Divorce him already, Usha

Unlike traditional journalism, social media thrives on speculation and rumor-mongering. It’s unsurprising, then, that comedian Suzanne Lambert created an Instagram reel that went viral in which she questioned the state of Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife Usha‘s marriage. The post alleged the second couple were overheard arguing in a restaurant. A third-hand report from waitstaff at the restaurant, Lambert said, was that the couple was “fighting at dinner.”

“Apparently, Usha said, ‘This is what our life should actually be like,'” Lambert breathlessly claimed. This, she said, confirms that “Usha wants absolutely nothing to do with this” and “J.D. Vance is a little b***h.”

“Their marriage is in trouble and someone needs to tell Jack Schlossberg,” Lambert joked, referencing the famously gossipy, trolling grandson of JFK, who has joked about being in a secret relationship with Usha Vance and that the two are having a son together.

This being a journalistic outfit, we can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of the rumor about the Vance marriage. But, as Lambert herself acknowledged, it’s just confirming evidence of what the couple’s more public appearances suggest.

Most of the time, they do not appear to like each other. Last month, Megan McCain hosted Usha Vance for what should have been the softest of softball interviews, focused on what life as second lady is like. Vance clearly understood her assignment was to make it all seem like a great time — that leaving her career as a high-powered attorney to spend her days doing sub-Melania Trump public appearances about dull topics like the importance of reading for kids. But her acting chops weren’t up to it. Instead, audiences were treated to a one-hour hostage video, as the increasingly desperate McCain tried to get Vance to feign interest in her own life.

(I try to never feel sorry for McCain, but as someone who does YouTube interviews myself, it was hard to not feel her terror, as she slowly realized her guest was an emotional black hole sucking life out of the viewers.)

Despite her mission to convey satisfaction, however, the longer Vance talked, the more miserable she seemed. Despite McCain’s best efforts to talk up how “excited” she is to see a “modern” woman in the role of second lady, Vance ended up talking about how much she missed her old life. “In a dream world, eventually, I’ll be able to live in my home and continue my career,” Vance told McCain, shrugging off questions about whether she wants to be first lady.

McCain also tried to extract sentimental details about the passionate romance between the Vances, for her audience to coo over. Usha Vance wouldn’t — or perhaps couldn’t — deliver, instead speaking of her husband like he was assigned as her roommate. McCain asked about the vice president’s previous claim he “learned to cook Indian food from your mother.” Usha Vance agreed this had happened, long ago, but when McCain asked about her favorite dish of his, she said he doesn’t cook for her anymore. “He’s mostly transitioned to baking,” she said, citing the very American foods of chocolate chip cookies and biscuits as his main focus now.

J.D. Vance has spent years now dropping similarly miserable hints that he is not enjoying married life. He runs down Usha Vance all the time in public. In March, he “joked” that when “the cameras are all on; anything I say, no matter how crazy, my wife Usha has to smile, laugh, and celebrate it.” At Trump’s birthday parade in June, he wished both the president and the Army a happy birthday without caveat. Then he added, “I would get in trouble if I didn’t mention it’s also my wedding anniversary.” But the most disturbing example, to me at least, is how he used his speech at last year’s Republican National Convention to celebrate how he is erasing her very identity in marrying her.

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Vance was trying to square Trump’s hostility to non-white immigrants with the fact that Vance himself is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants. He argued, “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” He then proceeded to spell out his terms by talking about how he proposed marriage by talking up how his “cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home” — and how she and her kids would be buried there with “seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot.” The implication wasn’t subtle: Usha Vance is expected to subsume her South Asian identity to his family’s whiteness, as well as her husband’s blood-and-soil idea of what makes someone an American.

It’s also telling that J.D. Vance seems to think marriage and parenthood should be mandatory for nearly everyone. He speaks of these choices so often in terms of duty — as if he can’t imagine either being undertaken out of joy. A mere seven years into his marriage, Vance argued people should be “doggedly determined to stick it out” in marriage, no matter if it’s “unhappy” or even “violent.” Despite his claims that “childless cat ladies” are “miserable,” it’s hard not to notice the protest-too-much quality to his obsession with single or childless people. He keeps insisting the childless are “sociopathic,” painting them as selfish hedonists, all in a tone of barely concealed envy — as if he senses they are getting away with something. This has led Vance to repeatedly call for what amounts to a fine for not having children, explicitly saying it’s to “punish” people who are “bad” because they didn’t make the choices he made.

As liberal commentator Melissa Ryan wrote during the campaign, when he calls other people “miserable,” you get the sense Vance is projecting. Despite his insistence that marriage and parenthood should be nearly universal, he talks about his own family with a sense of distance. He often refers to his kids as if they belong only to his wife. “She’s got three kids,” he said, laughing, during a 2024 interview in which he also admitted that, even though she’s not even Catholic, Usha Vance has his wife has “more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church.” In an interview four years earlier, he discussed how his mother-in-law took a year off to help take care of his first-born. That interview got attention mostly because Vance agreed with the host that “the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female” is to provide free childcare. His implication was right there: So that men don’t have to participate in raising their own kids.

The concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” was coined in 1980 by lesbian theorist Adrienne Rich, to describe how women were pushed to sleep only with men, whether they wanted to or not. But, as she herself said, even straight people can get something out of it. On the right, especially, there’s this notion that being married is something you have to endure, rather than enjoy. They speak of men and women as complete opposites, people who have nothing in common, but are forced by an apparently merciless god to live together anyway.

But the truth is that plenty of people, even straight people, find they can have a partner who is also a friend. Or that it’s better to be single than to spend all your time glaring at the person across the breakfast table from you. I don’t know what goes on in private behind the gates of the Naval Observatory, but what the Vances show in public is hard to stomach. If that’s what the right thinks marriage is all about, J.D. Vance shouldn’t be so surprised that ever larger numbers of women are saying, “Thanks, I’ll choose cats instead.”