William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett Set the Record Straight on Their ‘Open Marriage’

William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett want you to know the full story. The Boy Meets World star and his wife — who are weeks away from celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary — sat down with The Daily Mail to clear the air around remarks Bartlett made back in 2023 about the couple having an “open marriage” early in their relationship.

“It’s funny, the press will pick up on something and make more of it than it was,” Bartlett, 96, said with a laugh. The short version: yes, there were outside relationships. No, there was never a rulebook. And 75 years later, they’re still sitting side by side.

What Bartlett Actually Said — and What She Meant

When Bartlett published her memoir, Middle of the Rainbow: How a Wife, Mother, and Daughter Managed to Find Herself and Win Two Emmys, in 2023, she told Fox News Digital that the early years of her marriage to Daniels had been “a little bit of an open marriage” — and that it was “very painful.” The internet, naturally, ran with it.

Now she’s adding context. “There was never any discussion as to what we were going to do,” she explained in the new joint interview, “but in 75 years, the two of you together, you know, it would be abnormal if you weren’t attracted occasionally to other people. So there have been times, yeah, both of us, on both sides.”

“It was non-spoken,” she continued. “Bill and I never sit down and make rules. We never sit down and talk about these things. We just don’t. We just live our lives. And if he’s away for a year, he’s away for a year. Our lives just went on, but we never got unhinged. But our lives did go in different directions occasionally.”

The specifics, as Bartlett wrote in her memoir, are a little more concrete. She had an affair “that lasted a few months” around 1959 — eight years into their marriage — with an actor she described as “slightly boring.” Daniels, for his part, had an affair with a producer in New York in the 1970s, which Bartlett has said left her “devastated” and made her realize she “could no longer tolerate any kind of open marriage.”

In her 2023 Fox News interview, she’d been blunt about what that era cost them emotionally: “It was very painful for the both of us. But it was something we had to go through because we never went through it. When we got together, I was 18. Bill was my first boyfriend.” She was 22 when they married; he was 24. They wed in 1951, when the world — and especially New York — was a very different place. “It was a time when people were doing that,” she said. “A lot of sex and a lot of people doing all kinds of things. Very free.”

But they came through it. “Bill and I have moved forward day-by-day and eventually, the days added up,” she wrote in her book. “We’ve been happy together and sad together, and somehow stayed together for seven decades.”

75 Years, Two Emmy Wins, and a Love That Just Kept Going

Daniels, best known to millions of millennials as the warm, wise Mr. Feeny on Boy Meets World, doesn’t have much to add to the complicated history — just the simple truth of where they’ve landed. “I wouldn’t be with anyone else in my life than this woman sitting next to me,” the 99-year-old told The Daily Mail.

Bartlett, who earned two Emmy Awards for her work on St. Elsewhere and also appeared in Little House on the Prairie, sounds almost bemused by the milestone they’re approaching. “You don’t plan for it. You really don’t plan for it,” she said. “I’m not at all romantic or anything like that. I’m a big believer in today, you know? And then all of a sudden it’s 75 years. It’s kind of amazing, I must say. Especially in our business.”

The two actually played each other’s spouses on screen in three different projects over the years, including both Boy Meets World and St. Elsewhere — a Hollywood rarity that says something about how deeply their lives have been intertwined.

Their road together hasn’t been without real heartbreak. Ten years into their marriage, they welcomed a son, William Jr., who died just 24 hours after his birth due to complications. They went on to adopt two boys — Michael, now 62, and Robert, now 60. Bartlett told People in 2024 that the adoption turned out to be “the best thing that ever happened to us.” “It happened after losing a child, after great pain and sadness, and then we got these two wonderful boys, and they have been a joy the whole marriage,” she said. “I can’t imagine life without them.”

Online, some fans — particularly those who grew up watching Daniels dispense life wisdom as Mr. Feeny every Friday night — had a bit of a moment processing the news. “I got worried when I saw Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World was in the New York Post ’cause I thought he died but it turned out to be worse,” one person posted. The reactions ranged from genuinely shocked to playfully scandalized, which is pretty much what happens when a beloved TV father figure turns out to be a full human being with a complicated life.

But the bigger picture here isn’t the affairs — it’s the 75 years. The grief they shared and survived. The careers that crossed and intertwined. The two boys they chose. And an old man telling a reporter, without any hesitation, that there is no one else in the world he’d rather be next to.