Here's the 'Secret Sauce' to Robert Downey Jr. And Wife Susan's Successful Marriage

Take note, Robert Downey Jr. dropped a two-week rule he and his wife of 18 years Susan Downey religiously follow for a successful marriage. The Oppenheimer star met the love of his life in 2003 where he starred alongside Halle Berry in Gothika, produced by his now-wife Susan. The rest, as they say, is history. 

The Oscar-winner's wife told PEOPLE, "We do have a two-week rule, which often feels too long, but we don't go more than two weeks without seeing each other and the family being together." The couple are parents to two beautiful children- a 12-year-old son Exton and a 9-year-old daughter Avri.

Susan continued, "Fortunately, we prefer to be a traveling circus when we can be." However, she also acknowledged that so much in life is unpredictable and in such cases, they keep the basics intact and flow with the tide. 

"You keep the basic rule of two weeks, and then you don't try and think too far ahead, because so much of what we do is oddly unpredictable," admitted Susan. "You just never know. Someone might get sick, or there might be a shutdown, or this or that. So you just have to have some basic things in place, and then you have to be willing to flow with the rest of it." 

The couple are also producers in their own production Team Downey. Recalling their first meeting, Susan told The Hollywood Reporter, "We were up in Montreal prepping for Gothika, and we had lunch with the director and Halle Berry. "Everybody else ordered Japanese, but he brought his own packets of oatmeal to have at lunch. I mean, he was interesting but weird." 

The same year, around November, Downey Jr. asked Susan to marry him. In an Oprah Winfrey show, the 58-year-old recounted, "It was her birthday and I wanted to get her before she turned 30, so I waited right before midnight, and I got her a bunch of stuff and then there was a ring." 

While gushing over his wife, Downey Jr. is proud of the life they have built together as a couple, "It just gives me, honestly, something to attach my neurosis to that's positive." Meanwhile, Susan admitted her work allows her more flexibility than her actor husband who sometimes has to travel to far-off lands to shoot. 

"The good news is I'm not in front of the camera, and so as a producer, I end up with a little bit more flexibility in terms of location, of where I would need to be," she added, accepting, "I really admire and have a lot of empathy for couples who both have to be in front of the camera, because you get stuck and you have to make those choices." 

Apart from admiring each other as a couple, Susan is in awe of her husband's commitment to his work. "He approaches everything he's done, every Marvel movie, every other movie, with the same level of commitment and belief that he is an actor and that he's doing his best to create a role," she gushed.