Valerie Bertinelli has opened up about her love life, revealing who joins her in bed these days.
At the Thursday, April 30, North Hollywood screening of her new film Love, Again, the actress, 66, addressed her private life while speaking to Pause Rewind on the event’s red carpet. “2024 sucked the life out of me,” Bertinelli told the outlet, referring to her November 2024 split from ex-boyfriend Mike Goodnough. “I sleep with a black cat. That tells you everything you need to know about me and I love that furry little 11 lbs.”
While chatting to the outlet out the front of the Television Academy’s Saban Media Center, Bertinelli added that she says, “Hell, no” to the prospect of dating right now, noting that “Batman,” her cat, is the only companion she currently craves.
Bertinelli’s candid admission comes after she revealed in her recent memoir Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect, released in March, that she retained love for her late ex-husband Eddie Van Halen following the duo’s split. (Bertinelli and Van Halen, who died at the age of 65 in 2020, were married from 1981 and separated in 2001 before their divorce was finalized six years later.)
“We hurt each other’s feelings, but we always tried to do the right thing,” the Food Network star said of her marriage to the late musician, which saw the arrival of son Wolfgang Van Halen in 1991. “Even when we were angry, we stayed loving. It changed, evolved, and grew back different but stronger than it had been at the beginning of our relationship. It healed us.”
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Once Bertinelli and Eddie’s divorce was finalized, Bertinelli went on to marry Tom Vitale in 2011. The former couple were married for 10 years before Bertinelli filed for separation in 2021. Three years later, in March 2024, Bertinelli began dating Goodnough, however the relationship dissolved by November that year.
In her memoir, Bertinelli stated that she “couldn’t crack the code of lasting love” over the years. “Romance has never been easy for me, never even sane,” she wrote. “It’s a messy math equation — love, marriage, divorce — and I’m terrible at math. Worse at marriage.”
Of her second marriage to Vitale, Bertinelli also revealed that its demise unfolded quite differently to that of her former union with Eddie. “How could I have continued to feel love for Ed after our divorce but have no feelings — neither good nor bad — for my second husband after fifteen years of togetherness?” Bertinelli wrote in her memoir. “Hopefully that will change over time. I can already feel myself softening. I’ve reached a point of indifference and grace, which is so much healthier than hanging on to anger.”
