Kelly Ripa skipped a major rite of passage before her wedding to Mark Consuelos — and she has no regrets.
Ripa, 52, revealed during the Monday, August 28, episode of Live With Kelly and Mark that she never had a bachelorette party before marrying Consuelos, 52, in 1996. “You know me, pageantry is not my thing,” Ripa told her husband on their talk show. “I wanted the marriage, not the big wedding. I don’t need a bachelorette party to tell me that I’m about to get married because I’m about to get married and here I am on the airplane, you know what I mean? That’s my bachelorette party.”
Ripa went on to note that she’s also not a fan of traditional bachelorette party accouterments. “Sashes, hats, penis hats, hats with penises. Which, to me, it never makes any sense,” she quipped. “I don’t understand what it means. I don’t know! I don’t get it!”
Consuelos and Ripa met in 1995 while working on the soap opera All My Children. Consuelos proposed one year later — and the duo didn’t even wait a full 24 hours before tying the knot in Las Vegas.
Ripa later credited the spontaneous event as one reason she and Consuelos actually went through with marriage.
“I don’t think we would have made it to the wedding,” Ripa explained during an August 2022 episode of Live With Kelly and Ryan, reflecting on what would have happened if they’d had a more elaborate ceremony. “There would have been hard feelings and blame all over the place. And I can honestly say, we do not feel less married. As a matter of fact, we feel more married than those people, because we’re still married.”
Ripa told then-cohost Ryan Seacrest that the pair spent a total of $179 on their wedding, including airfare, because they used frequent flier miles left over from a previously canceled trip.
“It was ’96 guys, remember the winter of ’96? The winter of ’96 is in the record books as the most miserable, it was an endless winter, and it was a snowstorm when we left,” Ripa recalled. “And we looked at the weather because we thought about going to City Hall but that was still cold and miserable, whereas Las Vegas, it was 85 degrees and sunny. [We thought,] ‘Let’s do that!’ And so that’s what we did.”
