Ina Garten and her husband, Jeffrey, have been married for nearly 60 years. Here's a timeline of their relationship.

By Erin McDowell

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Their romance began to blossom after Jeffrey spotted Ina on campus from the library window.

"Look at that girl, isn't she beautiful?" Jeffrey told his roommate at the time, Food Network reported. As it happened, Garten's roommate knew precisely who she was: Ina Rosenberg, the younger sister of a friend he had planned to go on a date with that night. 

After the date didn't lead anywhere, Jeffrey sent her a letter with his photo in it. The future cookbook author was immediately interested.

"He saw me on the street and then sent me a letter with a photograph of himself in it," she told People in 2018. "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!'"

After Jeffrey picked up Ina, who was still in high school at the time, he drove them over to a bar in Port Chester, New York, where the legal drinking age was 18.

"It was a disaster," she told Food Network. "I had never been to a bar in my life! The guy at the door says, 'Where's your ID?' and I thought, 'What ID?'"

They ended up going to a coffee shop instead, where they had a "perfectly good time," according to Jeffrey.

After they were married, Ina and Jeffrey Garten settled in North Carolina after Jeffrey enlisted in the Army. With no plans to continue her studies at Syracuse University, Ina focused on cooking for her husband.

However, Jeffrey pushed her to pursue her passions for business and cooking, and she ended up getting her pilot's certificate on the side.

"We were part of the first generation where there was a fork in the road for a lot of women, whether to pursue their careers or stay at home," Jeffrey told People in 2018. "Ina was a cross between the two. She would send me brownies in a shoebox when I was in college and make me sweaters, but it never crossed my mind that she wouldn't also do something really interesting professionally."

"I wrote to Ina every single day," he told People in 2018 of his time stationed in Thailand. "During the whole year, I was only able to call her once."

Ina saved all the letters and has spoken about reflecting on them 50 years after the pair tied the knot. One of Jeffrey's letters mentioned how he'd love to take her to Paris, despite not having enough money for a hotel.

Paris still holds a special place in the couple's hearts and is where they've spent their anniversary every year.

Using all the ingredients France had to offer, Ina prepared all their meals on a small gas camping stove.

"I had always thought about French food as 'cuisine' with complicated preparations and slowly simmered sauces," Garten wrote in her cookbook "Cooking for Jeffrey," according to Bon Appétit. "I discovered French street markets and simple, seasonal food that was based on incredibly good ingredients." 

"It was the first formative period in her cooking," Jeffrey told Food Network. "All those little shops in Europe — the boulangeries — Ina would walk through them and just glow."

When they returned home, Ina began working her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in order to hone her skills. 

While in DC, Ina Garten spent her days earning her degree from Georgetown University and later working at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Jeffrey, meanwhile, worked in the State Department. At night, the Gartens entertained their throngs of friends at weekly dinner parties.

"People still talk about her parties," Jeffrey told Food Network. "They were legendary."

Garten worked under both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, helping to write the nuclear energy budget.

Ina Garten and Jeffrey decided early on in their relationship not to have children.

"It was a choice I made very early," Garten said during an appearance on Katie Couric's podcast in 2017. "We decided not to have children. I really appreciate that other people do and we will always have friends that have children that we are close to..." Garten explained. "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."

"We don't have any children. I'm her family," Jeffrey told Johns Hopkins Magazine in 2016.

"When I told [Jeffrey] I wanted to move to New York and open a food store, he said, 'Let's move to New York!'" Garten told People in 2018. "That he would not object to moving to a different state for my career was so unusual, particularly 40 years ago."

It became her new passion project and would be the key to launching her to superstardom. 

"Jeffrey said, 'If you love it, you'll be really good at it,'" Garten told the New York Times' Sam Sifton during a virtual chat for the release of "Modern Comfort Food." "And that's the best advice anybody ever gave me." 

Jeffrey also kept busy and worked his way to becoming the managing director at Lehman Brothers.

The pair briefly separated in the late 1970s as they navigated the pressures of Garten's new business venture.

During that period, Jeffrey was working in Washington, DC, while Ina was building her own professional path with the Barefoot Contessa store.

"When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles —­ took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces," Garten wrote in her memoir, People reported. "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."

She asked Jeffrey for a temporary separation while she figured out how to balance being both a businesswoman and a wife, and he came to terms with the fact that Garten had a flourishing career that would limit her time spent at home.

The separation was short-lived, and the couple ultimately reconciled.

While Jeffrey was on business for Lehman Brothers in Tokyo, Garten did the same thing for his apartment there, even going so far as to hire a Japanese artist to replicate his desk chair.

Their Southport, Connecticut, home looks almost identical to how it did over 20 years ago, except for a few personal touches courtesy of Jeffrey.

"Ina doesn't like any evidence of her public life," he told Food Network, "so I collect all the newspaper and magazine articles. The walls are covered with pictures of Ina."

"We're always texting each other and calling," she told People. "But I have to say I really look forward to Thursday or Friday when he comes home and the weekends are sacrosanct."

"When we're not together, I'll send her five or six texts per day," Jeffrey said. "I love looking at her schedule. I can envision where she is and what she's doing, and it doesn't feel like we're apart. If I could be with her seven days a week, 24 hours a day, that would be my ideal."

"I feel like I prepared my whole life to be quarantined, or working towards a place where we could be quarantined," the Barefoot Contessa told People in September 2020. "Jeffrey writes and he teaches remotely, and I think [he] is going to look back on these days as the good old days. I make him lunch, I make him dinner and he's home all the time."

"He would always leave on Monday and come back on Friday and I stayed in one place," Ina said. "I always wondered what it was going to be like when he retired. And when this happened, I thought, oh, I guess that's what it's going to be like ... I have to say, it's great."

In February 2021, Garten revealed how she and Jeffrey found pockets of joy during lockdown.

"Lunch date! Jeffrey and I make PB&Js, drive down to the beach, sit in the car, and listen to the podcast The Daily," Ina Garten captioned an Instagram post of her and Jeffrey's lunch.