Donna and Ed tied the knot in the late ’70s, about five years before welcoming their older son Jason. Less than two years later, they became a family of four with the addition of Travis. Together, they raised their family in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and sent their sons to the University of Cincinnati, where they both played college football.

After roughly 25 years of marriage, the pair went their separate ways following both their sons’ college graduations. While the divorce presented a hardship for the Kelce family, Donna looks back on her marriage to Ed fondly. On New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce, Donna assured both Jason and Travis that she has no ill will toward their father and considers him a very important person in her life.

“I don’t hate him. We’re friends to this day. We get along great,” Donna said on the podcast. “We were like a tag team with you two. We got to do all sorts of fun things. When one of you had to go out of town, the other person would help with the other child. It was perfect.”

However, as Donna explained, “sometimes people move apart.” When asked by her sons if she regrets marrying Ed, Donna responded, “No, never, because I got you two.”

In the 2023 documentary, Kelce, Donna and Ed talked about choosing to stay together for as long as they did for the benefit of their boys.

“If we had split as we probably both would have preferred, that would have been a nightmare with the logistics, getting kids where they had to be and providing all the support,” Ed explains in the film.

On an episode of The Martha Stewart Podcast that aired in May 2024, Donna said that she and Ed “worked together as a team” to raise their sons before their divorce.

“With as active as they were, how do you do that on your own? So we decided that we would be married throughout the entire time that the kids were in the house, and that’s the way it worked out,” she said.