Martha Stewart fell in love with ex-husband Andy Stewart on their first date.

In Netflix’s new documentary Marta, the culinary icon recalls meeting Andy when she was a student at Barnard College in New York City and he was in law school at Yale. The couple started dating after being set up by Martha’s classmate and Andy’s sister.

“He came to pick me up in his little yellow Mercedes sedan,” she recalls in the film. “I had never been in a Mercedes before.”

Martha, 83, grew up one of six children in Nutley, NJ. The popular, tall blonde spent her teenage years modeling to provide extra income for her parents, ‘Big Martha’, a schoolteacher, and Edward, a failed businessman.

Martha remembers going out to dinner with Andy on their first date when she was 19. ‘He was very polite and personable, and he had traveled a lot. It was exciting to meet a sophisticated young man. And he had an American Express card, which was a big deal at that time,” she says.

When the couple met, Martha found Andy “intriguing, playful and kind,” and by the end of the meal she was “madly in love.” Martha says that Andy sent her money every week for a train ticket to visit him in New Haven, Connecticut.

“I had never slept with anyone before,” she says. “He was very aggressive and I liked that.”

When Andy proposed, Martha said marriage seemed “such a natural thing.” But her father did not approve of the relationship. “I went home and told my dad, and my dad hit me,” she remembers. “And he hit me hard in the face and said, ‘No. You don’t marry him. He is a Jew. ”

“I remember getting that blow,” Martha continues. “I wasn’t surprised at all because he was a bigot and impulsive.” Martha says she told her father, “I’m getting married, no matter what you think.”

She made her own wedding dress for her 1961 wedding and welcomed daughter Alexis four years later.

“The wedding day was very happy,” she says. “Very nice. It was the beginning of my life.”

The documentary also details the infidelity in their marriage, revealing that both she and Andy had affairs. Martha remembers kissing a “very handsome man” in Florence’s Duomo on her honeymoon and having a “very brief affair” with a “very attractive Irish man” while working as a stockbroker in the late 1960s.

“It was nothing,” she emphasizes. “I would never have broken up a marriage for it.”

Andy told the producers that he “hadn’t strayed” until she had. “I don’t know how many different girlfriends he had at that time, but I think it was quite a few,” says Martha, noting that an affair took place on the couple’s property in Westport, Conn., while they were writing cookbooks the writing was. .

Martha and Andy divorced in 1990 and have not spoken in twenty years.

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Martha told PEOPLE in 2020 that her divorce was hard on her.

“Divorce was a terrible thing for me because we were the first in my family to get divorced,” she said. “And the fact that we haven’t spoken to each other since the divorce is even more painful. But I am very strong and very motivated to continue with life.”

Marta is now streaming on Netflix.