Whoopi Goldberg is peeling back the curtain on her love life after three divorces.
“I’m not good at relationships because you have to think about other people, and I have enough to think about with my daughter and her husband and my grandkids and my great-grandkids and all the people at work,” Goldberg, 70, told Interview Magazine on Wednesday, February 4.
She continued, “In the last 25 years, I recognized that not everybody’s cut out to be in a relationship. Some people are just cut out to be one-night stands. I don’t want to live with anybody. I lived with my daughter. That’s all I can handle. I have lots of people that I love, but I don’t need them living with me. I don’t need to be sleeping with them.”
Goldberg shares daughter Alex Martin with ex-husband Alvin Martin, to whom she was married from 1973 to 1979. The View cohost is a grandmother to Alex’s kids, Amara, 36, Jerzey, 30, and Mason, 27, whom she shares with husband Bernard Dean, and a great-grandmother to Amara’s daughter, Charli, 11, and Mason’s daughter, Lotus, 2 months. Goldberg was also married to David Claessen from 1986 to 1988 and Lyle Trachtenberg from 1994 to 1995.
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The Sister Act star revealed that she doesn’t mind living solo vs. cohabitating with someone because it’s taught her “several things” about herself.
“Being lonely and being alone are two different things,” Goldberg noted. “I don’t necessarily get lonely because there’s enough people around who don’t let me. But most people are not comfortable being alone because we’ve been taught that there’s something wrong with you if you’re not a pair, that being singular, eating singular, is a bad thing. Sometimes you don’t want to eat with other people. Sometimes you just want to go and have some pasta. You don’t want to say, ‘Do you want red wine or white wine?’ I don’t give a f*** what you want.”
Goldberg reiterated some people are just simply “not great at partnerships,” and that’s OK in her eyes.
“There are some people who are brilliant at it, but I think we walk into relationships with a lie and say, ‘I’m not trying to change you.’ But in fact, you are trying to change them,” she explained. “I’d rather you say, ‘Listen, I don’t know if I could be true to you. I think I might need more than one person in my life.’ I’d rather hear you tell me that so I can make the decision.”
Goldberg pointed to her 2015 book, Whoopi’s Big Book of Relationships: If Someone Says ‘You Complete Me,’ RUN!, where she delves deeper into her views on cohabitation, monogamy and why she prefers the single life.
“It starts out talking about how animals don’t just have one person,” she said of the memoir and self-help book. “Then I talk about how we get sucker punched by love songs. We get sucker punched by movies. It’s hard to not want to be Prince Charming or a Disney princess because you think, ‘Well, that’s what I’m waiting for.’ We don’t think, ‘Prince Charming has the flu this week and he’s on the can endlessly.’ Or Cinderella. ‘If she doesn’t stop getting that period, I’m going to lose my mind.’ She’s really cranky.”
While Goldberg is happily single, the Color Purple actress did previously confess that she still talks to her former flames.
“I’m in touch with all of my exes,” she said during an episode of The View in October 2024. “I’m in touch with every one of them, because once they were my friends. It doesn’t mean that we talk all the time, but I will be respectful enough for you.”
Goldberg continued, “I don’t have to sleep with you, I don’t have to eat with you — I don’t have to do any of those things that a relationship forces. But I can be [friendly] because there’s nobody that I’ve lived with or messed with that I absolutely hate.”
Years prior, Goldberg admitted she was “much happier” on her own while speaking with The New York Times in 2016, adding, “I can spend as much time with somebody as I want to spend, but I’m not looking to be with somebody forever or live with someone. I don’t want somebody in my house.”
