"I fear it might be so damn boring."
That was Kelly Ripa's chief concern about her newly released book Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories, a collection of hilarious, honest and heartfelt essays about her career, family and fame. But, as anyone who has watched even just a minute of Live With Kelly and Ryan knows, Kelly is anything but dull. And we can attest that her book is just as electric and compelling as she is on-air every morning—especially the juicy insight she graciously offers up about her 26-year marriage with Mark Consuelos, which now has us ready to launch a campaign for a rom-com based on their relationship.
While Kelly and Mark, who is half-Mexican and half-Italian, have long been considered #couplegoals, their relationship is even more inspiring when you recall they are also one of Hollywood's first interracial pairs.
"It was just two people that fell in love and really had the hots for each other," Kelly told E!'s Justin Sylvester when asked what that meant to the couple at the time. "Now, people reference it quite a bit. And at the time, we didn't even think about it. We were just like, 'What do you mean? We're in love? Why wouldn't we be together?' It's funnier now. Because when you look back in history, you go, 'Oh, I guess that was a big deal.'"
And it really was love at first screen-test for Kelly and Mark—who have three children: Michael, 25, Lola, 21, and Joaquin, 19—when they first met on the set of the ABC soap opera All My Children in 1996. While Kelly was already a series regular, Mark was one of the actors auditioning to play her new love interest.
"I don't know how I knew," the 51-year-old recalled, "but I knew that we would be together forever. I had a cognizant thought of that in my head, which still doesn't make any sense to me."
That night, Kelly had a vivid dream about Mark: 'We were on a plane together, flying to Rome, and we had a baby. We had a baby girl she had red footie pajamas. I am not kidding.'
Naturally, Kelly decided to tell Mark about this dream the next time she saw him, which was in front of the nine other actors vying for the role.
"Because he's unflappable, he says, 'Have you ever been to Rome?'" Kelly recalled. "Now I can't believe he's talking to me, just like in my dreams. And I said, 'No, never.' And he said, now listen to the word, 'We used to live in Italy. You would love it.' I was like, 'Wait, who's we?'"
Reader, is this not the most relatable meet-cute of our dreams? And just wait, it gets even more interesting as Kelly and her co-star Eva LaRue then began their own investigation into whether or not Mark was married because, as she said, "he's supposed to be with me!" Remember, this was before we had Google at the tip of our fingers.
Fortunately, All My Children cast Mark as her Matteo, and through "regular conversations, like people used to have," Kelly learned Mark was referring to his family and that he was raised in Italy until he was 7 years old.
While Kelly would've made the discovery that her future husband was single if she had access to social media, the TV host admitted they "wouldn't be married" if the Internet existed early in their relationship after the two got into a big fight while appearing on Live With Regis and Kathie Lee together.
"We weren't speaking to one another and they put us in a room together," she shared. "We silently ignored each other for a long time until we couldn't stand it anymore. But if we had phones, I would have been shopping, he would have been hate-scrolling Twitter and we would have been swiping. We had to work it out because that didn't exist."
It's not the only obstacle the two have overcome throughout their decades-long romance, including the time Kelly passed out while they were having sex shortly after she gave birth to their first child, Michael. (Ed note: As we said, where is the rom-com based on their relationship?!)
"If I had a crystal ball? I couldn't have predicted that," Kelly admitted, before clarifying that the "point of the story" she details in the book, is the outfit Mark chose to put on her before taking her to the hospital.
While she acknowledged Mark usually "has a great eye" when it comes to fashion, he didn't exactly have sartorial cool under pressure, with Kelly detailing the unusual ensemble he dressed her in after she lost consciousness.
"I'm going to call it a costume that I don't quite understand," she said. "A. Why? and B. How? I'm just going to leave it at this the base layer was a French cut leotard that a ballet dancer would wear. He decided to snake my unconscious body into a leotard." (In Live Wire, she added he also put her in a pair of his Juventus track pants and Manolo Blahnik pumps.)
Waking up on a gurney in such an ensemble led Kelly to believe she was having "the strangest nightmare," a far-cry from the dream she had that kick-started their romance. And, yet, as cliché as it may sound, their decades-long romance has been the stuff of fantasies.
Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories is available wherever you buy books.