Actress Maria Bello, she of a zillion TV shows and movies more people should see (The Cooler, A History of Violence) has written a piece in this weekend’s New York Times about telling her son and the rest of the family that her friendship with a woman has turned romantic. But keep it in your pants, squealing Law & Order: Special Acronyms Unit fangirls, because that woman is not Bello’s BFF Mariska Hargitay. Bello’s article, part of the Modern Love series, is a pleasant, low-key read and in line with the growing trend of casual celebrity outings.

* Because there exist on the Internet a gazillion photos of Bello and Hargitay gazing at each other more adoringly than some couples who have been married for forty years, I will direct you to basic Google image search results rather than select a photo to accompany this post.

12/1/2013 Update: Bello’s announcement is starting to get picked up on gossip blogs and mentioned by bastions of journalistic integrity like the Daily Mail. As of this writing one of the Mail‘s top headlines is “Prisoners actress Maria Bello comes out as gay and reveals she has a long-term girlfriend.” This is not quite true. 

Well, it’s true that her name is Maria Bello and that she appears in Prisoners, but anyone who bothered reading her piece in the Times (which the Mail article quotes at length, so presumably someone there at least tried to read it while copying and pasting the details) would know that she does not call herself gay in it and that her current relationship is still relatively new.  That’s sort of the whole point of what she wrote, you see.