Matthew Perry said he wasn’t ‘afraid of love anymore,’ couldn’t wait to have kids before death

nypost.com:

The “Friends” icon — who was found dead at his home in Los Angeles on Saturday at age 54 — told People in Oct. 2022 that he had long feared intimacy and pushed away women who got too close to him.Perry had a number of high-profile romances over the years, dating stars including Julia Roberts and “Mean Girls” actress Lizzy Caplan.

However, he admitted that he was usually the one to end a relationship. “That was me afraid,” he admitted in the extraordinarily intimate interview. “I manifest something that’s wrong with them, and then I break up with them.

But there can’t be something wrong with everyone. I’m the common denominator. I left first because I thought they were going to annihilate me.”The actor’s 27-year battle with drug and alcohol addiction also derailed his love life.

He did 15 separate stints in rehab between the mid 1990s and early 2020s. But Perry told People that he had finally “gotten over” his “fear” of love after becoming sober in May 2021.“I’m not run by the fear I used to be run by so everything’s kind of different,” he said of sobriety. “I’m feeling more confident and I’m not afraid of love anymore, so the next girl I go out with better watch out.”Perry said that achieving sobriety in his mid-50s had given him a renewed focus on finding someone to share his life with. “The thing that’s changed about me is I have no interest in hanging out with somebody that I don’t know or somebody that I’m not that into,” he stated.