The Hollywood star Valerie Bertinelli of One Day At A Time fame is speaking out this week to admit that she’s “really scared” of dating. This comes after she was married and divorced twice, and has found herself single at 65 years of age.
Bertinelli ‘Really Scared’ Of Dating
While appearing at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival last weekend, Bertinelli told fans that vulnerability can be a “superpower.” However, she was also quick to warn them to be careful.
“I mean, it’s still scary to be vulnerable with people. And I have yet to put some things into action in personal relationships, intimate relationships, you know, because I’m really scared of dating right now,” Bertinelli, whose 66th birthday is tomorrow, told Fox News at the panel.
“I’ve had, you know, two — I’m just scared,” she confessed. “So being vulnerable with someone is a superpower, because it can connect you to people. And it can connect you and make a relationship much more powerful. But you do have to be careful with your superpower. You have to be careful of who you share your vulnerability with.”
Bertinelli went on to explain that by sharing her feelings in her new memoir “Getting Naked,” which hit stores last month, “I’m able to give myself the power to just get to know it and be comfortable with it.”
Bertinelli also admitted that opening up exposed her to negative comments from haters on social media.
“There’s not a ton of them, but they’re there,” she lamented. “I guess how do you protect yourself from that without kind of shutting down the very part of you that makes you you? I think a lot of that has to do with, ‘You can’t make me believe anything about myself that I don’t already believe.’ And that’s why I had to change my beliefs of what I believe about myself, that I’m not a bad person.”
Bertinelli’s Past Marriages
Bertinelli was first married to the late great rocker Eddie Van Halen from 1981 until they divorced in 2007. Despite their divorce, Bertinelli and Van Halen remained on good terms until his 2020 death. During her panel last weekend, Bertinelli referenced Van Halen by saying, “I will always miss Ed.”
Bertinelli then married the businessman Tom Vitale in 2011, and they went through a bitter divorce in 2022. Afterwards, Bertinelli slammed Vitale as a “narcissist” who emotionally abused her by calling her “fat and lazy.” Indeed, she described the day that her divorce from Vitale was finalized as being the “second best day of my life.”
In 2024, Bertinelli began dating the writer Mike Goodnough. Though she claimed to be in love, they had broken up by the end of that year. In 2025, Goodnough spoke out to allege that Bertinelli was “playing a one-woman tennis match thinking there is someone on the other side of the net” after their breakup. He also accused her of taking “hostile, dishonest, and uncalled for backhanded swipes” at him.
“Valerie is in a war with her ghosts,” Goodnough said. “I’m just the guy who catches the bullets. And that isn’t new.”
After their split, Bertinelli took to social media to say that she had been “irreversibly changed by him for the better.” She also said that she had “fumbled the last true good man I met.”
Bertinelli has clearly not had the easiest time when it comes to her love life. Here’s hoping that she can find love in the future!