Actress Maria Bello Comes Out as a Lesbian in a Most Enviable Way

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After the divorces, the disappointments, the husbands who had affairs or came out as gay, the boyfriends who wouldn't commit, and the endless stream of bad dates, guys who disappeared, or ones who stalked you, girlfriends in their 30s, 40s, or beyond have a habit of turning to their best gal pals and lamenting: "Why couldn't we just be lesbian? Why couldn't we just fall in love with each other?" Yes, it's a dream we ladies who have been tossed out of the Love Boat in middle age have. Unfortunately, however, most of us are still hard-wired for men. Oh, that someone could invent a pill to change that. Luckily for actress Maria Bello, she didn't need a pill. She naturally fell in love with her best female friend.

Maria wrote touchingly about her love life in The New York Times. Most people were shocked to find out she was now gay. Maria has a 12-year-old son from a previous relationship. She says that she had been in love with a "handful of men and one woman" in the past. Of the men, two of whom she met on films, she says:

I was sure each was my soul mate, a belief fueled by sexual attraction that made me certain I was in love, only to find that when the filming ended, so did the relationship. And I read about the man who asked me to marry him four years ago over the phone, before we had even kissed. Three months later we were in his kitchen throwing steaks at each other’s heads in anger.

Yep, that's about it. Sexual attraction sparks the firm belief that this is the person absolutely meant for you. But it's just nature's way of making sure you procreate. Nature does not care if, a few years down the line, you want to throw a steak at the co-procreator's head.

Then Maria met a woman named Clare. She writes:

We had an immediate connection but didn’t think of it as romantic or sexual. She was one of the most beautiful, charming, brilliant and funny people I had ever met, but it didn’t occur to me, until that soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could perhaps choose to love each other romantically.

What had I been waiting for all of these years? She is the person I like being with the most, the one with whom I am most myself.

Sounds like me with my best female friends. Sounds like them with me. Sounds like every female I know who has a best female friend. There's just one thing missing: We're not sexually attracted to each other.

Maria, fortunately for her, suddenly found that she WAS sexually attracted to her best pal. She writes:

My feelings for Clare aren’t the same as the butterflies-in-the-stomach, angst-ridden love I have felt before; they are much deeper than that.

Ahh, the ol' butterflies-in-the-stomach nonsense. Maybe those butterflies are your internal warning system, telling you that soon after the marriage proposal, you will look into your beloved's eyes and want to slap a (bloody rare) steak over them.

Well, good for Maria and Clare. I hope I'm not belittling their beautiful relationship when I say, in all honesty, it's one that many, many women wish they could have. Lucky gals!