Alan Thicke calls his “Growing Pains” co-star Joanna Kerns, “one of my great wives,” but the leading lady only got the chance to fill that role onscreen, despite a flirtation between the actors off set.

“When ‘Growing Pains’ started, she had just been cancelled from a show and divorced. I had just been cancelled and divorced. We certainly had that in common, and we liked each other right off the bat,” recalled Alan Thicke in a conversation with HuffPost Live on Wednesday.

Kearns and the “Unusually Thicke” star “thought it through,” he said, and decided to keep things platonic.

“We made the very intelligent decision that the show might last longer than a relationship would, so would it be smart to just be friends and have that little bit of chemistry and preserve that, instead of going the other direction, which is fraught with peril?” Thicke recounted.

The actress who played Mrs. Seaver “was quite lovely,” he added. “We’re still in touch.”

Watch more from Alan Thicke’s conversation with HuffPost Live here.

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