Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray Are Separating
Mr. de Blasio's marriage helped fuel his campaign for mayor of New York, and his intense personal and political bond with his wife drew admiration and scrutiny.
The New York Times strains to paint this open bisexual marriage as a Love Story for the ages. It's filled with pictures like this:
And, even more cringily:
They really want you to know that "diverse" urban sophisticates are capable of Doing Plural Marriage Right, unlike those rubes in Utah.
DiBlasio and his "wife" sat down with Regime Comms the New York Times, to put as gauzy a Hallmark Holiday Movie spin on the couple's decision to start fucking other people, and the New York Times couldn't wait to Comply.
About two months ago, after another stale Saturday night of binge-watching television at their Brooklyn home, Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray surprised themselves.
It began with an offhand remark: "Why aren't you lovey-dovey anymore?" Mr. de Blasio, the former New York City mayor, asked, according to Ms. McCray, his wife.
It moved quickly, both said, into the sort of urgently searching dialogue that had been necessary for years but avoided until that moment: a full accounting of their relationship, what they wanted, what they were not getting.
"You can't fake it," Ms. McCray said Tuesday from their kitchen table.
"You can feel when things are off," Mr. de Blasio said, "and you don't want to live that way."
They made their decision that night.
Mr. de Blasio and Ms. McCray are separating.
They are not planning to divorce, they said, but will date other people. They will continue to share the Park Slope townhouse where they raised their two children, now in their 20s -- the vinyl-sided hub of a thoroughly modern political family whose mixed-race symbolism helped send a spindly progressive long shot to City Hall.
Bill Clinton has a similar arrangement.
And as with much about their marriage, they see lessons for others even in its tumult, both for workaday couples negotiating the challenges of growing old together and for the small subset who expose themselves to the uncommon glare of public scrutiny.
"I can look back now and say, 'Here were these inflection points where we should have been saying something to each other,'" Mr. de Blasio said. "And I think one of the things I should have said more is: 'Are you happy? What will make you happy? What's missing in your life?'"
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They were visually, viscerally distinctive, particularly after 12 years of Michael R. Bloomberg -- a living testament, supporters said, to the breadth and promise of New York: Black and white, short and tall, inclined to dance in public. They were so affectionate at news conferences that aides sometimes winced.
They love each other you guys.
They just want to bang other people.
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They cited the Covid crisis -- which arrived just as Mr. de Blasio said he had begun seeing a therapist for whom he quickly had little time -- as an all-consuming external shock that suppressed more probing discussions of what their post-City Hall lives might look like. ("It made me emotionally very needy," he said, "and we were not as connected.")
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They married in 1994, under a tree in Prospect Park, with two gay men officiating, before a reception with a "Super Freak" dance break and a heap of cannoli.
I see no red flags here.
No red flags here, either: Bill DiBlasio admits he had some doubts about marrying "Mrs. McCray."
Given, you know, that she was an avowed lesbian.
"For the guy who took the chance on a woman who was an out lesbian and wrote an article called 'I Am a Lesbian,'" Mr. de Blasio said, "there was a part of me that would at times say, 'Hmmm, is this like a time bomb ticking? Is this something that you're going to regret later on?' So I always lived with that stuff."
Nah, it'll be fine.
Oh, and this isn't a huge cliche at all: Bill DiBlasio is now dyeing his hair jetblack.
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In the 18 months since he left office, Mr. de Blasio has seemed at times to be casting about, personally and professionally.
Last year, he looked in the mirror and did not feel like himself.
"I never anticipated ever doing anything with hair color," he said of his now strikingly dark close-crop, adding that the current shading is a bit more pronounced than he intended. "But I like feeling what I feel."
He decided it was time to retire from politics, and start getting b's-deep inside some strange.
More public was a short-lived congressional run that persuaded Mr. de Blasio that it was "time for me to leave electoral politics." (More recently, the city's Conflicts of Interest Board ordered him to pay nearly $500,000 in reimbursements and fines for using his security detail on presidential campaign trips.)
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They will continue to share the home "for the time being," Ms. McCray said. For now, a photo of the couple in Times Square on New Year's Eve still greets visitors, which may come to include suitors.
This is so totally normal you guys.