Actress Portia James DeGeneres says she was destined to be with Ellen.

Portia talked about her love-at-first-sight romance with her wife-to-be in the November issue of The Australian Women's Weekly.

“I never thought I would experience that kind of feeling, being a lesbian,” says Portia. “That overwhelming experience of seeing someone across a room and falling in love with them.”

The women had actually met three years earlier, but a closeted Portia declined Ellen's invitation to attend a party she was throwing at her house.

“I was too nervous,” she says. “We both really, really liked each other and there was definitely a lot of chemistry there, but it was a ridiculous thought for me to be closeted and terrified of being discovered, and then date the most famous lesbian in the world. It wasn't going to happen.”

Ellen and Portia began dating in 2004 and married in 2008 during the brief window when gay marriage was legal in California. Portia, formerly Portia de Rossi, recently took her wife's surname.

She is expected to reveal more about her coming out lesbian in her upcoming memoir Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain due out on November 1.