Desparate Housewive’s James Denton On Lasting Love

by Jesse Kornbluth

(Page 5 of 9) Minnesota with a degree in theater, worked as an apprentice in a Minneapolis children’s theater while being a foster parent for two mentally disabled kids in a youth home, and then, “with two suitcases and a boom box,” moved to

New York. There she sang in an a capella trio, worked as a nanny in the Hamptons, lived in 11 apartments in 11 years—and came to a hard decision about acting.“When you have a dream and you try to make a living at it, it becomes a business,” she explains. “I hated that. I wanted acting to be my art. So I thought I’d find something else I liked as much, then do acting as a hobby.” Her discovery? “I love to teach women to exercise. People do it for lots of reasons. I do it for health and well-being, so it gives me great satisfaction to train older women who have never exercised and don’t know what it is to be in their bodies.”A tough-minded woman with a hard body, Erin wasn’t looking for a man to take care of her. Like Jamie, she’d had a brief, unfortunate marriage that only confirmed her desire for independence. “It took time for me to let myself be dependent on Jamie,” she says.Then both had to confront the Legacy of Mom and Dad.“My parents were amazing people who had no business being together—and they knew it,” Jamie recalls. “There was no fighting, no screaming … but silence is just as dysfunctional. They had three kids, and that was the glue. They stayed together for us. I wasn’t aware of the dynamics of my parents’ marriage until I was out of college. Then relationships start to be about ‘Will we settle down?’. My parents had nothing in common; I wanted to have a lot in common with my partner. My parents came from very different backgrounds, and that was always a problem. I wanted a woman from a similar background. And so I ran from relationships that reminded me of my parents.”As did

Erin. “My parents married when my mom was 21 and my father was 22,” she says. “They had five daughters and a hobby farm on 11 acres and a house on a lake, so I thought they had a terrific marriage—until I started therapy. Then I saw: They’re snipers.”She was determined to avoid relationships with men she’d be tempted to criticize. Jamie had been raised as a Southern Baptist and, she assumed, was the kind of Republican who’d describe himself as a “fiscal conservative.” He was a member of the National Rifle Association, too. For a Minnesota liberal like

Erin, that wasn’t promising. Then she learned that Jamie had decidedly blue-state politics, and had joined the NRA to be closer to his father, who was a hunter.None of these happy discoveries made a wedding the obvious next step, though. “We knew we wanted to be married if we were going to have kids,” Jamie explains, “so we weren’t in any hurry to marry. It was going to happen in reverse order—not very old-fashioned. Our thought was to get married before our child was born and hope he couldn’t do the math.”Three years after Jamie and Erin got together, she became pregnant. This created a certain romantic problem: How could Jamie propose in a way that had any emotional credibility?“I didn’t want

Erin to think, ‘OK, I’m pregnant, marry me,’” Jamie recalls, “so I didn’t bring it up for a long time.”