Jamie Lee Curtis reveals how ‘hatred’ is the secret to her 40-year marriage

Jamie Lee Curtis has opened up about the secret to her decades-long marriage to her husband, Christopher Guest.

The Halloween star recently spoke to Entertainment Tonight when she discussed the importance of accepting various aspects of your partner over the years, and how normal it is to experience moments when you don’t love them.

“Well, you don’t leave,” Curtis told the outlet. She continued, comparing marriage to an addict’s recovery.

“I’m also sober for a long time. And we have a phrase in recovery: ‘If you stay on the bus, the scenery will change.’ And, you know, that’s marriage. You stay on the bus, the scenery changes,” the Freaky Friday actress explained.

“Like, all of a sudden, you literally wanna hate each other, and then the next day, it’s a pretty, sunny day. And the dog does something cute. And your child does something cute. And you look at each other, and you’re like, ‘Aw, gosh.’ And then you’re on another track.”

She then named specific qualities that she felt were needed in order to have a successful marriage, including: “perseverance, patience, gentleness, and a really good dose of hatred.”

Touching on her inclusion of hatred, Curtis said the idea is to acknowledge you can’t be in love with your partner every second of every day while still choosing to stay together anyway.

“You’re going to hate each other. Not leaving. Not allowing that hatred to then cause you to make some choice that you’re gonna regret. I think that’s really the secret,” she explained.

Curtis and Guest have been married since 1984 after only knowing each other for four months. The actor seemed to know she would marry him even before meeting in person.

“I was with the writer of the original Halloween when I saw my husband of 37 years for the first time,” she wrote in a 2022 personal essay for People. “Debra Hill and I were on my couch in West Hollywood in 1984. I opened up an issue of Rolling Stone, saw Christopher Guest in a Spinal Tap story and said, ‘I’m gonna marry that guy.’ (I did, six months later).”

The couple went on to share two adoptive daughters Annie, 37, and Ruby, 28.

This isn’t the first time Curtis has spoken about her marriage. In 2018 she mentioned how the two of them are mostly an opposites-attract relationship and don’t have very much in common. “My husband and I are opposites. We have been for 33 years, and we always will be,” she told Good Housekeeping.

“He’s an intellectual, and I was from the movie star/alcoholic/drug addict side, where ­education was not the most important thing. We don’t listen to the same radio station, we don’t read the same paper, we don’t go to bed at the same time.”

However, they have discovered one similar interest they have after being together for so many years. “But we read the same history books. For our 30th anniversary, we both read a book called Undaunted Courage, [which is] the story of [explorers] Lewis and Clark. Then we took eight friends and retraced a section of the Missouri River in canoes that followed the path of their expedition. We’re a little nerdy,” she said.