Valerie Bertinelli on Why Eddie Van Halen Wasn't Her 'Soulmate'
"I fell in love with him when I was 20 and it rapidly declined into drugs and alcohol and infidelity."
Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli were married for over 20 years before they separated in 2001 and eventually divorced in 2007. However, the couple stayed close until Van Halen's death in October 2020, and Bertinelli was even at his side when he passed away following a battle with throat cancer.
However, nearly four years later, the One Day at a Time star is opening up about why her ex-husband wasn't her "soulmate."
Bertinelli took to Instagram to tell her side of the story the day after Paramount+ aired an episode of Behind the Music focused on the couple's only son, Wolfgang Van Halen. The 33-year-old followed in his famous father's footsteps by becoming a musician himself in 2007, touring with Van Halen and recording the band's final album, A Different Kind of Truth, which was released in 2012.
"It was not easy. I’d stopped it many times because it was just too brutal to watch for many reasons," Bertinelli said in a video message on Thursday.
"One, seeing Wolfie’s pain. Two, seeing what a better job I could have done as a parent even though he turned out magnificently. I made a lot of mistakes," she admitted.
"And three, seeing what I had turned of Ed’s and my relationship into some sort of fantasy, soulmate recreation of history?" the 64-year-old continued. "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 cared for. Nothing that would scream 'soulmate,' that's for sure. But after Ed died, 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," Bertinelli added. "That's what I got out of that marriage, is Wolfie, the best thing that ever happened to me. Not a soulmate."
Her remarks come as an about-face after detailing the couple's tumultuous love story in her 2022 memoir, Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today. In excerpts of the book published by People, Bertinelli recalled telling Van Halen on his death bed: "Maybe next time. Maybe next time, we'll get it right."
"We were portrayed as a mismatch," she wrote of their early years together. "The bad boy rock star and America's sweetheart. But privately, Ed wasn't the person people thought he was and neither was I."
"I hated the drugs and the alcohol but I never hated him. I saw his pain," she detailed. Yet still, through all of it, she wrote: "I loved Ed more than I know how to explain. I loved his soul."