Kevin Bacon, who has been married to fellow actor Kyra Sedgwick for more than three decades, has little to offer in the way of advice.

The couple met on the set of Lemon Sky in 1987, married in September of that year, and delivered their first child, Travis, in June of 1989. Their romance progressed quickly, and they expanded their family with the arrival of daughter Sosie in 1992, and they’re still going strong over three decades later. Their union has had its share of difficulties — they once had a six-month-long dispute — but they’ve always managed to work things out. The fact that their approach to relationship success is very basic and super real is maybe the most unexpected aspect.

In 2015, when asked about the secret to his now 32-year marriage, he joked to Entertainment Tonight, ” “Whatever you do, don’t listen to celebrities on advice on how to stay married. That’s my secret.”

Sedgwick was not pleased by Bacon after the first few interactions with him. In a 2012 interview with Piers Morgan, Sedgwick said that the second time she met Bacon, she thought to herself, “‘He’s really cocky and he thinks he’s so cool.'” But for Bacon, it was quite the opposite. “I found her, you know, really very beautiful and sexy and aloof,” he said during his own appearance on Morgan’s show. “And I was just immediately in love with her and she was just immediately put off by me.”

Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick’s decades-long relationship may have begun with the film Lemon Sky, but the actor claimed in 2014 that they met in the 1970s. Bacon finished a performance one day and went to a neighboring deli for lunch, when he happened to run into a 12-year-old Sedgwick! “A little girl was in there who had just seen the matinee and her brother said, ‘You liked that actor, go tell him you liked him,’ and it was Kyra,” he recounted of the chance meeting.

He was the 29-year-old alum of Diner, Animal House, and Footloose, fresh off a longterm relationship with Pollan, when they met for the second time in 1987. She was relatively grown up, all of 22 with appearances on soap opera Another World and an episode of Miami Vice under her belt.

When asked by People in May 2020, his bride provided a similar response, proving that they are, as always, in sync. The Endings, Beginnings actor joked, “I joke that the secret to a successful marriage is to not take marriage advice from celebrities.”

“People say it’s this fairytale thing, but it’s life. We just love each other a lot,” Sedgwick detailed to Redbook, adding, “Everyone has marital struggles—I don’t buy the ‘Oh, it’s so hard, actors being married. Man, marriage is hard for everyone. So when we’re on the red carpet and we get the ‘How do you guys do it? No one can stay together,’ I get really irritated. I don’t think our relationship is more or less difficult; I just think you both make the commitment and you make it work.” The 55-year-old also admitted that “We always knew that we were each other’s ‘one. Both of us knew this was forever and we were going to work it out no matter what happens, so when we fight, it’s not so scary. You can’t be honest with someone if you think that they are going to leave.” Being intimate in the bedroom has also contributed in their long-lasting bond. “Sex is really important. That desire is there,” Sedgwick shared with Redbook in 2012. “The essence of it hasn’t really changed. When he walks into a room, I’m still… I mean, my heart gets a little fluttery and I think, Oh! He’s so cute. He’s so hot. That’s literally the first thing I think.”

Though, to be honest, their common slogan might just be a front to hide the reality that they don’t have any fresh ideas. They put in the effort, yet theirs is a union that simply…functions.  “I guess if I had to think too much about [our marriage], that would probably not be a good thing,” she explained. “We just got lucky. I honestly believe that’s the truth.”

It’s never easy juggling a family and a profession, and Kyra Sedgwick revealed to Glamour that becoming a mother meant she had to put her acting career on hold. “When the kids were younger, I worked a lot less,” she explained, adding, “I think you just make your priorities, and sometimes they put restrictions on you that hurt a little bit, and that’s okay.”

According to PEOPLE, Bacon and his wife “realized that we’ve been married for a really long time,” and that “quarantine was an amazing, kind of, test for our marriage because, I mean, we were really isolated.” I think after a while we realized that we would kind of have to, even in our place, go away from each other,” he revealed, recalling, “So we would have breakfast, then she’d basically go to the bedroom, which we called the lair, and she spends a lot of time in her lair. Then she’d text me and say, ‘Do you wanna do lunch later?’ and I’d say ‘Sure’ and you know, we’d meet in the kitchen, and then she’d go back to the lair.” They’d keep that routine going all day. “And, again, you know, drinks, maybe dinner, whatever,” he continued. “And then we’d get back together in the kitchen and do the same thing all over again.”

The rest, she attributes to good fortune and strict devotion to a few guidelines: In 2010, she told Good Housekeeping, “Keep the fights clean, and don’t have sex with somebody else. Monogamy is a given, like ‘Put the toilet seat down.'”

The fact that she had a loving spouse who never took her sacrifices for granted made the difficult decision to put her career on hold a bit easier. “She’s made a lot more sacrifices than I’ve made,” Kevin Bacon told he mag, conceding, “In many cases, because of the kids, she would make decisions careerwise that weren’t the best for her career.” He recognized and appreciated her selfless dedication to their family and so when the role of a lifetime came knocking for Sedgwick, he pushed her to refocus on work. “When [2005’s] The Closer came along — I don’t even look at this as a sacrifice — but the kids were still in high school or junior high and she had this opportunity to go out to California and to be a lead in a TV show,” he shared. “I said, ‘Listen, I’ll stay with the kids.’ In this case, this was the first time in our lives I said, ‘I’ll stay home, I won’t take anything.’”

Surprisingly, their union—which puts them among Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson as famous couples who should never break up—wasn’t a certainty at first.

On a brighter side, Bacon never took for granted that his wife would stick by him despite his shady humor. “I was watching videotapes of our family from the early ’90s [and] hearing me making these cheesy jokes from behind the camera, I said to my wife, ‘When I look at those tapes and hear the things coming out of my mouth, the fact that you have stayed with me is truly heroic,’” he joked with People in 2017.

Although their connection appears to be picture-perfect, it is as genuine as it gets. Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon are no exception when it comes to ups and downs and disputes. “The biggest fight we ever had was when I wanted to move back to Manhattan and he wanted to stay in Connecticut,” the actress said to Glamour. “That was a big one, and it lasted a long time.” To be accurate, six months. “We have had our bumpy patches,” she told Good Housekeeping. She explained that they were living in a rural Connecticut farmhouse in 1995, but she “needed the pulse of the city.” She confessed, “My mental health was at stake,” she admitted. Eventually, they did move back to New York and they “got through it just by knowing that no one was going anywhere.”