Dolly Parton opened up about her relationship with her husband and what the pair do to make their love work.
The country singer might be one of the most famous women in the world, adored by many men and women alike, but her heart has always and will always remain with her husband Carl Dean.
After meeting outside their local laundrette in 1964 when she was 18 and he was 21, the couple immediately hit it off before tying the knot just two years later. Fast forward 56 years and the pair are still going strong, even while being in an "open relationship."
Now, I know what you're thinking - a typical open relationship involves sleeping with other people, right? Correct, but that's not the way Parton and Dean see it.
Instead, they're allowed to flirt with other people, but they will always come home to each other.
Writing about their set-up in her 2017 book 'Dolly on Dolly, Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton', the country singer wrote: "Men are my weakness. Short, fat, bald, or skinny — I've had crushes on some very unusual men but Carl knows I'll always come home and I'm not having sex with these people — I'm just flirting and having fun."
She continued: "He's not jealous and I'm not jealous of him. He knows I flirt. He flirts too. Yes, it's an open relationship, but not sexually and I would kill him if I thought he was doing that.
"He would shoot me too. At the end of the day we love each other madly," she added.
While the 'Jolene' hitmaker hardly shared much else about the intricacies of her relationship, in 2022 she gave us some details about how she keeps her marriage "spicy" during an interview with E! News.
"Every day, I put on some makeup and fix my hair because I think, 'Well, the whole world, I'm out here and everybody else sees me all dressed up, and I'm not going to just kind of go home and just flop on him,'" she told the outlet. "Nobody wants to make out with a slouch! It’s important to me that I look as good as I can."
"I think it kind of helps keep things spicy," she added.
The pair share no children together despite them being married for over five decades.
Speaking to Billboard, the country singer stated that they did want to have some little ones at one point in their relationship.
"When my husband and I were dating, and then when we got married, we just assumed we would have kids," she said. "We weren't doing anything to stop it. In fact, we thought maybe we would. We even had names if we did, but it didn't turn out that way."
She added: "God has a plan for everything. I think it probably was his plan for me not to have kids so everybody's kids could be mine."
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