Jenny McCarthy talks getting ‘freaked out’ over Donnie Wahlberg relationship and marriage

Jenny McCarthy and Donnie Wahlberg have been married for over a decade, and will be celebrating their 11-year anniversary this August.

Their relationship got off to a quick start after they first met in 2012 as guests on Watch What Happens Live and became public mere months later.

However, before their romance was official, they met once again in March 2013 on Jenny’s own show, The Jenny McCarthy Show, for an interview that she has now revealed was supposed to be just nine minutes but ended up becoming 90.

During an appearance on Jennie Garth’s I Choose Me podcast, she looked back on the early days of their romance and her initial hesitation about his interest in her.

“I thought he was married,” Jenny recalled of her first meeting with him on WWHL. “So I didn’t really flirt with him. I was just like, ‘Oh, you’re a really nice guy.’ Like, I had no idea Andy Cohen was like, ‘You gotta ask her out.'”

“So I’m doing my homework. I’m like, okay, who is he dating? He’s not dating anybody. Still wasn’t thinking anything,” she remembers of the time before inviting him on her show. “Then he sat down and I started interviewing him, and I was like, wow. He’s very smart. Oh, he’s very funny. Oh, he’s really cute.”

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Jenny remembers nervously asking her assistant to give him her number backstage after the taping. “So he wound up waiting for me in his dressing room to say goodbye.”

“But, I was so flushed like a little high school girl. My face was red, and I was like I can’t walk past him, I can’t walk past him. I’m too scared. I’m too nervous… and I’m like I just hope he calls me.”

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However, confusion arose between the pair of mixed signals, and while Donnie assumed she just gave him his number out of formality, Jenny waited for his call, to no avail.

“Two weeks go by and he doesn’t call me,” the The Masked Singer judge continued. “He thought I just gave my phone number to everybody. That’s why I didn’t want to see him when I left when, really, I was like a 12 year old little girl, like all freaked out.” 

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Things turned around, though, when she brought him up again on her talk show, this time asking a psychic whether she’d actually marry him. “So he saw a commercial of me asking a psychic on my talk show if I’m going to marry Donnie Wahlberg.”

That gave the Blue Bloods star the push he needed. “And the psychic was like, ‘Yeah.’ And this is before we even went on a date, okay? But it was right after the episode so he wound up calling me. We went on our first date, and then it was game over.”

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The pair announced their engagement in similarly public fashion, during an episode of The View in April 2014, and tied the knot that August at Hotel Baker in St. Charles, Illinois, where they now live.