil's four boys, and how they made long distance love work between Chicago and Los Angeles. So I took us back to that very first moment on phil stage. It's nineteen seventy seven. Marlow's sitting next to Phil. She was on a nationwide tour promoting one of her many projects, and Phil is saying mostly all the right things, except for that line about how she looks so thin. I don't know if anyone would be able to say that today, But when he says it, he's just gazing adoringly at her. Well, you know, I was certainly attracted to her. I mean, if you're Catholic, you'll understand that she was an impure thought. And I did call you, yeah, and I said I knew you were on a tour, and I said, what is your next city? Right? And you said it's is Denver? And you, and you said is I said, it is Denver, very far from Chicago, and he goes, oh, no, it's not far at all. So he came for dinner, and yeah, I flew to Denver and we had dinner, and yeah, pretty much fell in love. Yeah, that was the beginning of it. And I'd love to hear Phil try to get through this without being too mushy. By the way, I think I had a cold, did I not? From you did? Because you we walked in the rain and you took your coat off and then you lost your voice and I did. This was a huge deal. Bill Donnie, who had the biggest talk show in America at the time. He needed to talk who was this woman? Who was this woman at Stollfel's voice? He had no voice, and his producer was thinking, who is this woman that gets filter? Leave Chicago? Gettical as a show, but it was it was a We were certainly smitten at first sight. Phil was I guess forty when I met you, and I was thirty eight when I met you. We were already grown people who'd had careers and other relationships, and and you had children. I did not have a marriage, but he'd had a marriage and children. But we'd had other lives and we come to each other with a lot of experience that should be appreciated. In our differences are accomplishments. Phil was always the first person to tell me how proud he was of what I was accomplishing or what I had already accomplished. I mean, that's a great that's a great gift that your partner gives you that kind of cheerleading. Boy, that's very big, I think in a marriage. Yeah, as a parent, I wish I had learned that much earlier. Yeah, the biggest challenge early years was geography. Phil's entire life was in Chicago and Marlowe's entire life was in Los Angeles. It was a time in my career where I was making a television movie after television movie. I produced and starred in about twelve films all in a row, and Free to Be was one of the projects at that time. It happened one Christmas. I mean, there were so many of them, and Phil was doing a show every day at nine am, live in Chicago, and four boys, raising four boys. So I mean the traveling was just crazy and upsetting, and we'd always have an argument on Sunday night, one of us would be going back home. And it took us a while to realize that the reason we fought on Sunday nights is that we were unhappy that we were leaving each other. I think geography was the biggest problem. And we broke up for three months, obviously before we were married, and said this too much. FEEL said, I've got these kids, I've got to get them through high school. I've got my show. And I said, I, you know, I can't come every weekend. I've got responsibilities, I've got music scoring, I've script to write. You know, I just can't do so it was just impossible. So we broke up. And after we broke up, I went back to an old boyfriend, and I think he went back to an old girlfriend or some new girlfriends whatever for about three months. And after the three months, we both realize that we needed each other. I often say to people when they're concerned about whether or not they want to get married to a certain person, I say, you know, separate for a couple of months. It really gives you a good perspective, It really does. I would be out to dinner with another man and I'd be thinking, you know Phil would love this or that with that, I would be He was on my mind all the time. Marlowe never wanted to be married. In fact, when she was starring in and producing the sitcom That Girl, a show about a single woman living on her own, the network producers wanted to end the series with a wedding, Marla refused. She didn't even want to get married on TV. She did not want to give the impression that the only happy ending for a woman was marriage. She was also terrified of getting married because she'd never really seen a happy and equal marriage in her own family. My father was one of ten nine Lebanese boys who were not abusive to their eyes, but very dominating, and my mother was one of five Italians, four girls and a boy, and all of them were involved with dominating men and my parents. My mother gave up her career, my father ran the world. I just didn't want to live that way. I thought, nah, that's not for me. And I had wonderful relationships with men in my life, but I just didn't want to be married. I just that I want a career, I want to be free, I want to do what I want to do. I don't want anybody telling me when I have to come home, I can't do this, or my mother's friends would say things like, well he lets me do this, or he'll let me have that. I just wasn't raised to want that. And then I met Phil, and we've been going together about six or seven months, and he asked me to marry him, and I said, no, I really don't ever want to be married. And so we kept together, going together, and then about three years went by, and then one day I said, you know, maybe I do want to be married. She took three years, and you were very patient. Well that time you were busy raising your kids and you had your show. So we're busy working and stuff. But we were always together. Marlowe moved in with Phil and his four boys into their house. And Whennetka, Illinois, I was a little naive, you know. I thought, oh, I'm in love with this man. And by the way, he has four sons. I married a family. I didn't marry a man. I married a family. At first, I thought, well, I'm not their parent. Fills their parent, and he'll tell him, you know, discipline them and teach them and so forth. It wasn't It took a while for me to realize that I really had to be a part of the decision making entity. I couldn't pretend that I was a bystander. I wasn't. It was a family, and I helped bring it back to being a family because their parents had been divorced for a while. When I met Phil. The boys are like boys, you know. They took their dinner and one would eat it in their baredom, and one would eat it in the living and watching television, and one would eat it over there whatever there. And I said, come on, now, let's have a dinner time. And we'd sit down at the table, all of us. And Phil said he got to know his kids better because at the dinner table they had a real family conversation. When I had them all by myself, I mean I was really I was scared. I didn't know what to do with them. I mean, do I help them all with homework? I mean four And I have to say I was very impatient. I I went off. I mean i'd have well, what the kids called a spaz. That's two z's, you know. A spaz was something that bothered me or man, I went up. I remember one time I passed Michael who was on the phone, and he was saying to his friend, let me call you back. My dad is having a spaz. And when Marlow came, who was it, Michael? I think it was. Michael said to her, we like it when you're here because dad doesn't have as many spazes when you're here. So, you know, Marlow was a big hit with my kids. Well, I brought you know what wasn't in the house, the female energy, a mother energy. And they were good boys though they really were. They were like Phil you know. They were all loved athlete headaches. They liked to laugh, they were fun, they liked to ski, they liked to play. It was fun for me and they knew me from Free to be You and Me, so I wasn't a complete stranger to them. And they knew I made their father happy. And I think, isn't that what everybody wants? You know, they want their parents to be happy, and I wanted them to be happy. I wanted to be something good in their lives. Marlow told me this story about how she became the godmother to her stepson Michael's children. Their baby was supposed to be born around Christmas time, and Michael and his wife called Marlowe and said, hey, we need to talk to you about something. We don't want you to be the step anything to this baby. We want you to be this baby's godmother. And that meant so much to me that they had really appreciated my caring and my love of them and their dad, because you know, being a stepparent can be a very thankless job. You know you're on eggshows. You don't want to upset anything, and you don't want to take liberties where you shouldn't. I know Mary Steinberg and said she has two children of her own, and she married Ted Danson with his own to two daughters, and she said, I just wanted to be a cheerleader for them. So everybody has their way with us. It was different because I moved into the house and the four boys were there, but it was a good experience for me. So Phil and Marlowe had been merging their lives together, but after years of living between la and Illinois, they ultimately decided to give up their respective cities and make a higherly new life together in New York and we would start a new life. We gave up where we were, gave up our own homes and decided to make a life. It was a real commitment. But it's not so much that you can't live without somebody, is that you just want to live with them. And nobody can be somebody's everything. Right, that's some musical lyric. Maybe you're my everything. No, no, don't get into that, because it's not possible for somebody to be somebody's everything. Well, and you don't have what's the word of a contract for somebody, as I said, to become you or for you to become them. The excitement of a good marriage, I think, is not that one and one equals two, but it equals two thousand. We find all the parts of yourself that are can be nurtured by this other person. That's the exciting part. I think marriages go stale when there's not enough We call it juiciness, but I think there's just not enough interest in a lot of things. When we first started going together, you said to me, I've never been with a woman who has so much interest in so many other things. Other than that's what you said. I'm sure I did, and I thought that was adorable thing to say. You know that, he was really saying, I see this, You aren't going to be completely focused on me, and I like it. You know, that's was an interesting I realized I was not her everything and it was helpful. I mean, you know, it makes it easier to get through the reality of life. Well, but now you are now you are pretty watched by everything. But I think it happens. It happens year by year by year by year. But doesn't you know, It's not something you give over to somebody. It's something that grows and grows until you know it's braided. You know, like you see a tree where the two barks are braided. That happens naturally. It's not something you can and promise to somebody or make them give to you. It's just something that starts to happen. And I think, you know, Phil said earlier that half of marriages end in divorce. I think they end in divorce because they're never really taking the time. They didn't try. Time, they didn't try, but time. We have a ritual when every year on our anniversary from our very first year, we don't buy each other a present, We buy a trip that we take together. In the early years, it was difficult to find the time I was working in La he was working in Chicago and had children and four boys that lived with him. It was very, very hard to find the time, but we always did it. We'd get two weeks or ten days or one week, whatever we could get, and we'd go to Japan, or we'd go to Indonesia or upstate Washington, wherever we could get the time. But time is what we gave each other. It's the most precious thing that you can give each other. And people do date nights and stuff, they kind of squeeze them in. But we took this big chunk of time and gave it to each other, and in that time where there's nothing there at that time. There was cell phones in many of those years, but the time without kids, without the phone, without work, without responsibility, just to be together. You can't have a long marriage without accommodating the other person. You just can't. It's impossible. But there's always going to be growing pains, especially when you get married later in life, when you're already a fully formed grown up with your own lives, your own friends, your own careers and interests. You're on side of the pad, you're on favorite TV shows, all of your own stuff, your own baggage, I'm a very impulsive person and feels a very laid back person. So he's a kind of person that if something happens that needs a reaction, he will it back and go over many of the options. I, on the other hand, am running for the phone. I'm going to fix it now. And sometimes that's good and sometimes that's not good. So we had to figure out how to talk it through so that if he took forever or not forever, but if he took a while to think about it, to me, it felt like forever, and I was aggravated by that. And if I jumped for the phone, he was aggravated that I was being too impulsive. So we had to learn how to come to a middle ground there and say, Okay, let's just think about this for a couple of minutes, and let's just see I don't think this is a good thing to react to right away. This one really hit home for me, the idea of just taking some time to find a middle ground. See, I am also very impulsive, and Nick he's one of those people that needs to marinate. It's got to marinate on things. But it's taken me five plus years of marriage to figure that out. Somebody won said that a successful marriage is is one where both people don't panic at the same time. So we had to learn that as well. That the fact that he does take longer than I do, and that I do work quicker than he does react quicker, we both had to appreciate that in each other and give each other the opportunity to at least make their case before we decided it wasn't the best way, and let each person make their case. And sometimes we go his way and sometimes we go my way. Despite being very, very famous people for a long time, Phil and Marlow try to keep their marriage out of the spotlight. Up until this point in our lives, we've never talked about our marriage. We thought from the very beginning that our marriage would be healthy for its privacy, so we kept a very low profile. When we first got married, we came back from our honeymoon, everybody wanted us to host the Emmy's, host the People's Choice Awards, be on the cover of People magazine. It was overwhelming. We sat down and talked about it and said, let's not do this. If we just keep it private, maybe people won't pick at it. We'll do our careers and we'll keep our personal life private. But then like thirty nine years later, they got this idea for a podcast. Well, we looked up and realized we've been married for a hundred years, so maybe we have something to share. Well, also, people had always asked us, how does your marriage last? What do you do and everything? We said, we don't know. I love him, he loves me. We like each other. I like the way he smells. Does that count. We started thinking about it, and when we were having our thirty ninth anniversary, we heard from a couple that was getting a divorce that had been married a long time, and we said, wow, I wonder what they did wrong, and I wonder what we did right. And we just got curious about it. And so we did that until this time, and we thought, let's find out what makes it work. And then Phil said, Okay, I'll do this with you. I'll go on these double dates and everything, but I'm not going to talk about our marriage. And I said, okay, I mean, after forty years, you're not going to change somebody. But then when we got into these conversations like when Mark and Swell has talked about his jealousy with Kelly Rippa, Phil talked about his jealousy with Chris Kristofferson. Marla made a movie with Chris Christofferson and there was a love scene in the movie was four minutes long. It looked to me like it was about four years long. I remember sitting and watching this and I really did. I I had a sense of how draining jealousy is. It takes away the time that he should be devoted to improving the marriage, building the marriage, making you close, and you know, it's nothing to do with the person who is the object of your jealousy. You know, Kelly Ripper had not done anything to make her husband jealous. That was his own ballgame. And that's another thing, you know, because when somebody is jealous, whether it's male or female, they're blaming it on you and you didn't do anything. It's in their head. And that's something that the couples have to come to. I mean, Phil was very jealous of me with men beginning of our relationship, where you talked too long with that man at the party and so forth, and then after a while you just gave it up. You didn't think it anymore, right, Well, yeah, And it was the lesson for me was It just took a lot of weight off my shoulders to be able to stab jealousy in the heart and get rid of it. It is a very liberating thing when you sit down with another couple, you're sharing stories. That's the fun of being with somebody, with another couple, or being with a group of people. And so we were sharing stories and before you knew it, even my silent sam irishman here started opening up to these people. I mean, he didn't open up to me. He's always been open to me, but to other people, which is I think you're pretty amazed that you've done that. Right. Well, we wound up, you know. We figured these interviews would be like what twenty five minutes, half hour, well, three hours? Yeah, well, you know, and then finally I would say, you know, I'm really sorry, but we have to leave, you know, and they would look at me and it's got a laugh because they had been wondering themselves, when are these people going to leave? No, they weren't. We made friends. Actually, we made some new friends. Some of the people like Alan Alden and Arlene Alden, Rob Ryner and Michelle Ryner. We knew a lot of the people, but many we didn't know, and it was fun to get to know them in such an intimate way. And we were both surprised that so many people said yes that they would sit down with us, went to their homes and they put out things to drink and eat. We had a really fun time, a really fun time. I think it it mellowed us to see how all these people have found the safe spot. We said to each other, you know, our marriage is really a cushion. It's a cushion in life that if you don't have that, boy, life has got a lot of sharp corners. But when you have someone who has your back, as all of these people did and we do, it gave us an appreciation for that. Phil will say to me sometime, Oh, that's great that you got that for us, or that you invited that person over. I'm so glad you did that. I'm so glad that we did this thing you thought of. It's an appreciation for the other person, or a gratitude, you know, to say to each other. I'm so grateful for what you said to me this morning about how I needed to not feel bad about something. I'm so grateful for what we have together. It means so much. I mean, I see marriage like a big plant, a big tree, and you need to water it. You know, nothing living can continue to flourish unless you water it, unless you give it food to nourish it. And I think a lot of people get married and then they think, Okay, we're married. But it's not that it's a lot of work, because that sounds drudgery. It's that it just needs attention. I think just having the conversation made our own marriage room here. We had more room in the marriage because we were bringing in all these other people's feelings and experiences. We kind of absorbed them and appreciated. It was fun. It was fun talking to people who took their marriage seriously. I have to say that I've played so many excerpts of this conversation with Philla Marlow to Neck. They're definitely teaching me something about my own marriage, much like phil and Marlow. Making a podcast about marriage has actually improved my own marriage. It has. I don't know if it has for Neck, but it has for me. So many of these episodes have become like marriage therapy for me because they let me see how other couples live in the world, what they do behind closed doors. What they actually believe. Let they just got things done and live in the world together and even after having such a long marriage. Their podcasted the same thing for Phil and Marlowe, and I think what we were interviewing all these couples, these kinds of topics would come up. You know, it was a double date. That's why we call a double date. They would talk about jealousy, We would talk about jelsie. They would talk about fighting. How do you come back from a fight? That's a big thing. We talked about sex. We asked Alie Wentworth is such a darling. I love her. She's so funny, and she's so out there and wild and free. And she's buried to George Stephanopoulos, who's pretty buttoned up guy. And you would never fix them up together, but they're perfect together. And asked her she's written some books about relationships, and I said to her, what's your advice about sex? And she said, have it and have a lot of it, which I thought was great. Rob ryanher said he's married to Michelle. They have a great marriage too. I said, what's your advice for a young married couple. He said, Mary, your best friend that you can have sex with. So sex, best friend, no jealousy. I mean, these are kind of As you start to look at the building blocks of how people have made their marriage is work, you see that these are some of the ingredients avoid a marriage that involves only one passionate member. I have to wonder how many people went through life dragging their spouse across the world, a spouse not interested in the marriage, not as committed. You see that a lot in relationships, Well, one person is doing all the accommodating, and then that does become work, and that's no longer a love story because a marriage really has to be a love story too. There's a growing love story. I mean, many people spoke to us about the fact that they love their wife or husband more now than when they first got married because they got to know them and they like them better. And the more you like somebody, the more you love them, and the more you cherish them. This episode of Committee was hosted and reported by Joe Piazza, with special thanks to Marla Thomas and Philed Onto You. Supervising producer is Ramsey Young. The executive producers are Joe Piazza and Tyler Klein. Theme song and music by Tristan McNeill. For comments, suggestions, or to be part of the show, give us a call at four zero four nine nine six one one seven three. That's four zero four nine nine six one one seven three, or send us an email at Joe at Committed podcast dot com. That's jo at Committed podcast dot com. You can grab a copy of Joe's book How to Be Married on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Committed as a production of iHeartRadio and producing our studios located in Atlanta, Georgia. From more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. If you like this episode, you can listen to Committed wherever you get your podcasts.

Pushing Hey, double date listeners, Marlow Thomas, here, we have something special for you today. Phil and I have spent the pasture interviewing other couples about what makes their marriage work. Well, we recently had the microphone turned on us. Joe Piazza of the Committed podcast had us on to tell our own love story, and we wanted to share that episode with you. We started at the very beginning on the set of Phil's show and talked about how we grew together over the next four decades. Joe's Committed interviews are an incredible glimpse inside what it takes to make a marriage work. Sometimes they're heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious, but always relatable. Joe finds couples who've gone through some of the most difficult challenges life can throw at you and still want to wake up together the next day. Her show will help you look at marriage and commitment in an entirely new way. So okay, here's the episode. Committed is a production of iHeartRadio. Marlow Thomas is back. It's been a couple of years since she last visited with us. You are so thin, am I thinner than I think last time? You've never been fat no, no, I eat a lot of food to try to gain weight. Excellent. You want me to move out, I'm in the way. Excuse me, I'm upstaging you. Doctor. Just love the Smooth Show. A clip right there is the moment that Phil Donnie Hue fell in love with marlow Thomas. That moment right on his show in nineteen seventy seven on a sound stage in Chicago. I'm sorry that we are out of time. You are really fascinating now. You are wonderful, I said when we were off there. And I want to say you are loving and generous, and you like women and it's a pleasure. And whoever is the woman in your life is very lucky. How many of us have a video of the moment that we first fell in love. Actually have a picture of me on a plane right when I first saw Nick right that moment, which is pretty special. I love this video. Their chemistry is insane and undeniable. Phil is a little stumbly and so obviously smitten. Marlowe is just so composed and insanely beautiful. You could watch this clip and not know anything about what happens next and still knowing your soul that these two people end up together for the next forty years. So I wasn't prepared because I had never seen his show because it wasn't in La So when he walked into the green room with those killer blue eyes and that great white hair, and he shook my hand and I thought, Wow, what a good looking man. And then we got out in the studio and he was so confident and just to watch him work the audience, and I was very attracted to him. I mean, we had a chemical reaction to each other right right there. You could see it. I mean, it's embarrassing to look at that show because you can really see it. And I think the most important thing is really in a marriage is that it starts off like that and that gets rekindled all the time, so that there is that sort of not just sexual but also attachment. There's a magnet between you that's you don't have with anybody else. It certainly was true with me and Marlowe. People just they do have that reaction to each other, not always but often. And I think when you start off that way, it's so exciting and well it's risky. Yeah, it's true. You know, half half of us get divorced, half of us, so you know, you and me babe forever. Yeah, that's that's a musical, kind of lyrical ideas. It doesn't consist with reality. And that's why making a marriage last can be such a challenging thing. It's just isn't easy. Marriage isn't just a struggle. It's a struggle every now and then. But again it's it's braided, you know, you braid it with love and joy and struggle and sadness and happiness and fun and humor, and then another sad thing happens. That's life. It's going to happen whether you're with this person or not. It's just whether this person is the one that is worth going through life with and allowing each other to be as vulnerable as you want to be. There is no such thing as a marriage that is smooth sailing from beginning to end. No, it just doesn't happen. You know, that's pretty obvious to all of us older folks, right, But I don't know if it's totally something that young people are aware of. Joe Pianza and this is committed. Welcome to Season six Guys Last Month. After more than forty years of marriage, Bill Donna Hue and Marlo Thomas launched a podcast together, a podcast about long term love. It's a show that a lot of our listeners are going to be very very into. It's called Double Date, and on it they interview longtime celebrity couples to find out what really makes a marriage work. We wanted to know what makes a marriage last. So in order to find out what makes the marriage last, you've got to have people who've had some experience being married and who'd been through things. You know, somebody had been unfaithful. Kia Cedric and Kevin Bacon lost all their money to Bernie Madoff. Imagine that Michael J. Fox found out he had a lifelong diagnosis of Parkinson's Three years into their marriage. Jamie Lee Curtis was addicted to pharmaceutical drugs and her husband didn't even know it. I mean, people went through these terrible things, but they knew that they loved each other and they were going to help them through it without blame, without you know, anger, but to get to the other side. And somebody, and I said, I think it was Tracy Pollin's married to Michael J. Fox. She said, when you have a long marriage, you get through something hard and there's kind of a relief in it. You think, well, wow, we got through that, we'll get through the next thing. So I love their podcast. What I needed to know was more about Phil and Marlow. I wanted to know how they made a marriage work for forty years, what makes them tick, how they made it, how they blended a family together of Phil's four boys, and how they made long distance love work between Chicago and Los Angeles. So I took us back to that very first moment on phil stage. It's nineteen seventy seven. Marlow's sitting next to Phil. She was on a nationwide tour promoting one of her many projects, and Phil is saying mostly all the right things, except for that line about how she looks so thin. I don't know if anyone would be able to say that today, But when he says it, he's just gazing adoringly at her. Well, you know, I was certainly attracted to her. I mean, if you're Catholic, you'll understand that she was an impure thought. And I did call you, yeah, and I said I knew you were on a tour, and I said, what is your next city? Right? And you said it's is Denver? And you, and you said is I said, it is Denver, very far from Chicago, and he goes, oh, no, it's not far at all. So he came for dinner, and yeah, I flew to Denver and we had dinner, and yeah, pretty much fell in love. Yeah, that was the beginning of it. And I'd love to hear Phil try to get through this without being too mushy. By the way, I think I had a cold, did I not? From you did? Because you we walked in the rain and you took your coat off and then you lost your voice and I did. This was a huge deal. Bill Donnie, who had the biggest talk show in America at the time. He needed to talk who was this woman? Who was this woman at Stollfel's voice? He had no voice, and his producer was thinking, who is this woman that gets filter? Leave Chicago? Gettical as a show, but it was it was a We were certainly smitten at first sight. Phil was I guess forty when I met you, and I was thirty eight when I met you. We were already grown people who'd had careers and other relationships, and and you had children. I did not have a marriage, but he'd had a marriage and children. But we'd had other lives and we come to each other with a lot of experience that should be appreciated. In our differences are accomplishments. Phil was always the first person to tell me how proud he was of what I was accomplishing or what I had already accomplished. I mean, that's a great that's a great gift that your partner gives you that kind of cheerleading. Boy, that's very big, I think in a marriage. Yeah, as a parent, I wish I had learned that much earlier. Yeah, the biggest challenge early years was geography. Phil's entire life was in Chicago and Marlowe's entire life was in Los Angeles. It was a time in my career where I was making a television movie after television movie. I produced and starred in about twelve films all in a row, and Free to Be was one of the projects at that time. It happened one Christmas. I mean, there were so many of them, and Phil was doing a show every day at nine am, live in Chicago, and four boys, raising four boys. So I mean the traveling was just crazy and upsetting, and we'd always have an argument on Sunday night, one of us would be going back home. And it took us a while to realize that the reason we fought on Sunday nights is that we were unhappy that we were leaving each other. I think geography was the biggest problem. And we broke up for three months, obviously before we were married, and said this too much. FEEL said, I've got these kids, I've got to get them through high school. I've got my show. And I said, I, you know, I can't come every weekend. I've got responsibilities, I've got music scoring, I've script to write. You know, I just can't do so it was just impossible. So we broke up. And after we broke up, I went back to an old boyfriend, and I think he went back to an old girlfriend or some new girlfriends whatever for about three months. And after the three months, we both realize that we needed each other. I often say to people when they're concerned about whether or not they want to get married to a certain person, I say, you know, separate for a couple of months. It really gives you a good perspective, It really does. I would be out to dinner with another man and I'd be thinking, you know Phil would love this or that with that, I would be He was on my mind all the time. Marlowe never wanted to be married. In fact, when she was starring in and producing the sitcom That Girl, a show about a single woman living on her own, the network producers wanted to end the series with a wedding, Marla refused. She didn't even want to get married on TV. She did not want to give the impression that the only happy ending for a woman was marriage. She was also terrified of getting married because she'd never really seen a happy and equal marriage in her own family. My father was one of ten nine Lebanese boys who were not abusive to their eyes, but very dominating, and my mother was one of five Italians, four girls and a boy, and all of them were involved with dominating men and my parents. My mother gave up her career, my father ran the world. I just didn't want to live that way. I thought, nah, that's not for me. And I had wonderful relationships with men in my life, but I just didn't want to be married. I just that I want a career, I want to be free, I want to do what I want to do. I don't want anybody telling me when I have to come home, I can't do this, or my mother's friends would say things like, well he lets me do this, or he'll let me have that. I just wasn't raised to want that. And then I met Phil, and we've been going together about six or seven months, and he asked me to marry him, and I said, no, I really don't ever want to be married. And so we kept together, going together, and then about three years went by, and then one day I said, you know, maybe I do want to be married. She took three years, and you were very patient. Well that time you were busy raising your kids and you had your show. So we're busy working and stuff. But we were always together. Marlowe moved in with Phil and his four boys into their house. And Whennetka, Illinois, I was a little naive, you know. I thought, oh, I'm in love with this man. And by the way, he has four sons. I married a family. I didn't marry a man. I married a family. At first, I thought, well, I'm not their parent. Fills their parent, and he'll tell him, you know, discipline them and teach them and so forth. It wasn't It took a while for me to realize that I really had to be a part of the decision making entity. I couldn't pretend that I was a bystander. I wasn't. It was a family, and I helped bring it back to being a family because their parents had been divorced for a while. When I met Phil. The boys are like boys, you know. They took their dinner and one would eat it in their baredom, and one would eat it in the living and watching television, and one would eat it over there whatever there. And I said, come on, now, let's have a dinner time. And we'd sit down at the table, all of us. And Phil said he got to know his kids better because at the dinner table they had a real family conversation. When I had them all by myself, I mean I was really I was scared. I didn't know what to do with them. I mean, do I help them all with homework? I mean four And I have to say I was very impatient. I I went off. I mean i'd have well, what the kids called a spaz. That's two z's, you know. A spaz was something that bothered me or man, I went up. I remember one time I passed Michael who was on the phone, and he was saying to his friend, let me call you back. My dad is having a spaz. And when Marlow came, who was it, Michael? I think it was. Michael said to her, we like it when you're here because dad doesn't have as many spazes when you're here. So, you know, Marlow was a big hit with my kids. Well, I brought you know what wasn't in the house, the female energy, a mother energy. And they were good boys though they really were. They were like Phil you know. They were all loved athlete headaches. They liked to laugh, they were fun, they liked to ski, they liked to play. It was fun for me and they knew me from Free to be You and Me, so I wasn't a complete stranger to them. And they knew I made their father happy. And I think, isn't that what everybody wants? You know, they want their parents to be happy, and I wanted them to be happy. I wanted to be something good in their lives. Marlow told me this story about how she became the godmother to her stepson Michael's children. Their baby was supposed to be born around Christmas time, and Michael and his wife called Marlowe and said, hey, we need to talk to you about something. We don't want you to be the step anything to this baby. We want you to be this baby's godmother. And that meant so much to me that they had really appreciated my caring and my love of them and their dad, because you know, being a stepparent can be a very thankless job. You know you're on eggshows. You don't want to upset anything, and you don't want to take liberties where you shouldn't. I know Mary Steinberg and said she has two children of her own, and she married Ted Danson with his own to two daughters, and she said, I just wanted to be a cheerleader for them. So everybody has their way with us. It was different because I moved into the house and the four boys were there, but it was a good experience for me. So Phil and Marlowe had been merging their lives together, but after years of living between la and Illinois, they ultimately decided to give up their respective cities and make a higherly new life together in New York and we would start a new life. We gave up where we were, gave up our own homes and decided to make a life. It was a real commitment. But it's not so much that you can't live without somebody, is that you just want to live with them. And nobody can be somebody's everything. Right, that's some musical lyric. Maybe you're my everything. No, no, don't get into that, because it's not possible for somebody to be somebody's everything. Well, and you don't have what's the word of a contract for somebody, as I said, to become you or for you to become them. The excitement of a good marriage, I think, is not that one and one equals two, but it equals two thousand. We find all the parts of yourself that are can be nurtured by this other person. That's the exciting part. I think marriages go stale when there's not enough We call it juiciness, but I think there's just not enough interest in a lot of things. When we first started going together, you said to me, I've never been with a woman who has so much interest in so many other things. Other than that's what you said. I'm sure I did, and I thought that was adorable thing to say. You know that, he was really saying, I see this, You aren't going to be completely focused on me, and I like it. You know, that's was an interesting I realized I was not her everything and it was helpful. I mean, you know, it makes it easier to get through the reality of life. Well, but now you are now you are pretty watched by everything. But I think it happens. It happens year by year by year by year. But doesn't you know, It's not something you give over to somebody. It's something that grows and grows until you know it's braided. You know, like you see a tree where the two barks are braided. That happens naturally. It's not something you can and promise to somebody or make them give to you. It's just something that starts to happen. And I think, you know, Phil said earlier that half of marriages end in divorce. I think they end in divorce because they're never really taking the time. They didn't try. Time, they didn't try, but time. We have a ritual when every year on our anniversary from our very first year, we don't buy each other a present, We buy a trip that we take together. In the early years, it was difficult to find the time I was working in La he was working in Chicago and had children and four boys that lived with him. It was very, very hard to find the time, but we always did it. We'd get two weeks or ten days or one week, whatever we could get, and we'd go to Japan, or we'd go to Indonesia or upstate Washington, wherever we could get the time. But time is what we gave each other. It's the most precious thing that you can give each other. And people do date nights and stuff, they kind of squeeze them in. But we took this big chunk of time and gave it to each other, and in that time where there's nothing there at that time. There was cell phones in many of those years, but the time without kids, without the phone, without work, without responsibility, just to be together. You can't have a long marriage without accommodating the other person. You just can't. It's impossible. But there's always going to be growing pains, especially when you get married later in life, when you're already a fully formed grown up with your own lives, your own friends, your own careers and interests. You're on side of the pad, you're on favorite TV shows, all of your own stuff, your own baggage, I'm a very impulsive person and feels a very laid back person. So he's a kind of person that if something happens that needs a reaction, he will it back and go over many of the options. I, on the other hand, am running for the phone. I'm going to fix it now. And sometimes that's good and sometimes that's not good. So we had to figure out how to talk it through so that if he took forever or not forever, but if he took a while to think about it, to me, it felt like forever, and I was aggravated by that. And if I jumped for the phone, he was aggravated that I was being too impulsive. So we had to learn how to come to a middle ground there and say, Okay, let's just think about this for a couple of minutes, and let's just see I don't think this is a good thing to react to right away. This one really hit home for me, the idea of just taking some time to find a middle ground. See, I am also very impulsive, and Nick he's one of those people that needs to marinate. It's got to marinate on things. But it's taken me five plus years of marriage to figure that out. Somebody won said that a successful marriage is is one where both people don't panic at the same time. So we had to learn that as well. That the fact that he does take longer than I do, and that I do work quicker than he does react quicker, we both had to appreciate that in each other and give each other the opportunity to at least make their case before we decided it wasn't the best way, and let each person make their case. And sometimes we go his way and sometimes we go my way. Despite being very, very famous people for a long time, Phil and Marlow try to keep their marriage out of the spotlight. Up until this point in our lives, we've never talked about our marriage. We thought from the very beginning that our marriage would be healthy for its privacy, so we kept a very low profile. When we first got married, we came back from our honeymoon, everybody wanted us to host the Emmy's, host the People's Choice Awards, be on the cover of People magazine. It was overwhelming. We sat down and talked about it and said, let's not do this. If we just keep it private, maybe people won't pick at it. We'll do our careers and we'll keep our personal life private. But then like thirty nine years later, they got this idea for a podcast. Well, we looked up and realized we've been married for a hundred years, so maybe we have something to share. Well, also, people had always asked us, how does your marriage last? What do you do and everything? We said, we don't know. I love him, he loves me. We like each other. I like the way he smells. Does that count. We started thinking about it, and when we were having our thirty ninth anniversary, we heard from a couple that was getting a divorce that had been married a long time, and we said, wow, I wonder what they did wrong, and I wonder what we did right. And we just got curious about it. And so we did that until this time, and we thought, let's find out what makes it work. And then Phil said, Okay, I'll do this with you. I'll go on these double dates and everything, but I'm not going to talk about our marriage. And I said, okay, I mean, after forty years, you're not going to change somebody. But then when we got into these conversations like when Mark and Swell has talked about his jealousy with Kelly Rippa, Phil talked about his jealousy with Chris Kristofferson. Marla made a movie with Chris Christofferson and there was a love scene in the movie was four minutes long. It looked to me like it was about four years long. I remember sitting and watching this and I really did. I I had a sense of how draining jealousy is. It takes away the time that he should be devoted to improving the marriage, building the marriage, making you close, and you know, it's nothing to do with the person who is the object of your jealousy. You know, Kelly Ripper had not done anything to make her husband jealous. That was his own ballgame. And that's another thing, you know, because when somebody is jealous, whether it's male or female, they're blaming it on you and you didn't do anything. It's in their head. And that's something that the couples have to come to. I mean, Phil was very jealous of me with men beginning of our relationship, where you talked too long with that man at the party and so forth, and then after a while you just gave it up. You didn't think it anymore, right, Well, yeah, And it was the lesson for me was It just took a lot of weight off my shoulders to be able to stab jealousy in the heart and get rid of it. It is a very liberating thing when you sit down with another couple, you're sharing stories. That's the fun of being with somebody, with another couple, or being with a group of people. And so we were sharing stories and before you knew it, even my silent sam irishman here started opening up to these people. I mean, he didn't open up to me. He's always been open to me, but to other people, which is I think you're pretty amazed that you've done that. Right. Well, we wound up, you know. We figured these interviews would be like what twenty five minutes, half hour, well, three hours? Yeah, well, you know, and then finally I would say, you know, I'm really sorry, but we have to leave, you know, and they would look at me and it's got a laugh because they had been wondering themselves, when are these people going to leave? No, they weren't. We made friends. Actually, we made some new friends. Some of the people like Alan Alden and Arlene Alden, Rob Ryner and Michelle Ryner. We knew a lot of the people, but many we didn't know, and it was fun to get to know them in such an intimate way. And we were both surprised that so many people said yes that they would sit down with us, went to their homes and they put out things to drink and eat. We had a really fun time, a really fun time. I think it it mellowed us to see how all these people have found the safe spot. We said to each other, you know, our marriage is really a cushion. It's a cushion in life that if you don't have that, boy, life has got a lot of sharp corners. But when you have someone who has your back, as all of these people did and we do, it gave us an appreciation for that. Phil will say to me sometime, Oh, that's great that you got that for us, or that you invited that person over. I'm so glad you did that. I'm so glad that we did this thing you thought of. It's an appreciation for the other person, or a gratitude, you know, to say to each other. I'm so grateful for what you said to me this morning about how I needed to not feel bad about something. I'm so grateful for what we have together. It means so much. I mean, I see marriage like a big plant, a big tree, and you need to water it. You know, nothing living can continue to flourish unless you water it, unless you give it food to nourish it. And I think a lot of people get married and then they think, Okay, we're married. But it's not that it's a lot of work, because that sounds drudgery. It's that it just needs attention. I think just having the conversation made our own marriage room here. We had more room in the marriage because we were bringing in all these other people's feelings and experiences. We kind of absorbed them and appreciated. It was fun. It was fun talking to people who took their marriage seriously. I have to say that I've played so many excerpts of this conversation with Philla Marlow to Neck. They're definitely teaching me something about my own marriage, much like phil and Marlow. Making a podcast about marriage has actually improved my own marriage. It has. I don't know if it has for Neck, but it has for me. So many of these episodes have become like marriage therapy for me because they let me see how other couples live in the world, what they do behind closed doors. What they actually believe. Let they just got things done and live in the world together and even after having such a long marriage. Their podcasted the same thing for Phil and Marlowe, and I think what we were interviewing all these couples, these kinds of topics would come up. You know, it was a double date. That's why we call a double date. They would talk about jealousy, We would talk about jelsie. They would talk about fighting. How do you come back from a fight? That's a big thing. We talked about sex. We asked Alie Wentworth is such a darling. I love her. She's so funny, and she's so out there and wild and free. And she's buried to George Stephanopoulos, who's pretty buttoned up guy. And you would never fix them up together, but they're perfect together. And asked her she's written some books about relationships, and I said to her, what's your advice about sex? And she said, have it and have a lot of it, which I thought was great. Rob ryanher said he's married to Michelle. They have a great marriage too. I said, what's your advice for a young married couple. He said, Mary, your best friend that you can have sex with. So sex, best friend, no jealousy. I mean, these are kind of As you start to look at the building blocks of how people have made their marriage is work, you see that these are some of the ingredients avoid a marriage that involves only one passionate member. I have to wonder how many people went through life dragging their spouse across the world, a spouse not interested in the marriage, not as committed. You see that a lot in relationships, Well, one person is doing all the accommodating, and then that does become work, and that's no longer a love story because a marriage really has to be a love story too. There's a growing love story. I mean, many people spoke to us about the fact that they love their wife or husband more now than when they first got married because they got to know them and they like them better. And the more you like somebody, the more you love them, and the more you cherish them. This episode of Committee was hosted and reported by Joe Piazza, with special thanks to Marla Thomas and Philed Onto You. Supervising producer is Ramsey Young. The executive producers are Joe Piazza and Tyler Klein. Theme song and music by Tristan McNeill. For comments, suggestions, or to be part of the show, give us a call at four zero four nine nine six one one seven three. That's four zero four nine nine six one one seven three, or send us an email at Joe at Committed podcast dot com. That's jo at Committed podcast dot com. You can grab a copy of Joe's book How to Be Married on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Committed as a production of iHeartRadio and producing our studios located in Atlanta, Georgia. From more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. If you like this episode, you can listen to Committed wherever you get your podcasts.