Bridges' commitment phobia

last updated 8 January 2015

Jeff Bridges had a serious case of cold feet about matrimony, says Fred Schruers in Rolling Stone. When he met his future wife, Susan Geston, in 1974, they clicked immediately and moved in together after just a few months. But after a couple of years went by and Bridges hadn’t proposed, Geston began having doubts. “Sue and I would break up sometimes. She’d say, ‘Where’s this going?’ My mom used to call what I have—it’s a real medical term—abulia. It’s the disease of not being able to make a decision. Sue finally said, ‘I understand you suffer from abulia, but I’m going back to Montana, ’cause my biological clock is going off.’ I got on my knees and proposed.” But almost as soon as they were married, in 1977, Bridges freaked out. “We had this terrible honeymoon at the Seven Sacred Pools in Maui, this gorgeous scene, and all I could do was smell the rotten mangoes. And I was a pouting motherf-----, just terrible. She said, ‘Let’s annul this.’ I said, ‘No, no.’ I pouted like that for a year or more.” Now 60, Bridges is glad he stuck it out. “Thank God she didn’t cut me loose. I finally got with the program. Something I didn’t count on with marriage is that it’s gotten better on all fronts—the farther it goes on, it gets deeper and richer.”