Melissa Gilbert on the Realities of Marrying for Love (Instead of Money)
Little House on the Prairie alum Melissa Gilbert has been married three times. If you asked her at the time of each marriage, she’d probably say each one was for love. But she found herself in love and with “limited funds” in her third marriage with Timothy Busfield.
Melissa Gilbert on her contemporaries ‘for whom money was no object’
After Gilbert and Busfield got married in 2013, they lived together in a modest home in Michigan, Busfield’s home state. In 2019, they bought a rundown “cabbage” (Gilbert’s word for the home combining cottage and cabin) in the Catskills to fix up. Especially after their respective divorces from their previous partners, Gilbert and Busfield found themselves needing to be extra smart with their money. The former Laura Ingalls actor couldn’t help but notice a stark difference in herself and some of her peers in the industry.
“I knew plenty of people in Hollywood, contemporaries of mine, for whom money was no object,” she wrote in her 2022 memoir, Back to the Prairie. “They had homes that resembled modern-art museums. They might as well have lived on another planet. For the most part, they did.”
Gilbert and Busfield’s ‘funds were limited’
For Gilbert and Busfield, “money was an issue.” And as anyone knows who’s ever done renovations, things can quickly add up. Such was the case at “the cabbage.”
“We had used Tim’s Directors Guild retirement to purchase the property and had reserved a slice of the remainder to deal with the renovations,” wrote Gilbert. “Funds were limited. We had to be mindful of our expenses, which meant daily conversations about the most economical and least traumatic way to get work done, while still achieving the vision we had for updating the cabbage and making it our own.”
On not marrying for money
While many of Gilbert’s peers could afford modern-art-museum homes, many also could not. Many actors find themselves in financial positions similar to Gilbert and Busfield’s.
“This was just the reality of choosing art as a career instead of finance or law or computer programming or dentistry,” wrote Gilbert.
And while Gilbert had never made a habit out of getting into a relationship for financial reasons, she definitely didn’t do that with her third husband.
“It was also the reality of marrying for love instead of money,” wrote Gilbert. “I know someone who only half-jokingly advises to marry for money the first time and love the second. Tim and I were on round three, and while piles of money definitely can make life easier, we knew the only thing that gave a marriage any change of working was love. The one thing that makes life full and meaningful is the only thing money can’t buy.”
So they saved where they could. They had frequent conversations about money. And now the two actors live a very happy, peaceful life together out in the mountains.
