Food Network Couples
Are Ina Garten & Husband Jeffrey Still Together? Their Separation & Relationship Today
Food Network star Ina Garten married Jeffrey Garten in 1968 when she was just 20 years old. She met Jeffrey when she was 15.
However, in her 2024 memoir, Ina detailed her separation from the professor and former government official. What happened between them, and are they still together now? Scroll down for everything we know about Ina and Jeffrey’s marriage, separation, and more.
Are Ina and Jeffrey Garten still together?
Yes, despite a previous separation (more on that below), Ina and Jeffrey are still together today.
Earlier this year, she gushed to Us Weekly, “He’s the most important thing in my life, and he makes me feel like I’m the most important thing in his life. And he might be in China or Kenya or New Haven at Yale, but I know that no matter what’s going on, I’m the center of his life. And that’s just incredibly grounding. And I think that’s what makes a good relationship. Yeah. And he’s funny and smart and adorable, so that helps, too.”
Ina and Jeffrey met while she was visiting her older brother at Dartmouth College. Ina caught Jeffrey’s eye, and his roommate helped connect them because he knew Ina’s brother.
“He saw me on the street and then sent me a letter with a photograph of himself in it,” the Food Network star told People. “I just remember running through the house and going, ‘Mom, Mom, you’ve got to see this picture of this guy. He’s so cute!'”
They went on their first date six months later, kissed at the end of the night, and the rest is history!
Why did Ina Garten and Jeffrey Garten separate?
In her 2024 memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens, Ina revealed that she and Jeffrey nearly divorced in the 1970s, just a few years into their marriage. She said her decision to buy the Barefoot Contessa store in the Hamptons took a toll on her marriage to Jeffrey.
“When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles — took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces,” Ina wrote. “While I was still cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing at the store, I was doing it as a businesswoman, not a wife. My responsibilities made it impossible for me to even think about anything else. There was no expectation about who got home from work first and what they should do, because I never got home from work!”
She explained that Jeffrey was still living in Washington D.C. at the time but would come visit her on the weekends. “He was a distraction. I didn’t pay enough attention to him,” Ina recalled. “I just wanted everyone to leave me alone so I could concentrate on the store. Jeffrey was fully formed and living the life he wanted to live. I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t be able to figure out who I was or what I wanted unless I was on my own. I needed that freedom.”
Ina said she was the one who suggested a separation. “It was the hardest thing I ever did,” she admitted. “I told him that I needed to be on my own. I didn’t say whether it was for now … or forever. In true Jeffrey form, he said, ‘If you feel like you need to be on your own, you need to do it.’ He packed his bag and went home to Washington with no plan to come back. I buried my emotions and threw myself into my work.”
When the store closed that winter, she returned to D.C. just before her husband was set to take off on a six-week trip. At that point, Ina felt the marriage was headed for divorce, while Jeffrey asked her what he could do to make it work.
“I just couldn’t live with him in a traditional ‘man and wife’ relationship,” she explained. “Jeffrey hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just doing what every man before him had done. But we were living in a new era, and that behavior wasn’t okay with me anymore. I had changed.”
She asked him to see a therapist so he would see her as a partner and not just someone to fulfill the typical roles of a “wife.” Ina said he understood after just one hour with the therapist, and things quickly began to change.
“Six weeks passed. We talked, we listened, and more important, we heard each other when we aired our concerns. Moving forward, we could be equals who took care of each other,” she shared. “It wouldn’t happen overnight, but if we worked toward the same goal, we could change things together.”
Do Ina and Jeffrey Garten have kids?
No, Ina and Jeffrey do not have kids. They made a conscious decision to not have children.
“I really appreciate that other people do and we will always have friends that have children that we are close to but it was a choice I made very early,” Ina said on The Katie Couric Podcast in 2017.
She continued, “I really felt, I feel, that I would have never been able to have the life I’ve had. So it’s a choice and that was the choice I made.”
In 2024, she explained that her decision also stemmed from her upbringing (she accused her parents of physical and emotional abuse in her memoir). “I grew up in a family that wasn’t a happy family, so I couldn’t understand why people had kids,” she admitted to People. “Nobody had any fun in my family. Now I understand it, but at the time, when I was 25 and 30, I just didn’t. It was nothing I really wanted to do.”
She reiterated this in an interview on Today, explaining, “In my 20s, I kind of resisted having children. I was like, why would I want to recreate that nightmare that I just came from? And I thought that’s what life at home with children would be. [It] never occurred to me that other people’s lives were different because that was my experience.”
The chef added, “And then one day, maybe when I was around 25, I thought, I just don’t want to have children. I just don’t want to do that. And thank God [Jeffrey] is amenable to what I would I want. He wants me to be happy and it was OK.”
Ina explained that she and Jeffrey never had an explicit conversation about whether they would have kids. “It was just one of those things that every once in a while, it would come up and I would just go, ‘Hm not now, not now, nah I don’t think so,’” she shared. “And then it would come up again, maybe a year later and I was like ‘Mmm, I don’t think the time is right.’ And then it just never came up again.”
