Kelly Ripa celebrates Mark Consuelos' 50th birthday: 'I've loved you for more than half of your life'© Getty Images

Kelly Ripa celebrates Mark Consuelos’ 50th birthday: ‘I’ve loved you for more than half of your life’

The actor thanked his wife for letting him be her ‘co-pilot’


UPDATED MARCH 30, 2021 3:01 PM EDT

Happy birthday,  Mark Consuelos ! The Riverdale actor turned 50 on Tuesday, March 30. To celebrate her husband’s milestone birthday,  Kelly Ripa  shared a montage of photos that were taken before she and Mark met. “Happy birthday to the light of our lives @instasuelos,” the TV personality captioned the post. “I’ve loved you for more than half of your life, here are the years before we met. I was looking for you. ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️🎂🎂🎂🎂.”

Mark replied to his wife’s tribute commenting, “Thank God I found you… thank you for letting me be your co-pilot.”

The couple, who eloped in 1996, met in 1995 on the set of All My Children. Back in 2018, Kelly admitted that she saw her “entire future” with Mark before actually meeting him.

“I auditioned him. They’d been looking for this character for some time…They didn’t want a dark-haired guy, they wanted a Latino actor. So I had auditioned every Latino actor in the city and around the city and then California,” she shared on Bruce Bozzi’s Lunch with Bruce SiriusXM show, according to Us Weekly. “Then all of a sudden, Judy Blye Wilson, who was the casting director in All My Children, said, ‘I found him.’”

© Getty Images

Mark Consuelos turned 50 on March 30

“[Judy] showed me his picture and … 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. I just thought I would be living my single girl life in the city,” Kelly added. “I had no responsibilities and I was earning a good living on the soap opera … So when I saw him, the photograph of him, I saw my entire future with him flash before [my eyes]. Like. I saw it. I [didn’t] believe in any of that and now I do because of that moment.”