KELLY RIPA & MARK CONSUELOS
THE COUPLE OPENS UP ABOUT THE SHOCKING BREAKUP THAT ALMOST COST THEM EVERYTHING
The star couple open up about the heartbreaking split that nearly ended their marriage before it began.
After 22 years of marriage, Kelly Ripa can’t live without her husband, Mark Consuelos. “I miss him already,” she shared recently on social media when he was traveling for work, confessing that she’d already moved to his side of the bed to comfort herself. “If two people were ever supposed to be together,” she gushes, “I’d say it was us.”
That’s why it surprised everyone when the Live With Kelly and Ryan cohost admitted in a recent podcast that she dumped Mark — who was playing her love interest on All My Children at the time — a year after they started
“I just worship him. He makes me feel very safe.”
— Kelly
dating in 1995. “They were both only about 25 and they fell in love so quickly. They just didn’t trust it,” an insider tells Closer of the shocking split. “Kelly just had to be sure she wasn’t making a mistake by moving too quickly.”
As fate would have it, a joint appearance on Live With Regis and Kathie Lee soon brought them back together. “It was their Mother’s Day special,” Kelly, 47, reveals, “and one of the mothers’ dreams was to meet Mark and me because we were her favorite characters on All My Children.” Their sweet reunion on the show clearly reignited their attraction to one another and a week later, over pizza and wine at Mark’s apartment, “Mark just said, ‘Let’s go to Vegas,’” Kelly shares, and the two eloped and secretly got married on May 1, 1996.
Their first year of marriage was tough (“We fought constantly,” Kelly admits), but the two figured things out. “We looked at each other one day and said, ‘We’re in this for the long haul, so let’s make it fun,’” she says of surviving their rough patch. The couple are now proud parents to Michael, 21, Lola, 17, and Joaquin, 15, and “their kids are all healthy and well-adjusted,” the insider says. “They both keep family their top priority.”
MAKING IT WORK
Though Mark’s projects, like his role on The CW’s Riverdale, often take him out of town, the two strive to stay connected. “His absences do put stress on the relationship,” the insider notes, “but they FaceTime and text each other a thousand times a day, as Kelly jokes. They never take each other for granted.” Adds Kelly, “That’s what you want in life, to have a good companion, somebody that loves you, that listens to you and is your equal.”
Regular date nights help keep the romance alive, too. “We carve out time for ourselves,” Kelly says. “It gives us something to look forward to, a night where we’re not saying, ‘Put that down! Stop touching her! Don’t spill that!’ It can be that simple, just the two of us, for dinner and high jinks.” She doesn’t shy away from raving about their love life, either. “Lots of sex” is key, she insists. “We try to do spicy things together all the time.”
Their enduring passion doesn’t exactly thrill the rest of their household. “Kelly and Mark love posting sexy pics on Instagram, and that sometimes makes their kids roll their eyes. But Kelly and Mark don’t care,” the insider says with a laugh. After all, the couple who rolled the dice and eloped to Vegas are just proud that they’ve beaten all the odds. As Kelly says, “We’re very lucky that we found each other.”
— Ron Kelly