Nicole Kidman and her husband, Keith Urban, just celebrated 12 years of marital bliss – no small task considering they both have thriving careers that require them to travel all over the world.
But while the secret to their success is certainly staying connected while they are apart, Kidman says there is one thing she refuses to do communicate with her husband.
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“We’ve never texted,” the actress tells Parade. “That is so not our relationship.”
Instead, the couple reach out to each other the old-fashioned way – by picking up the phone and calling the other person.
“We call,” reveals Kidman. “We’ve done this since the very beginning. The reason it started at the beginning was because I didn’t know how to text, and it just kind of worked for us. So now we don’t. We just do voice to voice or skin to skin, as we always say. We talk all the time and we FaceTime but we just don’t text because I feel like texting can be misrepresentative at times.
“I’ve had the thing where I reread texts and I’m like, ‘What does that mean?,’” she adds, “and then read it to somebody and go ‘Can you interpret that?’ I don’t want that between my lover and I.”
The 51-year-old says the secret to their successful union really isn’t much of a secret at all.
“We never tell anybody any advice about their relationship or think that we have a secret,” Kidman concedes. “We just approach it with humility and hope and just really love hanging out. I mean, it’s that simple. We love spending time together. We have a lot of fun together and we just choose each other. If there is one person I can hang out with, it’s him and the girls and that’s it. That’s so much enough for me.
“We’ll get on planes and fly overnight rather than have a night apart,” she continues. “We will do anything to make it work. Jet lag is always a challenge though! That’s why I think it’s so important to take time to exercise and take care of yourself because a lot of times I’m functioning on too little sleep and I’m trying to do it all, which I think is a problem for a lot of women – trying to be there and do everything for everybody at the cost and the expense of my own health and emotional health. And so I’m always trying to balance that.”
Kidman’s famous husband echoes his wife’s sentiments, at least when it comes to prioritizing their marriage.
“We’re very, very ‘in it’ as a couple: very awake, very present and very in love,” he says (quote via The Boot). “When it does go out of balance, we fix it quickly. We do whatever we’ve got to do. We travel, we do whatever it takes to not be apart.”
Photo Credit: Getty images/Mike Coppola