Valerie Bertinelli walks back 'fantasy soulmate recreation' of Eddie Van Halen romance

Valerie Bertinelli is reflecting on her relationship with ex-husband Eddie Van Halen with more perspective nearly four years after his death.

The Van Halen guitarist died Oct. 6, 2020, at 65, after battling cancer. The rocker and Bertinelli, who broke through as Barbara Cooper on the Norman Lear sitcom “One Day at a Time,” wed in 1981. She filed for divorce in 2005. The former pair share son Wolfgang Van Halen, 33, who toured with his dad’s band as bassist.

"I was finally able to watch Wolfie's ‘Behind the Music,’” Bertinelli, 64, shared with her more than 1.6 million Instagram followers on Thursday. “It was not easy. I'd stopped it many times because it was just too brutal to watch for many reasons.”

Bertinelli couldn’t bear seeing her son’s pain, she shared, or “seeing what a better job I could have done as a parent, even though he turned out magnificently.”

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“I made a lot of mistakes,” she said candidly, before listing her final reason: “seeing what I had turned of Ed's and my relationship, (making it) into some sort of fantasy soulmate recreation of history.”

Speaking honestly, Bertinelli said, “I fell in love with him when I was 20, and it rapidly declined into drugs and alcohol and infidelity. Nothing that makes you feel loved and wanted and cared for. Nothing that would scream soulmate, that's for sure.

“But after Ed died,” she went on, “I was more than willing to put myself in the grieving widow category for a man that I hadn't lived with for 20 years. What we had together was this beautiful son that we both unconditionally loved. That's what I got out of that marriage — was Wolfie, the best thing that ever happened to me. Not a soulmate."

Bertinelli previously referred to Van Halen as one of her soulmates in her 2022 book "Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today."

"I think we meet up with souls that we're meant to work through things together," she told USA TODAY at the time of her book’s launch, explaining that she believes part of the pair's purpose was to welcome Wolfie into the world.

Also in 2022, Bertinelli filed for divorce from her second husband, Tom Vitale, whom she married in 2011, citing "irreconcilable differences."

In the comments of Thursday’s Instagram posts, Bertinelli reflected on her previous relationships. “I stayed in two toxic marriages because I truly believed I could love someone enough to be loved back,” she wrote. “It doesn’t work that way.”

Bertinelli is currently dating writer Mike Goodnough, whom she previously told USA TODAY she felt “incredibly grateful" for. "It's unlike any relationship that I’ve ever experienced with a man," she said. "I don't want to say too much, but I feel incredibly blessed and lucky to have met him. I was going to die with my six cats and my dog and be incredibly happy doing it."

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