Mark Consuelos Insists He Didn’t Have Cold Feet Before Marrying Kelly Ripa: ‘I Stand by My Decision’

The ‘Live with Kelly and Mark’ hosts were discussing the statistic that one and five people admitted to nearly running out on their wedding day

Mark Consuelos was all in on his wedding day with wife Kelly Ripa.

During the April 25 episode of Live with Kelly and Mark, the TV host, 53, insisted that he had no nerves or hesitations about saying “I do” during the couple’s May 1996 nuptials. The subject came up when the two were discussing a recent article citing the statistic that one in five adults admitted to having cold feet and nearly running out on their wedding day.

Ripa, also 53, told her husband that she thought he seemed “a little stressed out” the day they eloped in Las Vegas.

“I was not stressed out,” he said, later reiterating, “Just so you know, I don’t get cold feet. When I make a decision, I stand by my decision.”

His answer prompted Ripa to jokingly respond, “Well now this article is boring — I thought for sure,” before confessing: “I said to [executive producer Michael] Gelman, ‘Give me that cold feet article, because I’m going to get him to confess to cold feet.’ ”

Amid the discussion, Consuelos actually turned the tables on his wife, telling Ripa, “If you look at the wedding photo that we took in the Chapel of the Bells, you’re like this [mimics looking stiff].”

She assured him that she was simply cold and not dealing with any wedding-day jitters. “You were cold? It was 100 degrees outside!” he exclaimed.

“No, but it was chilly in there,” she replied of their wedding venue.

Consuelos then joked that maybe the real problem was that she was “wearing nothing.”

“Look at you,” he said, as a photo of the couple’s wedding was shown.

Back in February, the couple announced that they would be returning to the site of their wedding, nearly 28 years later, when Live traveled to Las Vegas to tape a week of shows.

“We’re definitely going back there,” Consuelos told PEOPLE at the time, calling the Chapel of the Bells “a very special place” for him and Ripa, who first met on the set of All My Children. “We always try to make a drive-by when we’re in town, but this time, we’re going to take the viewers inside, where it all happened.”

Ripa — who previously revealed that their entire wedding cost $179, including airfare — recalled the elopement experience as being “really romantic” and “very sweet.”

“We cherish those memories, still to this day. It’s been 28 years and we still can remember every minute of that wedding,” she told PEOPLE. “And I mean, it was really minutes. It was like two minutes!”

“We were very present,” she added.

The pair has previously explained that they opted to elope because they had a rare two days off of work and chose Las Vegas to escape the “cold and miserable” winter in New York City.

“It was like, ‘Let’s go to Vegas and get married and it’ll be fun,’ ” Ripa recounted on a 2022 episode of Live. “It really is such an efficient way to get married. And it was fun. We were like, ‘Now, this is gambling! Woohoo!’ ”

As for how they settled on their wedding location, Ripa told PEOPLE she cracked open the Yellow Pages at the hotel. “I looked up ‘Wedding Chapels’ and the Chapel of the Bells had the biggest, biggest ad. It was one of the first ads, and it was right in the right position of the page,” she remembered.

In an echo of their April 25 on-air discussion, Consuelos explained the surprising reason why he wanted to grab the earlier of the chapel’s two available time slots.

“The funniest thing was… I was like, ‘Hey, which one do you want to do?’ ” he told PEOPLE. “She’s like, ‘2!’ I go, ‘Noon. We want noon.’ Because I wanted to make sure I didn’t get cold feet.”