Actress Maria Bello has joined the long line of celebrities who have come out as gay with a public declaration following the publishing of her first-person piece in The New York Times about her search for love and how she explained her long-term relationship with a woman to her 12-year-old son.
Her article, titled "Coming Out as a Modern Family" was published Friday and explains the 46-year-old Touch and Grown Ups 2 actress' long term relationship with her best female friend, known only as "Clare" in the article.
The actress explains how she had originally asked her therapist how to explain to her son that she was in a romantic relationship with a woman and the two of them decided to wait until he was old enough to ask.
It was then that she began to reflect on her past dating exploits with men, which she chronicled in a journal, and how they often led to an unsuccessful situation for her, her son and her son's father.
"I read about the handful of men and the one woman I had been in romantic relationships with, passages rife with pain and angst. It seemed when I was physically attracted to someone, I would put them in the box of being my 'soul mate' and then be crushed when things didn't turn out as I had hoped," she wrote in the piece.
While looking through old photos and reflecting some years ago, she says she came across an old black-and-white photo of her and her best friend, Clare. Soon after she explains that she realized her relationship with her friend could be romantic without her having to sacrifice anything for herself or her son.
"First, how would it affect my son? He trusted Clare. He loved her. He had never met most of the men I had been in love with and had no idea I had been with a woman as well. Second, how would it affect my career? I have never defined myself by whom I slept with, but I know others have and would," she wrote, before going on to conclude. "Whomever I love, however I love them, whether they sleep in my bed or not, or whether I do homework with them or share a child with them, "love is love." And I love our modern family. Maybe, in the end, a modern family is just a more honest family."
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