After 75 Years Together, Boy Meets World Star Says Marriage Needs Wiggle Room

When William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett say they’ve cracked the code to a lasting marriage, they’re not selling you a fairy tale. At 99 and 96 respectively, the Boy Meets World star and his wife have logged nearly eight decades together—three of those before they even exchanged vows at Northwestern University—and their secret isn’t romance or compromise in the traditional sense. It’s flexibility, acceptance, and what Bartlett calls the necessity of“wiggle room.”

In a recent conversation with Page Six on Thursday, May 21, Bartlett explained that their relationship has thrived because both of them understand a fundamental truth: life demands constant adjustment. She used a simple metaphor—adapting to sudden heat in Los Angeles—to illustrate a bigger principle. A marriage, she reasoned, operates the same way. You don’t fight the circumstances; you adjust to them. For Bartlett and Daniels, that philosophy extended to their early years together in 1950s New York, when they briefly explored an open marriage arrangement.“That didn’t work well,”she later reflected, noting it was a product of that era’s cultural climate. But rather than view it as a failure, they simply grew up, as she put it, and moved forward.

What’s striking isn’t that they had a brief detour—it’s how candidly Bartlett has discussed it. In her 2023 memoir, Middle of the Rainbow, she revealed that she’d had“an affair that lasted a few months”with an actor she found“slightly boring,”while Daniels had his own involvement with a producer. Instead of letting those moments define their story, they chose to keep building it.“Bill and I have moved forward day-by-day and eventually, the days added up,”she wrote. Now, decades later, she’s clarified that their“open marriage”comments were sometimes misunderstood—there was never a formal sit-down to negotiate rules, just a non-spoken agreement that occasionally being attracted to other people over seven decades together was human, not a dealbreaker.

The couple shares two living sons, Michael, 62, and Robert, 60, and has weathered the typical storms of a long partnership: careers that took them in different directions, time apart, and the passage of decades. Yet Bartlett emphasizes that they’ve never become“unhinged”by life’s separations. They work together, live together, and according to her, there’s simply nobody else either of them wants to share a home with. They know how.

As for Daniels himself, when people ask him for marriage advice, his response is characteristically blunt:“Don’t.”He doesn’t clarify whether he means don’t get married or don’t ask him—and Bartlett laughs at the deflection. What she’s learned, though, is that his humor and her introspection balance each other out. He makes her laugh every day. She remembers the things he’s forgotten as age catches up with them both. Near their 75th wedding anniversary milestone, Bartlett says he’s happy, and that’s what matters.