Ah, young love. So often, even if it doesn’t end badly (looking at you, Romeo and Juliet), it just ends, period, a season of life that passes. Not so for actors Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, who have been married for longer than three decades and still seem to be as in love as they ever have been.

Last week, Sedgwick shared her secret to her longstanding partnership with the Footloose star and famed six-degrees party game subject. At the New York Women in Film and Television's Muse Awards in New York City, she told Page Six that there’s no strategy, just fate.

“We’re really lucky,” she said. “We got lucky really young.”

The two first met in the late ‘70s, a chance fan encounter in a New York City deli while Bacon was between performances of a Broadway show, wowing a younger Sedgwick. But it was when they filmed 1987’s Lemon Sky that they connected romantically, leading to their 1988 wedding. Sedgwick was 22 at the time, and Bacon 29. In 2022, Bacon shared what he claimed was “our first selfie” on Instagram, sharing an undated throwback pic (which, to be technical, is a portrait, not a selfie, due to neither of the subjects taking the photo itself) of his younger self, shirtless, cuddling up to Sedgwick.

Sedgwick, now 58, said that her partnership with Bacon, 65, is charmed, but not effortless.

“You know it’s work, it’s always going to be work,” she said. “A partnership for that long demands a lot of you … I feel like a very lucky woman.”

Life has its ups and downs, and the two have faced plenty of both together. They have two children, 34-year-old Travis Bacon and 32-year-old Sosie Bacon, a combined film and TV credit list that could stretch for miles, and plenty of lessons learned by one another’s sides. In 2022, Kevin Bacon revealed that he and Sedgwick had at one point invested “most of our money” with notorious Ponzi scheme king Bernie Madoff. The couple recovered “a portion” of their funds in legal proceedings after the scheme was toppled, but not all. They took solace in one another and their family, he said, rather than “whining about money.”

“When something like that happens, you look at each other and you go, ‘Well, that sucks, and let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work,’” he said. “We’ve made it this far, our kids are healthy, we’re healthy, you know? Let’s look at what we have that’s good. We can still both work.”