Robin Roberts is celebrating someone special in her life! The Good Morning America co-anchor, who is currently on a well-deserved weeks-long hiatus from the morning news program, took to social media on Sunday to show a little love to her longtime girlfriend Amber Laign as she celebrated her birthday.
In a sweet birthday message penned to Laign and shared alongside a gallery of images, Roberts said she was “wishing my sweet Amber a very Happy Birthday,” and added that Laign “keeps saying how overwhelmed she is by all the love she’s receiving from family and friends.” Roberts said she told her girlfriend “all the love & goodness she gives out every day to so many is being returned to her tenfold.” The GMA reporter ended the sweet post, which drew in plenty of happy birthday messages from her followers, by sweetly writing, “count my blessings every day to have this incredible soul in my life.”
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Laign, a licensed massage therapist, and Robert first met back in 2005 after mutual friends set them up on a blind date. Recalling that blind date in her memoir, Everybody’s Got Something, Roberts wrote that she liked the fact that she had no idea who I was. She rarely followed sports, so she never saw me on ESPN, and her office mates at the time watched a different morning show … ouch… The main thing we have in common is positive energy. She sees the good in everyone.” Although the couple maintained a relationship for years, they did not go public until 2013, when Roberts came out in a Facebook post.
Although the couple has been together for nearly two decades now, they have mostly kept their relationship private. When Robin appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2014, she shared that Laign “doesn’t really like the spotlight.” She also opened up about her decision to come out in that 2013 post, which came amid her cancer battle. Acknowledging that her girlfriend prefers a more private life, she said, “she’s very, very supportive and she’s been right there beside me every step of the way. And it was actually the end of the year on my Facebook and I had been thanking my doctors, my nurses and my sister who was a perfect match and I said [to Amber] I want to say thank you.”
Now 16 years strong, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has caused Roberts and Laign to grow even closer. Speaking with PEOPLE in April of this year, the GMA host noted, “we’re going on 16 years now. We spent more time together this past year than in the previous 15 years combined. We’ve never been stronger.”
