Joy Behar and Steve Janowitz quietly tied the knot in August 2011, but she had intended to do it two years earlier. She announced her intentions in March 2009, but the engagement was short-lived. Three months later, Behar shared the plans had changed. “I’m getting my own talk show on HLN, so I don’t have to get married anymore,” she joked at an event in June 2009, the New York Daily News reported. “Actually, I got cold feet again, so I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s off the table.”
That didn’t mean she and Janowitz had broken up. “What’ll happen is, when I decide to do it, I’ll do it, and then everybody will know I did it. I can’t make up my mind,” she shared. Behan was still open to getting married, but not right then. Janowitz was ambiguous and wanted her to do whatever she thought was best. “Steve is fine,” Behar told the outlet. “He says, ‘Do whatever you want.'”
While she was increasingly worried about the implications of being unmarried in case of illness or other unfortunate circumstances, she also valued her freedom. “I just feel claustrophobic in a marriage,” she said in the CNN interview. Behar has previously discussed how marriage stunted her career. “I don’t think that I’d be sitting here if I stayed married,” Behar said of her first husband, Joe Behar, on “The View” in February 2024 (via Decider).
