A lot has happened to Valerie Bertinelli in the last two years. The TV star broke up with her second husband, worked hard to accept herself, returned to the kitchen, wrote a new cookbook, Surrender — and she found love again.
“I’m in love,” Bertinelli, 63, tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “It’s a seesaw of emotions because I was adamant that I would never fall in love again.”
“I should have died with my six cats and a dog,” she adds with a laugh, “and lived out the rest of my years very happily alone – I’m fine alone.”
The former Food Network host isn’t ready to publicly name her new boyfriend, but happily says, “My stomach is turning. This shouldn’t have happened.”
Valerie Bertinelli.
John Russo
Before she could let love in, she had to learn to love herself.
“I want to be clear that this process took a long time,” Bertinelli says of the years following her 2022 divorce and the death of her first husband, Eddie Van Halen, who died of throat cancer in 2020.
“I became more intentional about my healing,” she says. “That meant a lot of walking with [my dog] Luna, lots of therapy, lots of learning that I deserve to feel good.”
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“The cookbook was an outgrowth of the emotional and mental healing I was doing,” she explains Let yourself go. “First came work. Why I thought I didn’t deserve to be loved. Why I used food to numb my feelings. All the drama and trauma I didn’t deal with — with Ed and my last marriage.”
He tells the story through his favorite recipes and intimate vignettes Let yourself go. “I know we’re talking about a cookbook, but this cookbook got me through everything,” he says with a smile.
As she writes in the book: “The more I allowed myself to cry, the better I felt. I wasn’t trying to be happy, sad or skinny. I wasn’t trying to be anything other than who I was.”
And then came a sweet surprise. She first became friends with her new guy, a writer from the East Coast, on Instagram a few years ago. “It was purely platonic, but there was something about him that I connected with, that I was familiar with,” she says.
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Valerie Bertinelli.
John Russo
They started talking on the phone earlier this year, and it was only recently that the relationship turned romantic. “The comfort level is crazy,” she says.
As new and unexpected as it is, she says, “it feels incredibly right.”
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It was a long journey for Bertinelli to be able to listen to her heart and find what truly nourished her. “First I found joy,” she says, “and then a man came into my life.”
For more on Valerie Bertinelli, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
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