William Daniels, Bonnie Bartlett Celebrate 75 Years of Marriage. Lessons from Their Relationship

William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett are celebrating 75 years of marriage.

The “Boy Meets World” actor celebrated the occasion with a photo of the couple shared to Facebook on June 30.

“Happy 75th Anniversary to my wife Bonnie. It doesn’t even seem that long it just seems like this is my life. And it’s with each other. How lucky am I?” he captioned the post, which included a picture of Daniels sitting in a chair while Bartlett stands over him with her hands on his chest.

Daniels, who turned 99 in March, met Bartlett, who turned 97 in June, while they were both students at Northwestern University.

“Well, we’ve been together actually 78 years because it was three years in college,” Bartlett told Page Six in a joint interview in May.

When you’ve been married as long as Daniels and Bartlett have, people are bound to wonder how they make it work. So, what is the key to their success?

“Life is all adjustment. You’re constantly adjusting,” Bartlett told Page Six.

“It suddenly got hot here (in Los Angeles), and it got hard to breathe and to move around. You have to kind of adjust to the heat,” she added. “And that’s what life’s all about — is adjusting to whatever your circumstances are and however you move along. And certainly a marriage is full of adjustments.”

Bartlett says Daniels is often approached about advice about marriage. What does he say when people ask him?

Daniels and Bartlett have worked with each other over the years, including playing spouses on “Boy Meets World” and “St. Elsewhere,” for which they each won a pair of Emmys.

Bartlett says marriage is a two-way street.

“Caring about your happiness, yes. You’ve got to be happy, too, but caring about the other person’s happiness. Being patient if there’s some kind of a problem that you’re going through, being very caring and very helpful,” she told People in 2024.

She also said that Daniels can still catch her off-guard.

“Every once in a while, he’ll do something, and I think, ‘Where did that come from? Where did that come from?’ Or, he the same with me,” she told People. “We never stop being surprised by what somebody does.”

Daniels and Bartlett had an open marriage early on in their union. The two wed in 1951.

“It was non-spoken,” Bartlett told the Daily Mail in May. “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… We never got unhinged, but our lives did go in different directions occasionally,” she added.

“I guess it was a little bit of an open marriage at first, but that was very painful,” she told Fox News in 2023. “That didn’t work well. And it was a time when people were doing that. It was at a time in New York when there was a lot of sex and a lot of people doing all kinds of things, you know — very free.

“But I don’t know if there was a lack of commitment a little bit, and that’s not good,” she added. “So there was a lot of pain connected with any transgression, with any extramarital thing.”

Bartlett and Daniels are also parents to two sons, Michael and Robert, whom they adopted after their son William Jr. died as a newborn in 1961.

“That’s the best thing that ever happened to us. And 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. I can’t imagine life without them,” she told People in 2024.