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Dolly Parton has been married to her husband, Carl Thomas Dean since 1966. When recently asked about the secret to their 56-year marriage, the Jolene hitmaker said that they “just work so well together.” However, the two have long been rumored to be in an open relationship. The 9 to 5 star addressed it at one point, saying, “Men are my weakness.”
Here’s the truth about Parton’s controversial marriage.
Who Is Dolly Parton’s Husband, Carl Thomas Dean?
Dean is the complete opposite of Parton. Speaking to Entertainment Tonight in January 2023, the latter said of her husband: “He’s kind of a loner, so he doesn’t really like being with anybody but me — when I’m home — I mean, he’s not one to kind of get out there and socialize that much. He loves living on the farm, taking care of the property as he has for all these many years, and then, we just have a lot to talk about.” Dean also runs an asphalt-laying company in Nashville.
Parton added that although Dean isn’t into all that Hollywood biz, he’s always had the same passion for music. “He loves music, but he’s not in the music business at all, so we have different things to talk about, his world and my world, and we work really well together,” explained the I Will Always Love You composer. “We have a lot of love and respect for each other, and I think the key to all of it — we both have a crazy, warped sense of humor, so we have a lot of fun.”
The couple first met at a laundromat in 1964. Parton was 18, and Dean was 21. “I’d come to Nashville with dirty clothes,” Parton told the New York Times. “I was in such a hurry to get here — and after I’d put my clothes in the machine, I started walkin’ down the street, just lookin’ at my new home, and this guy hollered at me, and I waved. Bein’ from the country, I spoke to everybody. And he came over and, well, it was Carl, my husband.”
“My first thought was I’m gonna marry that girl,” Dean later said of their meet cute. “My second thought was, ‘Lord she’s good lookin.’ And that was the day my life began.”
Is Dolly Parton In An Open Marriage With Carl Thomas Dean?
In her book Dolly on Dolly, Parton set the record straight on her “open relationship” with her husband.
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“Men are my weakness,” she said. “Short, fat, bald or skinny — I’ve had crushes on some very unusual men but Carl knows I’ll always come home and I’m not having sex with these people — I’m just flirting and having fun.”
She added: “He is not jealous and I’m not jealous of him. He knows I flirt. He flirts too. Yes, it’s an open relationship, but not sexually and I would kill him if I thought he was doing that. He would shoot me too. At the end of the day we love each other madly.”
In 2008, she also clarified that Dean didn’t have an affair with the bank teller that inspired Jolene. “She got this terrible crush on my husband,” she told NPR.
“And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us — when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.’ So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.”
Years later, she told the crowd at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England that she eventually “got rid” of the teller. “I wrote that years ago when my husband … was spending a little more time with Jolene than I thought he should be,” she shared. “I put a stop to that. I got rid of that redhead woman in a hurry.”
Does Dolly Parton Have Kids?
Parton and her husband don’t have any children. “I don’t know that I won’t have children someday,” said the Guinness record-breaker back in 1977. “But it’s just not possible for me to bear children and leave them for somebody else to raise while I have a career. If I wait until I’m naturally too old to have children, I can always adopt them.”
The fan-declared saint added: “When I listen to my own things, I think to myself, ‘I was the mother of that.'”
