How Lara Flynn Boyle Found Love with ‘Urban Cowboy’ Husband After Being ‘Done’ with Actors (Exclusive)

Lara Flynn Boyle has been happily married for 18 years to real estate developer and investor Donald Ray Thomas, a Texan she calls “my urban cowboy.”

Before connecting with Thomas, 58, in 2006 via a mutual friend, the actress, 54, dated several celebrities: her Twin Peaks costar Kyle MacLachlan, Saturday Night Live alum David Spade and, most memorably Jack Nicholson.

She was in a relationship with the three-time Oscar winner from 1999 into the early 2000s, and they were photographed together again in St. Tropez in 2006.

“I left with a bang when it came to actors,” she tells PEOPLE. “Then I went, ‘Okay, I’m done now.’”

It was then that she met Thomas. “We ran into each other at our mutual friend's party, and then we were together that night and ever since,” she says. 

They connected over each other’s jokes. “He laughed at mine, I laughed at his,” she recalls.

Boyle and Thomas (who used to ranch as well, according to his wife) were both ready to settle into a serious relationship.

“A lot of it is growing up. A lot of it is when you're ready, and I've been so fortunate, I've had so many lovely gentleman callers. I have had a blast, and I have just met wonderful men to have time with and to learn with and grow with. It was just the right timing,” she says.

“A lot of it is kismet, when it's meant to be, at the right time. I look back on my past relationships, and all of it at the time it's meant to be, and where you are in your life, and what you're taking in and taking out. It was just meant to be, it was just timing,” she adds.

Boyle and Thomas spend time in Texas as well as Los Angeles, but aren’t always in the same city at the same time. She says they “don’t go long” without seeing each other, but also don’t have any hard rules about spending, say, more than two weeks apart.

“It’s lovely,” she says of her relationship, which she has been focusing on in the past few years.

Boyle, however, is back on screen with her first role in four years. She stars in Mother, Couch, playing Linda, the daughter of a woman (Ellen Burstyn) who enters a furniture store, sits on a sofa and refuses to get up.

Writer-director Niclas Larsson developed the character with Boyle in mind for the role.

Mother, Couch is in theaters in New York July 5 before expanding.

For more on Lara Flynn Boyle, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE.