Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos eloped to Las Vegas on May 1, 1996. Total cost, including airfare: $173. Thirty years later, on the June 12 episode of Live with Kelly and Mark, the ABC daytime co-hosts let their audience in on what now reads, by daytime-TV standards, as one of the longest-running and least-discussed celebrity marriages in American television.
The actual anniversary date passed quietly. Ripa, in interviews she did the week before, said the couple had been planning to spend the night at their Sag Harbor house, with their three children — Michael, 29, Lola, 24, and Joaquin, 23 — cooking the dinner. The June 12 Live episode, which fell six weeks after the date itself, was the public marker. Ripa reflected on the elopement, the air-ticket cost, and one specific regret she has held onto for three decades.
“My one regret,” Ripa told the audience and Consuelos, who was sitting beside her, “is that I did not invite my mother.” Consuelos, by the show’s later cold-open recap, made a face. Ripa added that she had been twenty-five years old, recording All My Children five days a week in Manhattan, and had decided that telling her mother would mean her mother would invite her grandmother, who would invite her aunts, and the trip would become a wedding. “I just wanted to marry Mark,” Ripa said. “And I wanted to do it that weekend.”
The two met in 1995, on the Pine Valley set of All My Children, where Consuelos was cast as the gangster Mateo Santos opposite Ripa’s Hayley Vaughan. They had been engaged for eight weeks at the time of the elopement. According to TV Insider’s recap of the June 12 episode, the on-air conversation about the elopement included an extended detour into the chapel itself — the Stardust, which closed in 2007 — and the dress Ripa wore, which was a sundress she had bought at a Pasadena Macy’s three weeks earlier for an entirely different event.
The June 12 segment also included a brief callback to the wider US wedding-watch cycle. Ripa, mid-toast to Consuelos, pivoted to the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce July 3 Madison Square Garden ceremony. “I do not want to give them advice,” she said, looking directly at the camera. “But I will say this: when you spend $173, you do not spend the next thirty years arguing about who paid for the flowers.” The line, by Sunday morning, was the most-clipped daytime-TV moment of the week.
Live with Kelly and Mark is in its third season under the current co-host pairing. The show, which Consuelos joined in 2023 after Ryan Seacrest’s departure, won Outstanding Daytime Talk Series at the 2025 Emmys and is, by ABC’s own ratings figures, the highest-rated entertainment daytime program in the United States. Ripa has been on the franchise for twenty-five of its thirty-eight seasons. Consuelos was a regular weekly guest co-host for nineteen of those.
According to AOL Entertainment’s recap of the June 12 conversation, Ripa also addressed the rumour cycle that has periodically swirled around the marriage for years. “There has never been a serious crisis,” she said. “There have been bad weeks. There have been bad seasons. We do not have a bad marriage. We are not separating. We are eating dinner.” Consuelos, off-camera, called it “the most we have ever said publicly about us in a thirty-year run.”
The couple’s actual 30th-anniversary gift to each other, both confirmed on-air, was a single small dinner the night of May 1 at the same Sag Harbor restaurant they had eaten at for the first time in 1996. They did not, by Ripa’s confirmation, invite the children. “This one,” she said, indicating Consuelos, “is the only person I wanted across the table.” Live with Kelly and Mark returns on Monday. Their fourth co-host’s-anniversary segment, by Consuelos’s own brief teaser at the end of Friday’s show, will be “a quieter one.”
