In the latest issue of PEOPLE, Smyth cites the things that make her nearly 30-year love story with the tennis player thrive — friendship, compromise, privacy — while the tennis icon cautions his superstar wife, “You’re forgetting the most obvious one.” Smyth offers her husband a nonchalant nod. “Sex,” she says deadpanly. “You’ve got to keep the sex going!”
Smyth, 63, and McEnroe, 61, have been married for 23 years, proving that they haven’t lost that spark. They met at a Christmas party in 1993, both in a state of transition. Smyth’s rock band, Scandal, famed for epic singles like “The Warrior,” had disintegrated, and she was a single mother raising her daughter Ruby (now 34), whom she had with punk-rocker ex-husband Richard Hell. Meanwhile, McEnroe was planning to retire from tennis and separated from his then-wife Tatum O’Neal, with whom he has sons Kevin, 34, and Sean, 33, as well as daughter Emily, 29.
Smyth also credits their long-term marriage to maintaining a low profile. “To me, it was a superstition. I didn’t want to say, ‘Hey, look at us, we’re this happy pair. I just believed if I kept it quiet, I had this gut sense that we’d stay together — if I told the world, we wouldn’t — because I’ve seen that happen so many times,” adds Smyth, who discloses they were even in exploratory talks for a reality program approximately 20 years ago. “That probably would have broken us up, I bet you.””
I used to stay in a relationship for a few years and then grow bored and leave or anything. And I believe that many people do that, as well as get involved with other people while married, because they feel the need for something fresh or whatever,” Smyth says. “If you get to know somebody and become really intimate, it might get more exciting and simply more of a genuine experience.
Be the first to comment