Valerie Bertinelli Gives Hints About New Boyfriend in Sweet Post: ‘I Just Can’t with This Man’

Valerie Bertinelli is sharing sweet details about the new man in her life. 

On Tuesday, April 9, Bertinelli re-shared her boyfriend’s Instagram and blog post in which he gushed over the cookbook star. According to Bertinelli’s post, which she shared on Instagram Stories, her new love goes by “Hoarse Whisperer.”

In last week’s PEOPLE cover story, she opened up about how she found love again after ending her marriage to her second husband. “I’m in love,” Bertinelli, 63, told PEOPLE. “It’s a seesaw of emotions because I was adamant I was never falling in love again."

In her Instagram Stories, Bertinelli responded to her boyfriend’s endearing words by saying, “I just can’t with this man🥹😭.”

His blog post was chock-full of kind sentiments about the former Food Network star, who recently released her new cookbook, Indulge. In the post, he wrote about feeling immensely proud of his “girlfriend” during her cookbook release week in which she had several press interviews. 

During one of her book events in New York, he said that he had a front row seat in the audience. “Getting to be in the middle of a crowd watching as they love someone you love, it is something. It is something. It is just so wholly joyful, so fulfilling, it is almost overwhelming,” he wrote in the heartfelt post.

While Bertinelli hasn’t publicly named her new guy’s real name, she told PEOPLE her “belly is flip-flopping. This was not supposed to happen."

In the cover story, the cookbook author said that she had to learn to love herself again before letting love in. 

“I want to be clear that this process has taken a long time,” Bertinelli said of the years following her 2022 divorce and the death of her first husband Eddie Van Halen, who died of throat cancer in 2020.

“I got more intentional about my healing,” she said. “That meant a lot of walks with [my dog] Luna, a lot of therapy sessions, a lot of learning that I deserve to feel good.”

She first became friendly with her new man, an East Coast writer, on Instagram a few years ago. “It was strictly platonic but there was something about him that I connected with that felt familiar,” she said.

They began chatting on the phone earlier this year and only recently did the relationship become romantic. “It’s crazy the comfort level. It feels incredibly right,” she said.