Patrick J. Adams left “Suits” to focus on marriage to “Pretty Little Liars” star Troian Bellisario: We were 'away from each other for 7 years'

"We had been long distance for long enough. It was time for us to start our lives."

Patrick J. Adams had a number of reasons to leave Suits, but none more important than his marriage to Troian Bellisario.

Appearing on the latest episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson's Dinner's on Me podcast, the actor spoke about the decision to leave the legal drama after season 7 back in 2018. After seven years of a long-distance relationship with Bellisario — best known for her role as Spencer Hastings on the teen drama Pretty Little Liars — Adams felt it was time to start their lives together following their 2016 nuptials.

"It was a bunch of different things," prefaced Adams of the decision to leave. "Mostly, I felt done. The show starts [with], like, my character has a secret. So there was all this interesting stuff to play for a guy who was lying and hiding out, and the only person who knew his secret is this other guy. And over the course of seven seasons, that was all peeled away, and everybody knew everything."

He added, "I never regretted the decision for a second. I knew it was the right thing for my marriage — which, I was not married at the time, but we were getting married. We got married in 2016. And we had been away from each other for seven years. We've been together the whole time Suits had been on, and it was time. We had been long distance for long enough. It was time for us to start our lives. We wanted to be together. We wanted to have kids, which we knew would take a couple of years before we were comfortable doing that."

But the longer he stayed on the show, "the longer I was putting on hold this life that I knew I wanted. It was time to realize that money is great, but, you know, I'd made enough money that I could go and have my life now," said Adams. The only reason he stayed until the end was for the money. "Again, I loved everybody," he clarified. "It wasn't like I had any problem. It was just like, I've done it. You know, when you reach the end of the thing, there's nothing more. I don't know what else to offer."

Elsewhere, Adams delved into maintaining that long-distance relationship with Bellisario, noting that it's only made them stronger. "The gift of that was that she was on a show too," he said, citing Pretty Little Liars. "So for us, we were having this shared experience in a way, different shows, different people, different struggles, but also similar things coming up. Even though we were far away, we had this unique perspective on what the other one was going through."

The fact that Adams and Bellisario were both busy actors helped. "It wasn't like one person was sitting at home and not working." Though it felt like "a prison sentence" at the time, "now, stuff that rocks other couples doesn't have any effect on us," he said. "Our resilience and ability to communicate . . . and move through things is a direct result, I think, of having to maintain a relationship over so much distance and so much time. It ended up being a real gift."

Adams' storyline on Suits wrapped up with a marriage to his onscreen love interest Rachel Zane, played by Meghan Markle. Markle also exited the series at the end of season 7 following her engagement to Prince Harry to transition into her role as the Duchess of Sussex. Adams snagged a coveted invite to his former costar's 2018 royal wedding, attending alongside Bellisario.

For more from Adams, listen to the podcast above.