Valerie Bertinelli admits she turned Eddie Van Halen into “some sort of fantasy soulmate”

Actress Valerie Bertinelli is getting real about her relationship with ex-husband Eddie Van Halen, whom she was married to from 1981 to 2001.

Bertinelli posted a video on Instagram reacting to the recent Behind the Music episode about her son, Wolfgang Van Halen, and admitted that following Eddie’s death in 2020, she may have embellished the truth about their relationship.

“I was finally able to watch Wolfie’s Behind the Music. It was not easy. I’d stopped it many times because it was just too brutal to watch for many reasons,” she shared. “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.”

“And three, seeing what I had turned of Ed’s and my relationship into, some sort of fantasy, soulmate recreation of history,” she added.

“I fell in love with him when I was 20, and it rapidly declined into drugs, and alcohol, and infidelity,” she explained. “Nothing that makes you feel loved and wanted and cared for. Nothing that would scream soulmate, that’s for sure.”

She said that following’s Eddie’s death, “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,” she concluded. “That’s what I got out of that marriage was Wolfie, the best thing that ever happened to me. Not a soulmate.”