Why Sally Field Is Swearing off Marriage

Sally Field “can’t imagine” getting married ever again. The 77-year-old Oscar winner had a candid conversation about marriage and motherhood with Julia Louis-Dreyfus during the season premiere of the Veep star’s Wiser Than Me podcast, admitting that she was “never really good” when it came to picking a partner for herself.

Field was married to Steve Craig from 1968 to 1975 before marrying Alan Greisman from 1984 to 1994, but said the men she had previously been in relationships with  “were just not a good match” for her. Asked if she had “any interest in getting married again,” Field laughed, responding easily, “I can’t imagine.”

“It would certainly all depend on meeting somebody I wanted to spend more than 37 seconds with,” she joked. “And I can’t imagine that either! So I don’t know.”

Field is mother to sons Peter and Eli, whom she shares with Craig, and youngest son Sam, whom she had with Greisman, and said her past relationships bumped up against that identity. “Several people that I was dating, or around, would say, ‘Why can’t you treat me the way you treat your sons?’ ‘Uh, because you’re not my son!’” the Flying Nun star remembered. “I’ve just never been good at picking a person, a partner, to be with who would be loving and know me and not want to change me and also be challenging to me,” she continued.

Louis-Dreyfus also asked Field if having kids was “an opportunity to almost re-parent” herself, but the 80 for Brady star said she was “so young” when she became a mother at age 23 that it took time for her to be “mothering herself” as well. When it came to her oldest son, the actress explained, “There was something in me that felt so fiercely about him that I felt, ‘If I can take care of him, I can take care of myself. And goddammit, I’m going to take care of him. I don’t care if I go down.’ So it started to connect with a fierceness in me that I didn’t recognize.”

Louis-Dreyfus’ podcast premiered its second season Wednesday. The Lemonada Media Original promises “funny, touching, personal conversations with iconic older women who are brimming with the kind of unapologetic attitude and wisdom that only comes with age,” and will feature Julie Andrews, Billie Jean King, Beverly Johnson, Ina Garten, Anne Lamott, Patti Smith, Bonnie Raitt, Gloria Steinem, Debbie Allen and Vera Wang in its second season.