Inside Jenny McCarthy and Donnie Wahlberg’s Entirely Unexpected Love Story

Donnie Wahlberg, Jenny Mccarthy

Roger Kisby/DCNYRE2014/Getty Images for DCP

Jenny McCarthy wasn’t sure a great love was in the cards for her.

“Especially being a single mom, in the past it was one of my biggest fears,” not finding the right person, “and I didn’t know if it was going to be out there for me,” she shared with E! News last week before (almost) the whole cast of Jersey Shore visited her SiriusXM radio show. (Ronnie, you were missed.)

And Donnie Wahlberg, a divorced dad of two sons, wasn’t looking for anything special—but then McCarthy walked into his life in 2013. Or, more accurately, he walked into hers as a guest on the VH1 talk show she had at the time.

Today they’re celebrating four years of marriage, and five years of togetherness.

“Donnie said to me said, he’s like, ‘You know, we’ve been together 5 years’—I’m like, ‘What?’ This morning he said it to me,” McCarthy told us. “And [he says], ‘It still feels so brand new, doesn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it really does.'”

That’s what happens when two people just can’t get enough of each other.

“Let s just say we visually give 50 Shades of Grey a run for its money,” McCarthy promised viewers in a blog post she wrote teasing that episode in March 2013. “It gets steamy. I mean like really steamy. Being turned on by a guy is always fun but to have it legitimately happen to you on TV is to be turned back into a 12-year-old. By the time we get into the groundbreaking interview, my face turns fifty shades of RED.”

They had crossed paths once before, in 2012 when they were both guests on Watch What Happens: Live, but on that show they had a chaperone in Andy Cohen.

The topics covered on Jenny’s show included Justin Bieber(the scandalous celeb of the day), Donnie’s early New Kids On The Block days, dirty talk (“Some guys do it wrong,” McCarthy said; “I don’t do it wrong,” Wahlberg fired back) and Donnie’s virginity (which he admitted to losing in a pile of snow, to his brother’s girlfriend). The pair ended up snuggling on the floor sucking on lollipops, Wahlberg nibbling on the host’s ear. 

Still, despite the instant chemistry, it took two whole weeks for Wahlberg to ask her out. And yes, McCarthy was counting.

“I went a year without dating anybody,” the onetime Singled Out co-host said that September on New York’s 95.5 PLJ radio. “So I don’t know if I was really randy or really ready, but he was there and I gave him my phone number…I’ve never given a guy my number, but I was interested.”

McCarthy was married to John Asher, the father of her now 16-year-old son, Evan, for almost six years before they divorced in 2005. She went on to have a long relationship with Jim Carrey and then dated fitness model Jason Toohey and football player Brian Urlacher for a few months each. 

“It took awhile,” she recalled to Parade magazine in April 2012 about getting over her 2010 breakup with Carrey after almost five years together. “I felt like, ‘Oh, I’m so alone I have to be with somebody. But I got to a place where I was like, ‘I’m happy with myself. I don’t need to have a lover to have love in my life.'”

Wahlberg admittedly sowed his oats from an early age as a member of New Kids on the Block, which he helped put together when he was barely 16, then married Kim Fey in 1999 after eight years of dating. They mutually filed for divorce in 2008 and the split was finalized a year later. They’re parents to sons Xavier, 25, and Elijah, 17.

In 2010 Wahlberg scored a plum role in Blue Bloods and between that; NKOTB, which re-formed in 2007; and seeing his sons whenever possible he was too busy to get serious with anybody. He also had faith that the universe would help him out along the way.

“I watched Oprah Winfrey the other day, and she had a panel who were very successful,” the singer-actor said in a 2007 interview. “They were talking about the secret, the laws of attraction, how you think something and you put it out there and it comes your way. I can honestly say that in my life I’ve experienced that many times without really knowing it.”

But when McCarthy was ready to settle down again, she was ready.

“I wanted to find the one,” she later said on The Howard Stern Show. “I didn’t care what package it came in, I just wanted to find it.” And once she did (and he called) that was it, though they “took it slow” at first.

“It took two weeks for him to call me back, and I thought for sure he was playing for a different team, if you know what I’m saying,” McCarthy cracked on PLJ-FM. “That’s of course my ego, a girl’s ego: ‘He must be married, he’s gay, what’s wrong?'”

Eventually, “we both trusted the process of dating and we didn’t let stories take over,” she later told E! News, meaning the two of them put their public personas—hers being the wild, say-anything former Playboy Playmate who had a dramatic relationship in the public eye, and him being the teen idol turned cocky man-in-a-boy-band (“the hunky rocker who knows how to work the crowd,” Rolling Stone called him in 1989—aside and focused on the reality. “I think a lot of times we get caught up in the fantasy of who we think somebody is, and instead we trusted getting to know who each other are for real. So we paid attention to each other, we didn’t make up things, we didn’t Google each other. We just kind of trusted the spirit and still enjoyed the abs at the same time.”

They made their red carpet debut as a couple that August, at a fundraiser she hosted in St. Charles, Ill., to benefit her son’s school, featuring pros from Dancing With the Stars as the evening’s main entertainment.

By the end of the year, as the seconds ticked down on 2013, McCarthy and Wahlberg started what would be their annual tradition of ringing in the new year with a big, dramatic kiss in Times Square while Jenny’s co-hosting Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin Eve with Ryan Seacrest. “He kisses my hands and I put my hands up the back of his shirt and rub them on his warm back,” she told Us Weekly last December. “He’s always such a great partner during it.”

DONNIE WAHLBERG, JENNY MCCARTHY, New Years 2015

Lou Rocco/ABC via Getty Images

While their giddy PDA moments had some skeptics wondering whether they might be pouring it on for show, Wahlberg popped the question in April 2014, just over a year after they first met. He proposed with a yellow sapphire in hand and a little help from the other most important fellow in McCarthy’s life, son Evan.

“This weekend I was sitting with Donnie and he went into the other room and out came Evan with a card that said ‘Will.’ And he ran away and came back with a card that said ‘You,’ and I knew what was happening and I just started crying,” McCarthy relayed the story on The View. “And then he came out with a card that said ‘Marry,’ but it was spelled ‘Mary,’ and the last time Donnie came out with Evan and Evan’s shirt said ‘Me?’ and he was holding the ring. He asked, ‘Will you marry me?’ I of course said yes.

“And in that moment, Evan yelled, ‘I have another dad! I have another dad.’ And it was just—it made all of us cry,” she said, tearing up. “I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. He’s so wonderful.”

“It’s still very new and shocking and exciting and I feel really lucky. I feel just blessed,” McCarthy, still not entirely used to saying “fiancé” instead of “boyfriend,” gushed to E! News that May. 

They didn’t bother with a long engagement, marrying each other Aug. 31, 2014, at the Hotel Baker in St. Charles, sight of their official debut in 2013. Evan walked his mom down the aisle. Apparently not the superstitious sort, McCarthy wore a dress she picked out during a shopping excursion with Wahlberg to Bergdorf Goodman’s bridal section in New York.

“Donnie helped him get dressed, and then he met me and said, ‘You ready?'” McCarthy recalled to People. “He put out his little arm, and we walked down the aisle, and the officiator said, ‘Who’s giving away this girl?’ And he raised his arm, ‘I am.'”

Jenny McCarthy, Donnie Wahlberg, Evan

Jennifer Cooper, E!

And as if the night couldn’t be more of a happy-tear-jerker, Evan also spoke at the reception. “He grabbed the microphone and said, ‘Can I say a few words?'” McCarthy said. “He was like, ‘I love my stepdad, I’m so glad for my mom, we’re going to make a great family.’ And it was really beautiful.”

McCarthy also had a few things to say to their assembled guests, including the rest of NKOTB and Sherri Shepherd

“As a little girl, you dream of Prince Charming, and you always get disappointed because no one meets the expectations,” the bride said in toasting her new husband, “but he has surpassed it by far. He has been so kind and open.”

The newlyweds honeymooned at the cozy Glenmere Mansion in New York’s Hudson Valley, lounging by the pool and treating themselves to spa treatments for two.

Donnie Wahlberg, Jenny McCarthy, New Years Eve 2015

Neilson Barnard/DCNYRE2015/Getty Images for dcp

They sealed their first New Year’s Eve as husband and wife with a kiss, about a month after announcing they’d be taking their relationship to reality TV with A&E’s Donnie Loves Jenny, which kicked off in January 2015 with a wedding episode and lasted three seasons.

Talking about how their combined three boys were getting on together, McCarthy told E! News that they had needed to “take baby steps in some areas,” but overall she and Wahlberg could see “how each child is a blessing for each other. Like Evan is so influenced by Elijah,” who’s just a year older, “and how much Elijah means to me in my life that I didn’t necessarily get from anyone before.”

While letting the cameras in did not curse their marriage, as it seemingly cursed so many other couples, it did trigger a parade of headlines, many just inspired by silly arguments from the show.

“The s–t that comes out in the press, you can’t say anything, it’s a f–king world story…I marvel at the stuff that becomes truth in headlines,” Donnie said on The Howard Stern Show in March 2015. 

He shut down divorce rumors in December 2015, reportedly saying, “Jenny and I just read this as we are laying together, cuddling, while watching TV – ‘Rudolph (the Red-Nosed Reindeer)” to be specific. Not only is any story of our marital strife complete garbage, but we have never been happier!”

Jenny McCarthy, Donnie Wahlberg

Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images for SiriusXM

Meanwhile, he had gone into the restaurant business with his brothers Paul and Mark Wahlberg, starting in their native Massachusetts, and their adventures have been fodder for the Emmy-nominated Wahlburgers for nine seasons. Plus, they’ve got 26 locations, stretching from Atlanta to Las Vegas. 

And while Donnie’s crack that the longest amount of time they ever spent apart was seven hours turned out to be just a joke, it didn’t sound too far off from the reality.

“Because of work we’ve had to be apart, but in the house, if he goes to the bathroom, I’m like a dog or a toddler. I will follow him to the door, waiting for him to come out,” McCarthy also told Howard Stern in March 2015. 

Asked if they thought their eerily high level of infatuation with each other would have nowhere to go but down, Wahlberg said, “We’re not kids anymore. We’ve both been divorced. We’ve both been in long relationships after divorce. We’ve both been through a lot and I think we know things to do and steps to take to keep it fresh and keep it alive.”

Case in point—playing “Never Have I Ever” for Us Weekly last September, they toasted to having joined the Mile-High Club the previous week. They also FaceTime “somewhat nude,” but Donnie’s never sent an intimate selfie. “Don’t put it in the Cloud, ’cause it’s gonna get hacked!” he exclaimed. “You can’t put that out into the stratosphere.”

DONNIE WAHLBERG, JENNY MCCARTHY, New Years 2016

Nicholas Hunt/DCNYRE2017/Getty Images for dcp

The FaceTiming comes in, er, handy when they’re busy with work—which for McCarthy includes her SiriusXM show and the Blondies line of cocktails she launched last year, and for Wahlberg includes the upcoming ninth season of Blue Bloods and on Oct. 7 NKOTB’s concert at the Apollo Theater celebrating Hangin’ Tough‘s 30th anniversary (and to think we haven’t aged a day). But they carve out as much time as possible for togetherness, whether it’s at an event or cuddled up at home. They’ve bonded over the simple things in life, like watching The Bachelor (they were “not fired up” by Arie’s season) and all the Real Housewives franchises (though Donnie was already partial to Atlanta before Jenny stepped in). 

“We don’t really fight, we just get quiet and go to our neutral corners,” Wahlberg admitted on Watch What Happens Livelast October when a caller asked what their biggest-ever argument was about. And, interestingly, “We have a rule—no makeup sex.”

“It’s very hot and sexy—and it drains your brain!” McCarthy added. They don’t really have a rule about not going to bed mad, but rather they try not to escalate a disagreement. “We call it ‘hold the light,'” Wahlberg revealed. “So if one of us is in a bad way we kinda count on the other one to hold the light. So if I’m in a bad mood or she’s in a bad mood, it’s like, ‘don’t engage.'” McCarthy continued, “Defense is the first act of war, we tell ourselves.” Instead, she’ll ask him what the upsetting thought is reminding him of. “It’s a real therapeutic way to realize what’s going on now that we’ve brought in from the past,” she said.

Asked if their past life experiences—i.e. a Jim Carrey movie coming on TV—ever caused tension, again, they seem to have risen above such things.

“I think one time she was flicking [the remote] and Liar, Liar was on and she went, ‘Ugh,’ and I went, ‘No, I love Liar, Liar, put it back on,'” Wahlberg laughed. “We’ve been through it. Everything’s in the past. The great thing about having lived so much, for each of us, we really had these parallel journeys, we became really successful, like 19, 20 years old. We got married, it was unsuccessful, we had kids, we had other relationships. We got all this crap out of our systems and found our way, and by the time we met each other we were really both ready for what we have, which is the relationship we’ve waited for all of our lives.”

And perhaps because he already knew there’d be no sex if they ended up fighting, Donnie opted to kiss Andy Cohen during “Spin the Bottle” instead of disclose anything unattractive about his partner. “I love everything about my partner!” he insisted.

DONNIE WAHLBERG, JENNY MCCARTHY, New Years 2017

Lou Rocco/ABC via Getty Images

And as the months have gone by, the root of their connection—commitment to faith and family, and positive thinking—has only become more apparent, in addition to all that still-hot-for-each-other stuff.

Opening up to E! News last year about a verbally abusive relationship that ensnared her for four years, McCarthy revealed how she finally broke free and started looking out for herself.

“The path to loving yourself requires you to stop putting the blame on others and observe the choices you make that got you there. It wasn’t his job to love me. It was mine,” she explained. “So I chose to finally get the hell out of that relationship. I chose to be powerful not powerless.”

Donnie Wahlberg, Jenny McCarthy, 2018 Grammy Awards, Candids

Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Eventually, “I got to a place in my life where I learned that I deserved love given the right way, the healthy way, and I wasn’t going to settle anymore until I got ‘The One,'” McCarthy continued. “And I literally said that out loud. I said, ‘God, I’m not helping. I don’t want to be a teacher to any more guys. I want to just love. I want someone that reflects the love that I have inside of me.’ That’s it. A reflection of where I’m at, because I felt like I was at a really great place and within probably a month, I met Donnie.

“We quickly, quickly knew on a deeper level that this was something very special and something that we didn’t want to screw up. So we made sure that we did things the right way.”

The affirmations appear to be running both ways in their house, with Wahlberg echoing his wife’s sentiment just earlier this week, tweeting, “Love somebody today. Start with yourself. Because if you don’t love you, you cannot love anyone else. #loveeternal.”

On their first wedding anniversary, the couple started another tradition—renewing their vows. They’ve done so every year and this year, McCarthy told E! News last week, should be no exception.

“We just might change locations,” she teased, disclosing only that it would be “a romantic, hometown getaway.”

When asked, McCarthy said there were “so many” things she’d qualify as her favorite part about being married. But, simply, “my favorite thing is that I found my soul mate.”