Valerie Bertinelli and her boyfriend Mike Goodnough are ending their relationship. “They are no longer in a relationship,” a source tells PEOPLE.
Bertinelli and Goodnough had been dating long-distance since January. (Bertinelli lives in Los Angeles, and Goodnough is based on the East Coast.) The actress told in July that sticking to their three-week rule had “been challenging.”
Goodnough tells, “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.”
Bertinelli talked about Goodnough for the first time in an April. She said they became friends after he commented on one of her Instagram posts a few years ago.
“I thought he was interesting,” she said. “It was strictly platonic, but there was something about him that I connected with that felt familiar. A comfort level. He felt like a kindred spirit.”
They first spoke on the phone in January, and their connection grew. “His voice had the most beautiful timbre. I was like ‘Oh, I can’t talk to this man right now because that’s really sexy.’ We both had strong feelings, trying not to admit them,” she said.
The couple went public on April 3 when Bertinelli appeared at a filming of The Drew Barrymore Show with him. Goodnough talked about their relationship soon after.
“I am Valerie Bertinelli’s boyfriend… and that may well be among the most surreal sentences I’ve ever pecked out. But it’s true… and nothing about our actual relationship seems surreal. It just seems… good… lucky… a gift,” he wrote on his Substack called Hoarse Whisperings.
Bertinelli has since shared her admiration for him on social media, and they made their red carpet debut at the Daytime Emmys in June.
In the April, Bertinelli said they “never go longer than” three weeks “without seeing each other.” But in a July interview, she said it had “been challenging” to stick to it. “The summer has been booked full. It is challenging,” she added.
After being open about her new relationship early on, Bertinelli said she wanted to keep it more private moving forward.
Valerie Bertinelli and Mike Goodnough break up after 10 months of dating“A part of me is just like, it’s been so public and now I’m trying to pull back and make it so much less public, and try to keep some stuff for us now,” she told. “It’s like, ‘Oh, but, yeah, I let the cat out of the bag.’ I don’t know. I would like to start keeping it between us and make it a little bit more special.”
“Even though I was so public with it, now part of me wants to just protect,” she said, adding that her boyfriend is “terrific.”
Bertinelli was married to financial planner Tom Vitale from 2011 until 2022. Before that, she was married to Van Halen frontman Eddie Van Halen from 1981 until 2007. She has been open about her breakups in the past, offering advice on social media.
“When something is toxic, and it’s only ever been that…Do your best to heal your way to indifference,” she wrote on her Instagram Story in March 2023 after her divorce. “You do not have to forgive to move on
.”
“Learning to trust again after having that trust destroyed is not an easy thing. Those demons want to protect you from being vulnerable and emotionally exposed ever again,” she said in a June 2024 Instagram post.
“This man is worth fighting the rest of my demons for. He is the most thoughtful, kind, gentle, intelligent, funny, and grateful man I’ve ever met.”
What is Mike Goodnough’s job?
Mike Goodnough, is a writer who usually writes about lifestyle topics. He shares his work on his Substack page called Hoarse Whisperings under the name Hoarse Whisperer.
Goodnough mentioned in a 2019 X thread that he worked in marketing and communications for different advertising agencies for much of his career. He also shared the companies he worked for, including AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Time Warner, Sheraton, Old Navy, and L’Oreal.
He said on X that he stopped working full-time about 12 years ago, just one day before his son was born.