Exes
Valerie Bertinelli’s Ex Spills New Details About Split & ‘Complicated’ Relationship
More than five months after Valerie Bertinelli and Mike Goodnough’s split, he’s giving some more insight into the breakup.
Goodnough responded directly to a critic who wrote on Threads, “She left you bro. Get over it. This is f**king cringe.” The commenter was referencing an article that featured Goodnough talking about his split from the former Food Network Star.
“I ended the relationship. You tried though. You really tried,” Goodnough responded.
This came after he admitted to having “regrets” over a post he previously made about the breakup. “I regret having posted it. I wish I hadn’t. The issue addressed was real. My post made it worse rather than better,” he admitted. “Valerie and I had a complicated relationship. Our time as a couple ended months ago but our close contact only really ended recently. So, it is more ‘fresh’ than it would seem.”
He continued, “It has been so acutely agonizing, it has entirely changed the scale of how much heartbreak can hurt,” he continued. “Over the last few months, I had hoped we’d find a way to a gentle parting rather than a closed door but couldn’t seem to get us to one. I reached out again this week in that hope. No answer is an answer though. I accept it.” He concluded his message by confirming that this chapter of his life is “closed.”
Bertinelli and Goodnough became friends after he commented on one of her Instagram photos, but their platonic relationship turned romantic in January 2024. They dated long-distance for nearly a year before calling it quits that November. However, Bertinelli kept tight-lipped about the split until March.
In an Instagram post, she broke her silence on the situation, writing, “I am irreversibly changed by him for the better. I know I am becoming a much stronger and more benevolent human for having met him and spent time with him. Before I had the pleasure of meeting Mike, I was initially and immediately attracted to his writing. It’s heartfelt, authentic, smart, funny, sensitive, caring, and from the soul. And the way he puts words together is just sooo ridiculously beautiful. I’m a big fan, can you tell? And as luck would have it, the human being in person is exactly as heartfelt, authentic, sensitive and caring as his writing. And wickedly witty.”
In the weeks that followed, fans began speculating that Bertinelli and Goodnough were subtly throwing shade at each other with their social media activity. He denied this theory on March 31.
“The message common to all [the messages I’ve been receiving] is that Valerie and I appear to be communicating with each other via our Instagram posts and stories. That is not the case,” he insisted in a since-deleted Instagram post (the one he said he regrets). “I have never at any time posted something on social media for the purposes of communicating with someone indirectly when I know them personally and have ample ways to reach them directly. I have never at any time posted something for the purpose of getting a message to someone or getting reaction out of someone. I’ve never posted something in an effort to impact someone’s feelings about me privately or to influence others’ opinions of them publicly.”
Goodnough said he still cares about Bertinelli, but added, “Unfortunately, over the past two months, Valerie has been prone to lapsing into a place where she has been playing a one-woman tennis match thinking there is someone on the other side of the net. When in that place, she reads all of my posts, centers herself in them, takes offense over wholly imagined slights, and then lashes out angrily with a ‘response’ to things that were neither to her or about her.”
