After Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert divorced her second husband, Bruce Boxleitner, she quickly started dating someone who, in hindsight, wasn’t good for her. He seemed to have all the bad qualities of every boyfriend she’d ever had, all wrapped up in one person.
Melissa Gilbert ‘raced into [a] new relationship’ after her divorce from Bruce Boxleitner
After Gilbert and Boxleitner divorced, the Laura Ingalls actor was eager to make up for lost time when it came to dating. At the same time, she was coming to terms with being an actress in Los Angeles in her forties. So she got the Botox, she colored her hair, she bought a convertible, and started dating a “slightly younger but wildly inappropriate French dude.”
“Feeling like I had been tamped down and muzzled for far too long, I raced into my new relationship status, trying to make up for lost time and recapture the freedom I remembered from my youth,” wrote Gilbert in her 2022 memoir Back to the Prairie. “I knew I wasn’t a kid anymore, but I wasn’t ready or willing to concede any ground. All women experience enormous pressure to look and stay young and attractive but, as I discovered, being a single woman in your forties in Los Angeles is a whole different league of pressure, and being an actress looking for work in an industry obsessed with youth ratchets that up even further.”
Melissa Gilbert’s boyfriend was ‘every lesson [she] refused to learn’
Gilbert told herself that her new French boyfriend was “fresh, fun, and proof that I was still desirable.”
But really he was bad news.
“He was all the bad behaviors of anyone with whom I had ever been involved, married or otherwise, rolled into one package,” she wrote. “He was every lesson I refused to learn.”
She saw some of her first husband, Bo Brinkman, in him. A little of her second. He even had some of ex-boyfriend Rob Lowe’s bad-boy qualities.
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“He was mean. He was not generous. He was self-centered. He was vain. He was judgmental. He was chauvinistic. He was xenophobic. He was uber-conservative politically. And he was obvious about it,” she said of her then-boyfriend.
The ‘Little House on the Prairie’ star ended the relationship
Maksim Chmerkovskiy and Val Chmerkovskiy | Adam Taylor/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
You may be wondering: Did this guy have any redeeming qualities? Why did the Laura Ingalls actor stay with him? Gilbert writes that because he was so attractive and came from a “truly lovely family,” she “held on to the threads of possibilities.” But he kept letting her down.
They dated throughout her time on Dancing With the Stars, which she calls “the most agonizing, painful, physical, emotional, exhausting” thing she’d done in her life at that point. Her unnamed boyfriend didn’t provide sympathy or support as she progressed through the show.
After an injury unrelated to the dancing competition (though she had her fair share of DWTS-related injuries, too), Gilbert began reflecting on her life and decided she needed to make a change.
“My life clearly wasn’t working,” she wrote. “I couldn’t be with inappropriate dudes anymore. I couldn’t continue to do these things to my face and my body. I had to figure out who I was and where I was headed and what was good and healthy for me.”
So she called “the Frenchman” and told him not to come visit her anymore. And that was the end of that.
Read more about Gilbert’s life and relationships in Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered.
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