On the first edition of her SiriusXM podcast Let’s Chat Off Camera with Kelly Ripa, Ripa noted, “It’s very hard being married to someone who is envious.”
The 26-year marriage of Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos has had its ups and downs, including some difficulties that the couple has had to overcome.

On the first episode of Kelly Ripa’s new Sirius XM podcast Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa, which debuted on Wednesday, the couple talked about their love and how they overcame some challenging moments by talking things out.

Consuelos, 51, said, “It always gets better.” If you speak things through and communicate, nothing is impossible.

Ripa, 52, recalled how they used to quarrel over Consuelos’ jealousy and insisted that this did not imply that they were unaware of the difficult times.

My biggest beef with you during our marriage — and this isn’t new, ’cause it changed, and I’m not sure whether I changed, if you changed, or if it was some combination of change — is that you used to be envious. It was challenging to swallow that tablet. It’s challenging to be married to an envious person. It lacks attractiveness.

She continued by saying that Consuelos regularly harbored “an inaccurate sense of a scenario” that made him envious. She recalled how a Boston restaurant waitress warmly referred to her as a “princess” in Italian shortly after the All My Children couple secretly wed in 1996.

The older waiter was a wonderful character. Ripa remembered that he was at least in his 70s, if not his 80s. The fact that this elderly man referred to me as a princess made me smile. As I gave him my order, I grinned as I stared at him. When you decided to engage in a severe battle with me, he left.

Next month, Consuelos, who will take over for Ryan Seacrest as co-host on Live, confirmed the claim by admitting to Ripa, “I was upset.”
Hey, I was 25 years old and utterly insane. Nonetheless, I did carry that resentment around for a time, he said. “I no longer feel envy… It’s a flaw in who I am. It’s disgusting. Furthermore, it is far worse on the inside than it appears to the person on the receiving end. If it helps, you are aware of your insane state. Even though the jealous person knows it’s bad and evil, they still can’t help it.

Consuelos responded that it was about personal development when asked “what changed.” He said, “I wanted to work on myself. That was important for me to handle since it was getting in the way of my growth.

Ripa needed to improve on a few other areas as well, most notably her bad habit of hanging up the phone during arguments.

Consuelos said, “Sometimes if the person’s like, say, in Vancouver, and you don’t pick up the phone in a day, it’s incredibly scary. You haven’t done that in such a long time, but when you’re pissed on the phone, you hang up.”

“That’s awful. Ripa earlier asserted that she and Consuelos were “bad arguers” and occasionally needed to communicate more efficiently. “It’s terrible,” she stated on her podcast. That came from my upbringing, I guess. I come from a well-known family of hangers-on.

Everyone experiences ups and downs, as Ripa acknowledged. It never just happens to be even or flat. I compared it to a heartbeat, saying that if it flatlines, the person is definitely dead.

The couple, who have three children—son Michael, 25, Joaquin, 20, and daughter Lola, 21—also visits a marriage therapist, particularly now that they are empty-nesters.

Consuelos declared, “I’m a lifer; I want to be married for the rest of my life.” Yet after the distraction is over, I think you’ll be stuck in a house with only me. And I desired to attend counseling in order to resolve some of the problems we had been battling for 26 years.