David Bugliari and Alyssa Milano.Photo: Tara Ziemba/Getty
In her new book,Alyssa Milanois candid about what makes her marriage to husband David Bugliari strong — and the difficulties they’ve faced.
“Love, in many ways, is a constant state of apology. It means recognizing the things that you fail at, knowing that the person you love sees them too, and trying so hard to be better at them,” continues Milano, 48.
“But most important, it means being loved in return even with those shortcomings. It means that the apology is usually accepted, and it’s usually sincere. Love is not a casual ‘sorry.’ Love is making amends. Love is forgiveness. Love is success and failure. Love is perpetual apology.”
Being apologetic may be part of Milano’s blueprint for love and marriage, but she isn’t contrite about the other issues she champions inSorry Not Sorry. The collection of essays is “part memoir, part manifesto,” ranging from Milano’s views on the #MeToo movement to navigating political division and her own white privilege. Milano also gets personal, sharing her struggle with the long periods of time she’s away from Bugliari, as well as her devastation over her miscarriage 10 years ago.
Dutton
Milano miscarried when she was 38 years old, which she says felt like divine punishment for the abortions she’d had in the past.
“I was completely crushed. Devastated,” Milano writes inSorry Not Sorry. “I remember going to the doctor and trying unsuccessfully to find a heartbeat. It felt like God was punishing me for the abortions I’d had in my twenties.”
In 2019, on herAlyssa Milano:Sorry Not Sorrypodcast, Milanorevealed that she had two abortionsin 1993.
“I knew at that time, I was not equipped to be a mother, and so I chose to have an abortion,” she said at the time. “Ichose. It wasmychoice. And it was absolutely the right choice for me.”
“It was not an easy choice,” continued Milano, who shares daughter Elizabella, 7, and son Milo, 10, with Bugliari, 40. “It was not something I wanted, but it was something that I needed, like most health care is.”
David Bugliari and Alyssa Milano with their son Milo in 2018.Jamie McCarthy/Getty
She writes that she got pregnant with Milo three months later. These days, Milano says she’s away from Bugliari, who is a talent agent in Los Angeles, more than she’d like because she has to travel for work.
“I mean, there are benefits to it — there’s something to the adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and the distance forced us to communicate more and be creative in that communication,” she writes. “Each time one of us leaves, it’s almost like dating again, scheduling talks and having long-distance dinner dates. But the added pressures and complications of managing a household on top of managing our relationship while thousands of miles apart is not easy. But we did it.”
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Bugliari also didn’t “run away screaming” when Milano suggested a national sex strike, she writes. (In 2019, Milano reiterated her controversialcall for women to go on a sex striketo protest Georgia’s extremely restrictive abortion law.)
“Let me tell you, if you’re ever looking to test your relationship, just suggest women withhold sex until political change is achieved,” she writes inSorry Not Sorry. “If you don’t see a cartoonish cutout in the front door with a trail of footprints disappearing into the horizon, you’ve maybe got yourself the real thing.”
At the end of the day, Bugliari is Milano’s “magnet.”
“David’s and my lives are full of positive. Our lives are full of negative,” she writes. “It would not have taken much, so often and so early on, for those poles to face the wrong way and send us shooting away from each other.”
She continues: “But somehow, with work and faith and love and forgiveness and patience, we lined each other up just the right way. We are bound together, a bond that is going to take something stronger and harder than anything we’ve faced to sever.”
Sorry Not Sorryis on sale now.
source: people.com
