Ina Garten Reveals Why She and Jeffrey Once Separated for 4 Months

• Ina Garten, 78, said on The Mel Robbins Podcast on Oct. 15 that she and Jeffrey Garten, 79, separated for four months in the 1970s because she had “never lived on my own.”
• Jeffrey’s answer, she said, was “If you feel like you need to be on your own, you need to be on your own.” They got back together and have been married since 1968.
• Her new cookbook, Simply Ina, with 85 recipes, comes out Tuesday, Oct. 20.

Ina Garten has told the story before, in her 2024 memoir. This week she told it again, in more detail. The Barefoot Contessa star, 78, said on The Mel Robbins Podcast that her marriage to Jeffrey Garten went on pause for four months in the 1970s, and that the break was her idea.

“I wanted the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do,” she said in the episode released Thursday, Oct. 15. “I also had never lived on my own.”

Why did Ina Garten and Jeffrey separate?

She married Jeffrey in 1968, while still in college, and moved straight from her parents’ house to his. “I really didn’t know who I was on my own,” she told Robbins. “I just felt like I needed to find out who I was.”

The schedule did not help. She had bought the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store in Westhampton Beach, on Long Island, and Jeffrey was working in Washington, D.C.

“He would come to West Hampton on the weekends when I was the busiest, and then he would leave on Sunday night to go back just when I had a moment to breathe.”

She moved into what she called a “terrible little apartment” in New York, and he left on an international work trip for the State Department. “Jeffrey used to call and check on me, which was really lovely,” she said. “He didn’t try and solve the problem.”

What did Jeffrey say when Ina asked for a break?

He did not argue. “He said the thing that was the most difficult to walk away from: ‘If you feel like you need to be on your own, you need to be on your own,'” Garten recalled. “Which made me just love him more, which was really hard. He wasn’t mad. He was incredibly empathetic.”

We worked out that he felt that he couldn’t travel as much as he could because he was married, and I felt like I was responsible for dinner because we were married, and we realized none of those were true.

Ina Garten, on The Mel Robbins Podcast

When they reunited, she said, it felt like “falling in love with this incredible guy who just happens to be my husband.” For years after, he traveled for work and she stayed to run the store. Her marriage, she said, “doesn’t have to look like anybody else’s relationship.”

Are Ina and Jeffrey Garten still together?

Yes. They will mark 58 years of marriage in December, and she titled a 2016 cookbook after him, Cooking for Jeffrey. He went on to serve in the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department and as dean of the Yale School of Management.

On the same podcast, she said her first day owning the store brought in $87, and Jeffrey told her, “I don’t think you’re gonna make it here.” The next day, the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, the shop sold out.

What is Ina Garten’s new cookbook?

Simply Ina is out Tuesday, Oct. 20, from Clarkson Potter, with 85 recipes built around shortcuts. Her publisher’s examples include a Mashed Potato & Leek Soup made with packaged mashed potatoes, Bourbon Baked Beans that dress up canned beans, and a Cherry Berry Crumble with a topping you prep ahead.

The memoir where she first wrote about the separation, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, came out in paperback in April.

More celebrity love stories: Elizabeth Hurley and Billy Ray Cyrus’s reported engagement and Sophia Bush and Ashlyn Harris’s wedding. More in Celebrities and Food.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: Ina Garten on The Mel Robbins Podcast, “The Power of Reinvention: Switching Things Up at Any Age,” Oct. 15, 2026; Ina Garten, Be Ready When the Luck Happens (Crown, 2024); Penguin Random House/Clarkson Potter title pages for Simply Ina, the memoir and Cooking for Jeffrey, with list prices checked Oct. 17, 2026; E! News (Gabrielle Chung); Delish (Sean Abrams); People (2024 memoir excerpt). Photos and video: The Mel Robbins Podcast, Food Network, CBS Sunday Morning, TODAY, Clarkson Potter/Crown.