In an interview with PEOPLE,
Rosie O'Donnell confirmed reports that she's engaged to girlfriend
Elizabeth Rooney.
However, O'Donnell said that the couple
has agreed on a long engagement.
“This is a long time in the future,”
O'Donnell said. “We both decided that that would be best.”
“She lives in Boston now and I live
here in New York. It's been a long-distance thing. It's been great.
I think she's a wonderful woman.”
“She's a pretty unbelievable young
woman,” she said of Rooney, a police officer and Army veteran.
Rooney is 23 years younger than
O'Donnell, 56. A fact she joked about.
“I keep telling her I'm too old for
her. But she doesn't seem to care. She's like, 'I was in the Army!
I put my life on the line every day. You think I don't know who I
want to date?' I'm like, 'Alright, I guess that's true.' She has a
lot of good points,” O'Donnell
said.
During an appearance in November on The
Howard Stern Show, O'Donnell called dating someone younger than
herself “a very trippy thing” and insisted she would not marry a
third time.
“I will not, ever,” she
said. “I would rather stay in it for love and not deal with
lawyers if, God forbid, it doesn't work out.”
O'Donnell and Kelli Carpenter were
married from 2004 to 2007. She divorced her second wife, Michelle
Rounds, in 2015 after three years of marriage. Rounds
died in 2017 from an apparent suicide. O'Donnell has five
children from her previous relationships.