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Dolly Parton said she got along well with her husband. Still, she sometimes forgot he was talking to her in the middle of a conversation.
Dolly Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, were married for nearly six decades, and she said that they rarely argued during this time. Parton said Dean was so easygoing that he hardly blinked when she was rude or dismissive to him. She admitted this wasn’t on purpose. He also frequently did the same thing to her.
Dolly Parton said she’d walk away from her husband as he talked to her
Parton and her husband married in 1966 and were together until his death in 2025. She said they were extremely “comfortable” with each other, so much so that she could wander off mid-conversation without him taking offense.
“If we’re in the middle of a conversation, if I lose interest without realizing it, I just get up to go do something else,” she said, per the book Dolly on Dolly. “He doesn’t get offended at that; he just figures we’ll pick up the conversation another time.”
It was hard for him to take offense, she noted, when he often did the same thing to her.
“It’s the same with him. I’ll be tellin’ him something and I’ll be really involved, and he’ll realize that he’s left the engine runnin’ on a truck up in the woods and he gets up and leaves,” she said. “I know it’s not out of disrespect.”
She said that neither of them was sensitive in this way.
“We’re not real sensitive,” she said. “That is, we’re very sensitive people, but we’re not supersensitive to silly little things like if he forgets to send me an anniversary card.”
She said that while she might have taken offense to Dean forgetting their anniversary early in their marriage, she learned he was romantic in other ways.
Dolly Parton said she and her husband spent a good deal of time talking
Though Parton and Dean sometimes walked away mid-conversation, she said they liked to talk to each other. When she wasn’t touring, they spent much of their time chatting.
“We like to talk together a lot,” she said. “We like to go up to our bedroom early at night. He takes a bath and piddles around, and I read and talk or just watch television. We do a lot of talkin’ in the bedroom because we have a lot of different things to talk about, such as what he’s been doing.”
They were different, but they got along. Parton said they also traveled well together.
She said they rarely argued
As Parton noted, she and Dean didn’t take offense to many things. She said they rarely argued.
“Never argue,” she said. “Sometimes we’ll get a little touchy if we’re tired or aggravated, but the worst it ever gets to is ‘Why don’t you get out and go somewhere? Why don’t you get out of my face for a while?’”
She said they made a conscious decision not to bicker early on and stuck with it throughout their relationship.
“We never put ourselves in a situation where we bicker back and forth,” she said. “It’s just too easy to pick up the habit of arguing. Years ago we decided that if we never started then we’d never have to keep it up.”
She noted that she would feel crushed if she ever got into a bad argument with Dean.
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