Mark Consuelos Admits He and Kelly Ripa Broke up the Week of Their Wedding

Can Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa attribute their 22 years of happy marriage to a convincing argument he made, effectively ending their breakup, a day before their wedding?

While appearing on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Consuelos answered a fan question about their breakup from a week before they eloped in Las Vegas in 1996.

“She came back home and she was visiting her family in South Jersey and we both had to do an appearance on Live With Regis and Kathie Lee,” Consuelos said. “We were pushing furniture on for a Queen of the Day Mother’s Day special, and when we were together she wouldn’t talk to me. And that made me go crazy.”

“So I followed her in Central Park — I stalked her. And then we went back to my place and we got married the next day,” he said, adding that “it wasn’t a big breakup.”

“What happened between you going to your place and you getting married? I think we know,” host Cohen teased.

While the story is a lesser known one of the couple, as even Cohen admitted he hadn’t heard it before, Ripa opened up about the brief breakup on the Comments by Celebs podcast last summer.

“Right before we got married, we broke up. We broke up and we got back together the day before we went off and eloped. Yeah, we eloped. We went to Vegas and got married,” she said at the time.

Consuelos admitted on Watch What Happens Live that he knew Ripa was the one “pretty early on.”

“We would go out with groups of people from work and slowly each date would go that the groups started getting smaller and smaller until it was just us two,” the Riverdale star said. “I was shy, I wasn’t very aggressive that way.”

While he noted that the couple met on the set of All My Children, “We started dating way before [our characters] were together on the show.”

Fast forward 20-some years later, and the couple shares three children: Michael, 21, Lola, 17, and Joaquin, 15 — but Ripa said recently that she regrets not having even more.

“I am regretful that we didn’t have more,” she told Ryan Seacrest on the Tuesday, Feb. 5 episode of Live With Kelly and Ryan. “There is [sic] many different reasons. First of all, triangulation. When they are small…you always have two against one. It is just the way it is, it’s unavoidable.”

“But I also just loved having them,” she continued. “I adore them as the grown-ups that they’ve become…but when they are tiny, they are just so adorable. And they say amazing things, and I miss all of that.”