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Valerie Bertinelli says she’s “really scared of dating right now.”
The “One Day at a Time” alum told fans at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival on Saturday that she believes vulnerability can be a “superpower,” but you have 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,” the 65-year-old, who turns 66 on Thursday, told fans and interviewer Jenn Harris.
She continued, “I’ve had, you know, two — I’m just scared.”
“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,” she added. “But you do have to be careful with your superpower. You have to be careful of who you share your vulnerability with.”
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Valerie Bertinelli says she is “really scared of dating right now.” (Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal)
“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 said that by sharing her feelings in her new memoir, “Getting Naked,” “I’m able to give myself the power to just get to know it and be comfortable with it.”
Valerie Bertinelli and Mike Goodnough attend the 51st annual Daytime Emmy Awards at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites in Los Angeles on June 7, 2024. (Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)
Bertinelli acknowledged that opening up also exposed her to negative comments on social media.
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Valerie Bertinelli with second husband, Tom Vitale, in 2014. (Rich Polk/Getty Images for St. John)
“There’s not a ton of them, but they’re there,” she said. “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.”
After divorcing her first husband, Eddie Van Halen, in 2007, she married businessman Tom Vitale in 2010. After the end of their 10-year marriage, Bertinelli began to refer to Vitale as “the narcissist,” saying that he emotionally abused her, calling her “fat and lazy.”
She also called being officially divorced from Vitale the “second best day of my life.”
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Bertinelli began dating writer Mike Goodnough in 2024 and said she was in love, but by year’s end, the relationship had fizzled.
A year ago, Goodnough claimed Bertinelli was “playing a one-woman tennis match thinking there is someone on the other side of the net” after their breakup, accusing her of falsely making his social media posts about herself and “lashes out angrily” at him.
Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli are pictured at the Mann Village Theatre in Westwood, California. (Gregg DeGuire/WireImage)
He also accused her of “hostile, dishonest, and uncalled for backhanded swipes.”
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“Valerie is in a war with her ghosts. I’m just the guy who catches the bullets. And that isn’t new,” he added.
After their breakup, Bertinelli said in an Instagram post she had been “irreversibly changed by him for the better” and said that she had “fumbled the last true good man I met.”
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While they were dating, she told USA Today, “He was not on my radar. I was going to die with my six cats and my dog and be incredibly happy doing it. So this came out of left field, and I’m grateful it did. He’s very special.”
Bertinelli told Fox News Digital at the panel that she realized for the first time through writing her memoir, “I didn’t give myself enough credit for the strength I already had inside me. And that I’m — that I don’t have to listen to people be negative to me.”
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The star said that she was “surprised that I was able to learn that. Finally! That I don’t have to listen to people be horrible to me. I don’t have to tolerate intolerable behavior.”
She added to Fox News Digital that when she wrote her 2022 book “Enough Already” she thought she had learned that lesson, “but I still put up with intolerable behavior after that.”
“It wasn’t until I really dug down and got to the root of my shame and the dark side that I made friends with it,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘Now I’m done. Now I can just say, f— you. That’s it, I’m done. I’m out,’ you know?”
Bertinelli also mentioned Van Halen at the panel while talking about grief, telling the crowd, “I will always miss Ed.” The rock star died in 2020.