David Burtka talks candidly about what it’s like when your partner is more successful than you are

When Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka first began dating in 2004, they were a couple of New York-based actors appearing in Broadway shows.

Harris may have been famous for his role as a teenager in the ABC series Doogie Howser MD but at that time, he was having greater success on the stage starring in such shows as Assassins, Cabaret and Proof.

Meanwhile, Burtka was starring in the musical The Opposite of Sex and had made his Broadway debut in 2003 in the Bernadette Peters-led production of Gypsy.

“We were both doing Broadway shows in New York and it was a real high point,’ Burtka said the premiere broadcast on Sunday of Oprah’s Next Chapter on OWN.

Then Harris landed the role of Barney Stinson on CBS’s How I Met Your Mother sitcom – now in its eighth season – and the couple set up house in Los Angeles where Burtka suddenly found himself on a different career trajectory.

‘I thought, ‘We’re going to LA and I’m going to get a TV show and it didn’t happen for me,’ he said. ‘I went into a depression.’

‘It’s not only hard being two actors in a relationship, it’s hard being two men in a relationship,’ he added.

Burtka said his unhappiness made for an unhappy relationship for a time. Then in 2009, he decided to quit acting and enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Pasadena in summer 2009. He then began running a Los Angeles catering company called Gourmet MD.

Burtka has gone back to showbiz in a sense by becoming a correspondent for E! News Daily. He landed an exclusive and very candid interview with Elton John earlier this year and done many other assignments.

Burtka sees his greatest role these days as parent to the couple’s 18-month-old twins Gideon and Harper.

But there are times he still envies the opportunities of his more famous partner who is the host of next Sunday’s Tony Awards telecast and appeared on Broadway last year in a production of Company.

‘When he gets to do theater and go back to New York, that’s when it’s hard for me,’ Burtka admitted. ‘That’s When I’m having a hard time.’