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Sally Field Reveals She’s ‘Really Happy’ And Not Looking For Love At Age 72
It seems only fitting that the former Flying Nun star has apparently taken a vow of celibacy. “I don’t even try,” Sally Field said of looking for love at a recent Live Talks LA Q&A about her new memoir, In Pieces. “I’m really happy with how I am, and I really don’t want to pick up your underwear in the morning, you know?”
Perhaps the 72-year-old is taking a different approach to her love life after being married and divorced twice. And after each relationship would go down the gutter, Sally said that she “would constantly look for love.” But she’s learned from past mistakes. “I’m trying to examine that pattern,” she said.
Now that she’s in her later years, the Mrs. Doubtfire actress is “realizing I really don’t want to start again,” she said. “I really like not worrying about someone else’s dinner.”
As Sally has learned, there’s a difference between loneliness and being alone. “Ultimately, what we have is just aloneness, and that sounds terrible, but it’s really glorious,” she insisted. “Because if you are all together inside yourself, owning yourself, and all the pieces are put together, you keep great company with yourself. You’re not alone in your aloneness — you’re together with yourself.”
That’s a lesson Sally has learned the hard way. She’s endured some painful splits, most notably with Burt Reynolds, her on-and-offscreen leading man from 1977 to 1982. “He was an important part of my life for a very long period of time,” she confessed. “He was a catalyst for me in a lot of ways, and I probably was for him.”
However, their relationship was over for almost forty years when Burt died of a heart attack at age at 82 this past September, only 12 days before In Pieces was published. “Selfishly, I’m glad [he never read the book],” Sally revealed in another interview. “It would’ve hurt him, and I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had.”
The mom-of-three may never have another romance, but “I found another love,” Sally says. “I, who found it difficult to find partners, have found love in my children and my work.”
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