Ricky Martin is getting married.
The Puerto Rican-born pop star behind “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and other hits told Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show Wednesday that he had proposed to the well-regarded conceptual artist Jwan Yosef. “We’ve known each other for more than a year now, officially since January,” Martin, 44, told DeGeneres. They had met through the singer’s art collecting, he said. “I started looking for art and I saw his art and I went crazy because I really love what he does. Really original. And I contacted him.”
“And then you collected him,” joked DeGeneres, 58.
“And then I collected him!” Martin responded with a laugh. “Yeah. . . . I had no idea what he looked like and then I saw what he looked and I’m like . . .,” he trailed off, making a pleased gesture with an “yeah”-type finger-point.
Like many grooms-to-be, he confessed, “I was really nervous. But I got on my knees and I took out the little metal box I just had in a little velvet pouch and instead of saying, ‘Would you marry me?’ I said, ‘I got you something!’ Bad! Very bad!” he said, laughing at his awkwardness. “And then he was like, ‘Yes?’ I said, ‘I want to spend my life with you,’ and he was like, ‘What is the question?’ ‘Would you marry me?’ ”
Martin said, “It was very beautiful and then, like, 30 minutes after I said, ‘Wait, did you say yes?’ Yes, he said yes.”
Yosef, who was born in Syria in 1984 to a Kurdish Muslim father and an Armenian Greek Orthodox mother and raised in Sweden, will be stepfather to Martin’s 8-year-old fraternal twin boys, Valentino and Matteo, born via surrogate. “They love each other,” the singer said of his sons and Yosef. “It’s been perfect, Ellen. It’s been really special.”
In January 2012, rumors had swirled that Martin was marrying his boyfriend at the time, Carlos Gonzalez Abella, but the singer’s representative shot down those reports.
