Kelly Ripa Dishes on Her and Mark Consuelos’ Plans for When Their Last Child Moves Away From Home

Kelly Ripa and husband Mark Consuelos share three kids, only one of whom still lives at home — their 17-year-old son, Joaquin. Speaking to PEOPLE Now, Ripa revealed that she and her husband have a plan for the day Joaquin goes to college, joking that she and Consuelos will no longer be clothed in their home.

“We’re going to be totally naked,” she joked. “At all times. We are going to change the locks. People are like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna miss the kids.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I wanna experiment with it. See how that goes.’”

The couple’s oldest child, 22-year-old son Michael, lives in Brooklyn, and 18-year-old daughter Lola started her freshman year at New York University in 2019. Ripa and Consuelos married in 1996, and 24 years later, Ripa shared that the secret to their successful marriage is similar to many others.

“We encourage each other,” she explained. “I hate when people say this — because it sounds so dumb — but we are best friends and we love each other and we like each other and we’ve got these beautiful, amazing kids and we feel very fortunate to have found, in this great big world with all these people, we’re just two kids. He’s from Italy, I’m from south Jersey, what are the chances we would find each other?”

The couple met on the set of All My Children when Consuelos was cast as Mateo Santos, the love interest for Ripa’s character, Hayley Vaughan.

“I saw my husband in a photograph before I saw him,” Ripa told Bruce Bozzi on his SiriusXM Radio Andy show Lunch with Bruce in 2018. “I knew when I saw his photograph.”

“[Casting director Judy Blye Wilson] showed me his picture and, Bruce, I’m not this person, at that point I was not a hopeless romantic. I never thought about getting married, it never occurred to me that I would grow old with someone,” the mom of three recalled. “I just thought I would be living my single girl life in the city and sort of like moving. You know, if I needed to up and move to a location, I could do that. I had no responsibilities and I was earning a good living on this soap opera because I was there for almost seven years before Mark got there…I was a baby when I got the job.”

“When I saw him, the photograph of him, I saw my entire future with him flash before — like I saw it,” she continued. “And I don’t believe in any of that and now I do because of that moment.”

Photo Credit: Getty / Axelle/Bauer-Griffin