Melissa Gilbert’s six-year relationship with ex-boyfriend Rob Lowe was full of ups and downs.
“I was such a baby when Rob and I were together,” Gilbert, 61, said during a Tuesday, July 29, appearance on Jennie Garth’s “I Choose Me” podcast.
The former couple were 17 when they started dating in 1981 (Gilbert was still playing Laura Ingalls Wilder on Little House on the Prairie at the time) and they “broke up for the last time” when they were 23 in 1987.
“It was very tumultuous,” Gilbert explained. “I felt like a bit of an old sage in the business at that point, because I’d been doing it for so long.”
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While Gilbert seemed like a Hollywood veteran, Lowe’s career was just getting started.
“I was able to, sort of, sit back and watch this meteoric rise happen. I don’t think I was prepared for the stuff that came with it, necessarily,” she explained. “I was prepared for all of the having to go to premieres and things and award shows and all of that. But I wasn’t prepared for the fandom and, frankly, the girls.”
Gilbert said, at the time, she believed that every girl “was my sister,” but this changed after coming face-to-face with Lowe’s fans during their relationship.
“It was like I didn’t exist. They just push right past me and stick phone numbers in his pockets and stuff,” the actress continued. “To say it was disconcerting is doing it a big disservice. It was horrible. I think I learned a lot about what didn’t work for me, actually. And what I wouldn’t stand for later on.”
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While Gilbert said she and Lowe had “some really, really, really fun times,” their relationship brought her some “really valuable and important lessons” overall.
“In looking back, I look at the way my life is so easeful now. But I look at it back then and I feel like I was all, like my shoulders were always up by my ears,” Gilbert explained. “Always waiting for the next shoe to drop or something bad to happen or some, I don’t know, something untoward or gross.”
Following her split from Lowe, the actress moved on with fellow star Bo Brinkman. She and Brinkman, now 68, were married from 1988 to 1994. The following year, she and Bruce Boxleitner married. They were together from 1995 to 2011.
Gilbert confirmed her engagement to her now-husband, Timothy Busfield, in January 2013. They wed in April of that year.
