Valerie Bertinelli's Candid Dating Confessions Reveal How Tragic Her Love Life Is

Not long after Valerie Bertinelli and her boyfriend Mike Goodnough split, the cookbook author got candid about failures in her love life. She and her beau called it quits in November 2024. "Valerie and I are the only two people with insight into our relationship. Neither of us pays much attention to chatter among people outside of it," he told People at the time. A few months later, Bertinelli dropped a trove of advice on navigating conflict within a relationship and hinted at how she may have botched things with Goodnough.

The "One Day at a Time" actor posted a selfie to Instagram on February 17 along with a sprawling caption that discussed how a person can mishandle an argument even when they are right. "Change, real change, never happens through criticism, shame, or pressure," she wrote. "If you stop focusing on what they did wrong and instead approach with empathy and understanding, everything can then start to shift." She also acknowledged how difficult it could be to take the high road with your partner, but that communication and support need to be a two-way street in a relationship. Along with her words of wisdom, Bertinelli also dropped a confession. "I have two failed marriages and fumbled the last true good man I met," she added, which seemed to be a reference to Goodnough.

Early on in their relationship, Bertinelli gushed over how Goodnough treated her. "It's unlike any relationship that I've ever experienced with a man," she told USA Today in March 2024, before the public even knew who her beau was. Goodnough must've felt like a godsend as Bertinelli had previously come clean about the turmoil with her ex-husband Tom Vitale.

Besides losing a ton of money in her divorce from Tom Vitale, Valerie Bertinelli had a lot of healing to do after her second divorce. The "Indulge" author shared a video to Instagram in February 2023 that seemingly painted her ex in a very unflattering light, as she talked about past emotional trauma. "I had a small hidden bruise that was activated today," she said in the since-deleted video [via Today]. Bertinelli mentioned a pair of pants that were tight-fitting and would make noise when she walked in them, and how that irritated Vitale (who she did not mention by name). "I'd stopped wearing [the pants] because I was ... mercilessly mocked," she revealed. "Hidden bruises are something that emotional, verbal, mental abuse do to you that people can't see."

The following year, the television personality was open about the role she played in the dissolution of her relationship with Vitale. "We became very unkind to one another, and that's not a way to live in a marriage," she told People in April 2024. Bertinelli had seen issues from the past come to fester. "I had hit rock bottom emotionally. All the drama and trauma I hadn't dealt with," she told the outlet. It wasn't the first major split she had to deal with, however.

Bertinelli opened up about her relationship with Eddie Van Halen after his death in 2020. The actor spoke about her relationship with the Van Halen guitarist, whom she had divorced in 2007, and how she and the rock star had bonded over their son. "The love that Ed and I shared — and we did come to a very wonderful place at the end of his life," she told USA Today in April 2024, while adding that any chance of reconciliation "was a wistful fantasy."