Love Lessons From Suzanne Somers

Suzanne Somers has had many incarnations — sitcom star, pop icon, ThighMaster creator, best-selling author, diet expert, alternative health advocate. Her latest role: love guru. Her new book Two’s Company: A Fifty-Year Romance and Lessons Learned in Love, Life & Business is a passionate ode to her husband Alan Hamel, 81. It’s also a memoir of their long life together and a kind of self-help manual with tips for readers on how they, too, can maintain the romantic flame (hint: Lots of sex helps).

Somers, 71 and most famous as the ditzy blonde Chrissy Snow on ABC’s Three’s Company from 1977 to 1981, can get a bit gushy on the topic of her hubby. “He makes me smile before I fall asleep and wake up happy in the morning,” she writes in Two’s Company. “I don’t like being away from him.” 

AARP Membership— $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal

Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine.

Join Now

They haven’t spent a night apart in 37 years. And, she says in a phone interview, “Every morning the first thing he says to me — and it’s not true, and I don’t care — 'You’re so beautiful.' ”

Courtesy of Harmony

She adds that their love “is what poets write about. From the moment I saw  him there was some magical chemistry.”

C’mon. Doesn’t anything about him ever annoy her after so many decades of marriage? “No,” she says. “He just doesn’t bug me. We have such fun, and he’s kind, and he brings me coffee, and he’s funny … I really can’t think of anything.”

Somers met Hamel on the set of a game show when she was 19 and a struggling model and actress — “a small-town girl from San Bruno, California,” as she puts it — who had grown up with an abusive, alcoholic father. She was a single mother and divorced (from her son’s father, Bruce Somers). Hamel was a dashing Canadian television star and talk show host, divorced with two children. They eventually blended families; 40 years later they have six grandkids and, she says, "I feel like we were meant to be."

What are her secrets to their long and happy life?

Focus on the good

“Every morning I get up, and I do a meditation of gratitude for the love I have in my life, my wonderful husband, my wonderful children, the work I get to do, the country I get to live in,” she says. “I think happiness is something you can choose.”