How Lara Flynn Boyle found love with her ‘Urban Cowboy’ husband (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 she met Thomas, 58, through a mutual friend in 2006, the 54-year-old actress dated several celebrities: Twin Peaks Co-star Kyle MacLachlan, Saturday Night Live Alumnus David Spade and, most memorably, Jack Nicholson.

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

“I quit acting with a bang,” she tells PEOPLE. “Then I thought, ‘Okay, I’m done now.'”

That’s when she met Thomas. “We met by chance at a mutual friend’s party and were together that night and have been together ever since,” she says.

They enjoyed each other’s jokes. “He laughed at mine, I laughed at his,” she remembers.

Boyle and Thomas (who, according to his wife, also ranched) were both ready to enter into a serious relationship.

“A lot of it is growing up. A lot of it is when you’re ready, and I was so lucky to have so many lovely gentlemen come visit me. I had a great time and just met wonderful men to spend time with and learn and grow with. It was just the right time,” she says.

“A lot of it is fate, when it’s meant to be, at the right time. I look back at my past relationships, and everything at the time when it’s meant to be, and where you are in your life and what you take in and what you take away. It was just meant to be, it was just a matter of timing,” she adds.

Boyle and Thomas spend time in Texas and Los Angeles, but aren’t always in the same city at the same time. She says they “don’t spend long periods of time” without each other, but also don’t have any hard and fast rules when it comes to, say, spending more than two weeks apart.

“It’s beautiful,” she says of her relationship, which she has focused on for the past few years.

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

Screenwriter and director Niclas Larsson developed the character with Boyle as the target audience in mind.

mother, couch opens in New York theaters on July 5 before expanding.

For more information about Lara Flynn Boyle, see the new issue of PEOPLE.