Robin Roberts says she will marry her partner of nearly 18 years

"Good Morning America" co-anchor Robin Roberts made a surprise announcement on the ABC morning show Monday, saying she's ready to tie the knot with her girlfriend of nearly 18 years, Amber Laign.

“I’m hesitating because I haven’t said it out loud yet. OK, I’m saying ‘yes’ to marriage,” Roberts told motivational speaker and author Gabby Bernstein during a conversation about setting intentions for the new year. “We’re getting married this year.”

Roberts added that she and Laign, whom she began dating in 2005, previously discussed marriage but "put it off" after Laign was diagnosed with breast cancer in late 2021.

Laign, a co-founder of women's well-being brand Plant Juice Oils, completed radiation in July. Roberts herself received a breast cancer diagnosis in 2007, before being diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease, in 2012.

The pair's decision to wed comes amid a nationwide uptick in same-sex couple households.

For the first time, the number of same-sex couple households in the U.S. has surpassed 1 million, data from the Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey revealed in November.

In 2021, there were more than 1.2 million same-sex couple households across the country, up from 540,000 in 2008, an increase of more than 120%, the data found.

The number of married same-sex households started to outnumber unmarried same-sex households in 2016, following the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which effectively legalized same-sex marriage across the U.S.

Just last month, President Joe Biden signed legislation to codify federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriages. The measure, titled the Respect for Marriage Act, passed Congress with bipartisan support.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com