Why Ina Garten and Husband Jeffrey Decided Not to Have Children

04/20/2017 03:49 pm EDT

Ina Garten married husband Jeffrey in 1968, and the two have since lived a happily blissed-out life that we are lucky to get to witness on Food Network.

One thing they haven't done, however, is have children, a choice that Garten told Katie Couric on a new episode of the Katie Couric Podcast was entirely intentional.

"We decided not to have children," PEOPLE reports the Barefoot Contessa star as saying. "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."

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"I really felt, I feel, that I would have never been able to have the life I've had," she continued. "So it's a choice and that was the choice I made."

While Couric noted that people sometimes judge others for choosing not to have children, Garten shared that she never felt that stigma.

"I never felt that people did," she said. "I think the one thing that we miss is a lot of people's friends are the parents of their kids' friends. So we never had that connection with other people that I see, that network. But no I never felt judged by it — maybe people did but I didn't notice."

Garten also revealed a few keys to how she and Jeffrey make their relationship work, saying, "The secret is that you just take care of each other and admire each other and support each other and you get that back."

"If Jeffrey and I disagree on something," she added, "he always agrees with me!"

[H/T Twitter / @wyffnews4]

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