Having a successful decades-long marriage isn’t all that complicated, according to Sarah Michelle Gellar.
When Jenna Bush Hager and Tiffany Haddish asked “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” star the secret to her 22-year marriage to Freddie Prinze, Jr. during a recent interview, she gave a pithy response. “Separate bathrooms!”
“That’s it? It’s that simple?” an incredulous Hager asked during Thursday’s episode of “Today With Jenna and Friends.”
“It’s that simple,” Gellar confirmed.
“See, I was thinking it was like the [‘I Love Lucy’] thing where [Lucy and Ricky had] twin beds, and then when y’all want to get together you push them together, and when you want to be apart, you push them apart,” Haddish, who was Hager’s temporary co-host, said.
“I had not thought of that,” Gellar conceded. “That is actually a really good idea.”
Gellar, 48, met Prinze, 49, on the set of iconic ’90s slasher flick “I Know What You Did Last Summer” in 1997. However, they wouldn’t go on their first date until three years later, in 2000.
“We were friends for a very long time,” the “Cruel Intentions” actress recalled during an interview with People in 2020.
“We’d had many dinners before. And we were supposed to go with someone else, and the third person didn’t make it out and we decided to still go.”
After that first date, Prinze knew she was the one. “I didn’t go on dates with other girls, nor did I even want to pursue dates with other girls,” he told the outlet.
They married in a star-studded ceremony in Mexico in 2002 and subsequently welcomed two children — daughter Charlotte in 2009 and son Rocky in 2012.
Gellar shared a more serious take on what goes into a successful long-term relationship during a 2024 interview with Fox News Digital.
“I think everything takes work in you, whether it’s a friendship or a work relationship or a marriage,” she said at the time.
“You have to put the work in,” she added, noting that “we live in an extremely disposable society now.”
“Your phone breaks, you don’t fix it,” Gellar continued. “You get a new one. And I think that’s a lot of the attitude toward relationships.”