Maria Bello, the Prisoners and Coyote Ugly star, recently revealed that she’s been in a long-term lesbian relationship with Clare Munn.

Maria Bello Reveals Lesbian Relationship

Bellow, 46, penned an essay for The New York Times titled “Coming Out as a Modern Family,” to share details of her relationship and how it came to be. “I had been sitting in my garden in California, looking through photos and old journals I have kept since childhood,” Bello begins, detailing how throughout her life that she’d often wrote about romantic relationships – none of which lasted for too long.

“As I continued to look through photos,” the actress continued. “I came across a black-and-white one of my best friend and me taken on New Year’s Eve. We looked so happy, I couldn’t help but smile. I remembered how we had met two years before; she was sitting in a bar wearing a fedora and speaking in her Zimbabwean accent.”

“We had an immediate connection but didn’t think of it as romantic or sexual,” Bello added, speaking of Munn, a new media executive and activist. “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.”

Maria Bello & Her Modern Family

The next time Bello saw Munn, she told her how she felt and the two went on to realize they wanted to pursue a romantic relationship. Within months, she told her family that they’d become a couple. Not knowing how to broach the subject of her romantic relationship with Clare to her 12-year-old son Jackson, Bello waited until he asked her. When she revealed she was dating her longtime friend, who’d become something of a godmother to him, Jackson said, “Mom, love is love, whatever you are.”

_{Maria Bello, Dan McDermott, Jackson & Claire Munn (Twitter)}

Jackson’s father Dan McDermott, whom Bello dated from 2004 to 2006, is someone the actress continues to consider a partner. McDermott, along with Bello and Munn, have forged a new and modern family. “ It’s a rare weekend when we aren’t piled in the same car, driving to one of Jack’s soccer tournaments.… We have dinner together almost every night,” Bello wrote. “Mostly, the four of us laugh a lot together.”

– Chelsea Regan

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