Marriage Has Always Been A Rollercoaster. But, Then Came The 2024 Election....
- Marriage & Martinis
- Jun 4
- 10 min read
Updated: Jun 5
A relationship survival story from a politically anxious woman and the man who loves her (imperfectly).
To say the night of the 2024 election was a mindf*ck doesn’t even come close. For the second time, I let myself believe that this country wouldn’t go backward. That after the first term filled with chaos, cruelty, and corruption, there was no way anyone would willingly choose that again.
I spent Election Day canvassing with my siblings and my tennage son in Bucks County, PA—one last push to reach undecided voters. I was surrounded by people who matched my energy: cautious, hopeful, fired up. Adam wasn’t with us. He never is when I do these things. While he’s never supported Trump, he also doesn’t feel the urgency I do. Not in his bones. Not in his gut. Not the way I do as a Jewish feminist, the mother of a Queer teen, and a woman who has gone from writing letters to state reps about women's rights since I was 12-years-old, to watching those rights yanked away from all the women I've been adamant about protecting, from the years I volunteered as a Planned Parenthood Clinic Escort, literally using my body to shield women from the screams and shoves of anti-abortionists, to the rallies and marches throughout the years, to using my platform to call out racism, misogyny, and homophobia.
When the results started pouring in that night—fast, red, and brutal—I felt my stomach drop. I woke up the next morning in that weirdly familiar yet nightmarish state of a blurred reality. Opening my phone, I felt the impact of the results, before I even left the bed. Trump was back, and in an instant, everything looked bleaker, dimmer, and more uncertain. I rolled over, Adam still asleep beside me, and quietly cried. When he woke up and I told him that Trump had, in fact, won, he responded with a quick but somewhat authentically shocked, "No way." I knew not to go deeper into the conversation. I had learned from experience. But the reaction still stung. No hug. No check-in. No acknowledgment that I might be devastated. Just the familiar silence of a man who doesn’t understand what this means to me. Not really. And just like that, it became blaringly obvious that he would not be my safe space for the indefinite future. That scared the shit out of me, and it also infuriated me.
Adam and I have always been opposites. He’s the calm to my storm. The laid-back counter to my passion. And for a long time, we accepted those roles. But this time felt different. More personal. More dangerous. I was grieving, and all I wanted was to be held—physically and emotionally. Instead, I felt dismissed, judged, and even resented. It wasn’t just about politics anymore. It was about safety and partnership; about whether I was too much, or if maybe he was not enough. We’ve fought about everything—money, chores, parenting, family. But this hit a deeper level, as someone who was raised that we need to actively care and fight for other people; that our privilege is not for the sake of how we can advance in the world, but how we can assist others in advancing, too.
"How could I stay in a marriage where the person who’s supposed to protect me and catch me, couldn’t even validate my fears?"
Recording our podcast is usually where we connect best. For the past seven years, it's where we realign, sinking into our zone of comfort: our shared humor, our wildly inappropriate banter, and our insatiable need to "get into it." But the post-election episodes exposed a painful gap. I started to realize how much "bro-culture" Adam had absorbed, without ever fact checking or wondering if these "experts" were even qualified to be disseminating such critical information. I'd listened to these podcasts that existed basically unchecked, out in the manosphere, and I was repulsed by them. Simultaneously, I was realizing how little he knew about the issues about which I cared so deeply. In our first episode post election, he outright admitted that he didn't "do the research." I felt like I was in the twilight zone. This is what happens when we allow politics to not be an issue in a relationship. As we're always deeply honest on the podcast, I told him I didn't want him listening to Joe Rogan anymore. For some reason, this came as a shock to many female listeners - listeners who I'm honestly not sure had consumed our content for so long yet somehow did not know where I stood, politically. It baffled me.
On top of the the gut punch of everything Adam said in the first and second part of our post-election episodes, now I had to deal with the backlash of women saying I was trying to "control" my husband. But I stood by my statement. I didn’t want a husband more interested in a right-leaning podcast host than the lived fear of his own wife. I said on air,
“If you want to listen to Rogan, fine. But you’ll need a different wife.” I meant every word. I wasn’t asking for silence. I was asking for solidarity. He didn't have to stay. But if he did, some things were going to be non-negotiable.Things got way worse before they got better. We lived on completely different planets even when standing just feet from one another. He pulled further away, constantly annoyed at how "obsessed" I was with current events. I was exhausted by the daily emotional labor of not only surviving this political hellscape, but having to justify why I needed to be so loud about it. From his perspective, it was me who was pulling away, choosing an existance rooted in resistance and activism over the status quo of our normal, mundane lives. He saw it as a choice. I saw it as an unmistakable calling. I had a platform. I had a voice. I had privilege. To me, there was only one option, if I wanted to look myself in the mirror, and show my children that I do, in fact, practive what I preach. But when we were together, we were no longer in our shared reality. We were in parallel universes. And we just could not seem to meet somewhere in the middle. It was getting very obvious that either something had to change, or we had to decide if this was going to work.
But as always throughout our 25+ years together, we both know that at our core, we want to be together. In so many ways, no one has ever accepted me like Adam, even when he can't quite understand what I'm going through. He's never wanted to give up. And not just because it's more convenient for him to stay, but because I know he really has a deeply-rooted love and passion for me. It's something that I'm not sure many women get to experience. However, while I've spent so much time working on myself and evolving, he has often taken two steps forward and one step back, trying to do "the work" himself. This has made it so complicated to also grow, together, as we've both been at different stages of our our personal journeys as constant works-in-progress.
We both committed to improving our relationship by making each other feel seen, valued, and understood. This issue was a fresh wound needing careful attention. But this wasn't our first rodeo. With 25 years together, three kids, mental illness, and seven houses, we've faced many challenges. Knowing Adam is more reactive, I took the first step by planning politics-free date nights, like a surprise trip to see one of his favorite movies in 4D. He started listening to more relatable voices like Pod Save America. Mostly, we focused on asking questions and listening, our strength after over 300 episodes of tackling tough topics. We had lost our rhythm, resorting to sharp accusations, which felt easier in the moment.
Rather than blurting out, "that's ridiculous," or "you're wrong," we focused on from where we got those ideas. "What do you think from your upbringing led to you feel that way, or believe that?" And, "did you really look into that, or do you think we could sit and do some research on it, together?"
No more opinions. No more accusations. Steady, intentional dialogue, time and space used effectively to make one another feel less alone, and like we didn't need to rely on others to give us the validation we need. And most of all, constantly reminding one another in a thousand different ways, that we really DO belong together, and therefore, we're willing to do what it takes to get us there. If we don't have that, then none of the other stuff will matter.
The two of us just returned from our first getaway since the election. Throughout our marriage, we've been very intentional about going away together as often as possible, even if only for a night or two. Usually, leading up to going away, we count the days until we're alone together. But this time, we were also pretty anxious, since we'd really just started to reconnect and feel more confident that we just may weather this storm, too. Three straight days of just the two of us. Would it all feel forced? Would the intimacy feel natural and truly connecting? If this was some type of test to the next level of relationship Tetris, fitting all the pieces back into place, I would say that we actually passed with flying colors. We spent time playing pool in the hotel lobby, and Adam helped me figure out some plans I had for my new community, The 3AM Uprising, where I'd been spending so much time, and had been making me feel so seen and validated in ways that Adam was unable. Now, it felt good to be finally sharing how deeply in love with the women sharing this space with me I had become. I'd hated feeling nervous to talk to him about it. And he was genuinely excited about it. We talk even more while we were away, and I expressed things that had really been building up inside me.
We will forever be a work-in-progress, as long as we keep wanting to work at it. No one warns us about all the twists and turns that life throws our way, over which we have little or no control. However, we do have control over how we choose to show up for one another during those times. And, there are times when certain aspects of life, and how we need those closest to us to show up, is non-negotiable. For me, in this moment, being with someone who is frustrated by my being "political," is a deal-breaker. Also, it would be horrible if this said dealbreaker was also something caused by total miscommunication. In the span of around a month, we went from resenting one another, to feeling like we were in an amazing spot - understanding one another more deeply than we had even before the election. But this could only happen because we didn't become complicit, and we were honest about what we needed. It took work, but not as much work as it was to thrive when we seemed to not even be living in the same reality. We're not done. Not even close. But now at least we have gaurdrails up for when we're spiraling, and getting sucked in by the chaos. We so desperately want to hold one another during these hard times, and it was so damn painful for the opposite to be happening. This feels a million times better. And when there's a shitstorm happening in all directions out in the world, being held in the space that's supposed to feel safest, by the person who's supposed to want to protect your from it all, makes everything exponentially more doable. Cause what good is it if your favorite person isn't the first one you want to go to when the weight of the world is on your shoulders?
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