Halle Berry Shares Relationship Advice She ‘Learned Early On’ with Hoda Kotb

Halle Berry’s love life has always been under a microscope — so much so that the 59-year-old has said she stopped doing interviews entirely for nearly a decade because she was tired of answering the same questions about her relationships.

Currently engaged to musician Van Hunt, Berry took a four-year break from dating before they met. A break she credits with getting herself to a place where she could attract the right kind of partner.

After three failed marriages, she realized that she was attracting men who were a “mirror of herself,” Halle Berry told The Cut. “People who were broken, people with childhood wounds that weren’t addressed.”

So she took a step away from dating and committed to working on herself through therapy.

“When you talk about working through things like that, how did you — or how do you — find that place? What does the work mean?” Hoda Kotb asks Berry in the July 15 episode of the Making Space Podcast. The actress and menopause advocate sat down with Kotb to talk the confidence that comes with aging, feeling better than ever as she enters her 60’s, and her new product launch with Joylux, “Juicy Like a Peach.”

“It’s for me. It’s been working on myself. You know, any time a relationship, whether it’s a personal relationship, a work relationship, even our relationships with our children and our family, it’s always two people,” says Berry. “And I learned very early on from my fifth grade teacher, Yvonne Sims — who’s my kid’s godmother — she was the first person to tell me at 10 years old, when things were going wrong, she would always force me to take a look at my part in it.”

Berry says that Sims taught her, “This isn’t happening to you. It’s happening for you, and you’ve been a part of causing this. If this is a hot mess, you’re half the reason it’s a hot mess, right? So let’s look at the part you’re playing, so that you can have a different outcome next time. If not, you’ll keep replaying.”

The advice inspires Kotb to reflect back on her own dating history.

“Somebody once asked me if you lined up all the people who you were in deep relationships with, what would be the single thing that they would all have in common that they would say was the reason it ended?” Kotb says. “At the end of it, as I was thinking through it, mine was that I didn’t need them enough. Like I was fine. I have it. Thank you. I was never somebody who went past that area of deep emotional trust. It’s exactly what you said. It’s that link that you’re like, ‘Wait, what did I contribute? What was my thing here?’”

Berry says she’s asked this simple question about all the relationships in her life. “In every situation, I’ve always been able to look at the part I’ve played,” she says. “And while some have failed or not gone the way I had hoped, I can distill the part I played, and hopefully next time, I might make a different set of mistakes, but I’m not going to make the same exact mistake again.”

That process has allowed her to learn valuable lessons from each failed relationship.

“That’s sort of how my life has played out. I’ve made a series of mistakes, but I’ve learned from all of them because I’ve identified the part I played. And then finally get to, ‘Oh, I can start doing things differently now because I’m owning what I did to contribute to the demise.’”

“That’s some good advice from your fifth-grade teacher,” Kotb reflects, adding that the fact that she is the godparent of Berry’s children is “the best thing I’ve heard all day.”

“I’m so glad to have her in my life, and she was that teacher, which is why I’m so bowed down to teachers,” says Berry. “I think teachers make this world go round. But having one teacher that cares can make a difference in a life, and my fifth-grade teacher, I was at a crossroads — a real crossroads — and she saw that, and she just plucked me out. She’s one of my heroes.”

Kotb asks how her teacher reacted to her winning an Oscar. “Oh, she was there,” Berry says. “She was very proud and stunned like the rest of us.”