Wayne Rooney has sent a special message to his wife Coleen as they celebrate 18 years of marriage. The couple, who first met when they were just 12 years old, began dating at 15 and married in 2008 in a beautiful ceremony in Portofino, Italy.
Family Life
The Rooneys are proud parents to four sons: Kai, 16, Klay, 13, Kit, 10, and Cass, eight. They often share glimpses of their busy family life, including birthdays, trips, and holidays together.
To mark their wedding anniversary, Wayne posted a photo of the couple on a boat, captioned: "Happy anniversary @coleen_rooney. Where’s them 18 years gone. Thanks for everything. Love you."
Fan Reactions
Fans flooded the comments with well-wishes. One wrote: "Love ya Wazza congrats." Another said: "Happy anniversary you two lovely people xxx." A third added: "Happy wedding anniversary to both of you." A fourth commented: "Happy anniversary to an amazing couple, 18 years and still going strong! Wishing you many more years of love and happiness."
Coleen on Their Relationship
Earlier this year, Coleen appeared on the Late Late Show and spoke about their relationship. Reflecting on being in the public eye from a young age, she said: "It wasn't tough at the time. We were both young and oblivious, we had each other to fall back on and we went through it together. Now when I look back and my son is 16, we were young."
She credited their support system: "The main thing for us is we have always had a really good team around us. We have good parents that have always protected and guided us."
Coleen also recalled how the romance began: "I went to an all girl school and he went to an all boy school, he used to come and stand outside school waiting for us to come out. He always used to whistle and we wore pale yellow shirts, so the boys would get water guns and shoot us so our shirts turned see through. He done the running after me. I made him wait for a few years."
She added: "He said to my brothers 'I will get you a pair of football boots if you get me a date with your Coleen', I waited until I had finished my GCSEs and then I went on a date."
The 'Wag' Label
Throughout Rooney's playing career, Coleen was a prominent figure in "wag" culture, alongside Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole. She addressed the label: "The wag label annoyed me, it put us all into one category and we were all our own individual people. The perception of a wag was that we were the ladies of leisure who would drink champagne and go shopping all the time, but it wasn't."
She concluded: "We had families and we had kids. We would do school runs, things that everyone else did. We were lucky to have nice times, but it wasn't all the time."
