In March, Valerie Bertinelli revealed that she had started seeing someone again after her 2022 divorce. At the time, she described the new romance as “unlike any relationship that I’ve ever experienced with a man” when speaking to USA Today. About a month later, the former Food Network host and her boyfriend, Mike Goodnough, went public with their relationship. Now, 10 months after they started dating, a source says they’ve broken up.
On November 5, 2024, a source told People that the 64-year-old Hot in Cleveland star and Mike, who is 10 years younger than she is, “are no longer in a relationship.”
The insider did not say what caused the former couple to split up, but Valerie previously spoke about one of the factors that made the relationship “challenging.”
Because they lived on opposite sides of the country, they could not see each other super frequently, Valerie told People in April. From the beginning, they knew that being long distance would be difficult, but they decided to take the risk anyway.
“We finally said, ‘Why are we doing this? It’s going to be challenging because it’s long distance but why not?’” she explained. “You only live once.”
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To deal with this challenge, Valerie and Mike created a “three week rule,” meaning that they would not go longer than three weeks without seeing each other.
The long distance was probably part of the magic when they first met online. Mike commented on one of Valerie’s Instagram posts and they started getting to know each other, though Valerie told People that it was ” strictly platonic” at first.
Before sharing Mike’s identity with the public, Valerie gushed about him during an interview with USA Today. “I don’t want to say too much, but I feel incredibly blessed and lucky to have met him, because I wasn’t expecting it!” she said at the time. “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.”
Mike first opened up about his relationship with Valerie on his Substack called Hoarse Whisperings. “Nothing about our actual relationship seems surreal. It just seems… good… lucky… a gift,” he wrote shortly after they were first spotted together. His most recent post about Valerie was published on October 23.
Before dating Mike, Valerie was married to Tom Vitale for 10 years. From 1981 to 2007, she was married to the late Eddie Van Halen.
