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 started with a casual comment, “Why aren’t you in love anymore?” Mr. de Blasio, the former mayor of New York City, asked, according to Ms. McCray, his wife.
It moved quickly, both said, to the sort of urgently seeking dialogue that had been needed for years but had been avoided until then: a full account of their relationship, what they wanted, what they didn’t get.
“You can’t fake it,” Mrs. McCray said from their kitchen table on Tuesday.
“You can sense when things aren’t right,” said Mr. de Blasio, “and you don’t want to live like that.”
That night they made their decision.
Mr. de Blasio and Mrs. McCray separate.
They don’t plan to divorce, they said, but are dating other people. They will continue to share the Park Slope mansion where they raised their two children, now in their twenties – the vinyl-sided center of a thoroughly modern political family whose mixed-race symbolism helped send a spindly progressive long shot to City Hall .
As with much about their marriage, its tension has been imbued with societal resonance a decade after the pair became what was then the most important and dissected biracial couple in American politics.
And as with much about their marriages, they see lessons for others even in the tumult, both for working couples negotiating the challenges of growing old together and for the small subgroup exposing themselves to the unusual stares of public scrutiny.
“I can now look back and say, ‘Here were these turning points where we should have said 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 makes you happy? What is missing in your life?’”
It’s easy to forget now—after two unequal terms, a disastrous 2020 presidential bid, and a decade in which headlines were alternately deserved and unneeded—exactly what it felt like to see Mr. de Blasio and Mrs. McCray rise to power.
They were visually, viscerally distinctive, especially after 12 years of Michael R. Bloomberg — living proof, supporters said, of New York’s breadth and promise: black and white, short and tall, prone to dancing in public. They were so affectionate at press conferences that assistants sometimes flinched.
During an interview that lasted nearly three hours, during which they held hands sporadically and gave a high five in agreement once, Mr. de Blasio, 62, and Mrs. McCray, 68, were alternately wistful and cheerful, self-critical and defiant.
Instead of issuing a succinct joint statement announcing what they called a trial divorce — the carefully crafted fate of so many political marriages before theirs — the two suggested they wanted to get significantly more out of their chest.
They came to the conclusion—Mr. de Blasio more forcefully than Mrs. McCray—that their marriage would not have come to this place if he had never been mayor, grateful as they were for the experience and how proud they still are of many of their job. (“Everything was this overwhelming schedule, this kind of series of tasks,” Mr. de Blasio said. “And that took a little bit of our soul.”)
They referred to the covid crisis – which arrived just as Mr. de Blasio said he had begun seeing a therapist for whom he was soon running out of time – as an all-consuming external shock that stifled more intrusive discussions about what their post-City Hall lives might be like. are. looks like. (“It made me very needy emotionally,” he said, “and we weren’t that connected.”)
Yet they also clocked a shift in their relationship a year earlier, they said, roughly coinciding with a presidential run that Ms McCray viewed with deep skepticism.
“I thought it was a distraction,” she said, publicly echoing a common complaint from Mr. De Blasio’s constituents.
“A little bit true,” he said laughing. “Point for Chirlane.”
When asked how it felt when Mr. de Blasio went ahead, she admitted that she had to support her.
“This isn’t the kind of thing where you can break ranks,” she said. “That’s part of the difficulty of being part of a pack.”
When asked what she was looking for with this new wording, she suggested she might enjoy the non-glow of being with a non-public figure.
“I just want to have fun,” she said, and as Mr. de Blasio turned to her, she added, “It’s not that we haven’t had fun.”
“Thank you, sweetie,” he said.
“There’s a certain weight,” she said, “that’s part of being with Mr. Mayor.”
It is a perch she has come to know well.
Positioning himself in 2013 as a sharp break from Mr. Bloomberg’s gilded attitude, Mr. de Blasio put Ms. McCray and their family at the center of the race. Their older child assured supporters that Mr. de Blasio was not “some boring white guy.” Their youngster (and his bountiful Afro teen) starred in the campaign’s viral ad.
Stories about the candidate’s courtship with Mrs. McCray — when both worked for David N. Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor — only accentuated Mr. De Blasio’s persistence: Mrs. McCray, who had identified as a lesbian and coolly seemed to favor his rapprochement, finally relented.
They were married in 1994, under a tree in Prospect Park, with two gay men officiating, for a reception that included a “Super Freak” dance break and a bunch of cannoli.
“He was very easy to fall in love with,” Ms. McCray said.
After Mr. de Blasio’s victory, he was consistently criticized for elevating Ms. McCray to positions of great influence, especially when a mental health initiative she helped lead was called into question over its spending and performance. He also openly mused about her political future, privately boosting Ms. McCray for a possible campaign for Brooklyn borough president. She ruled out a run in 2020.
In the interview, both claimed that the nature of their municipal cooperation was clear from the start. But Ms. McCray acknowledged there was “no infrastructure” for a first lady seeking a different kind of portfolio, nodding to the burdens each felt in roles they couldn’t possibly prepare for.
“How can you be a couple in the fullness of what you tend to think,” she said, “when you have this responsibility on your shoulders and don’t want to add anything to it?”
While Mr. de Blasio said they had become so sure of their marriage that he had little reason to doubt its strength, unwanted thoughts could creep in.
One of them, both said, had to do with their own parents’ troubled marriages. Another was about Mrs. McCray.
“For the man who took a chance on a woman who was a lesbian and wrote an article entitled ‘I’m a lesbian,'” Mr. De Blasio said, “there was a part of me that sometimes said, ‘Hmmm, is this like a ticking time bomb? Is this something you’re going to regret later?” So I always lived with that stuff.
In the 18 months since he left office, Mr. de Blasio has occasionally appeared to be at work, both personally and professionally.
Last year he looked in the mirror and didn’t feel like himself.
“I never thought I’d ever do anything with hair color,” he said of his now strikingly dark close-crop, adding that the current shade is a bit more pronounced than he intended. “But I like to feel what I feel.”
More public was a short-lived round of congress that Mr. De Blasio convinced 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 fees and fines for using his security detail during presidential campaign trips.)
His current endeavors include teaching at New York University and giving paid speeches in Italy, he said. Ms. McCray has continued to work on mental health policy.
They’re both happier now than they’ve been in ages, they said, making sure to project a practiced heat into their kitchen, where at one point Mr. de Blasio wiped something off her face.
A few weeks after their impromptu session on that televised Saturday night, they exchanged written messages outlining “what we thought of the moment,” Mr. de Blasio said. After that, he said, ground rules were established: “what’s cool and what’s not cool, and whatever.”
“One of the things we say to the world is that we don’t have to own each other,” he added.
He quoted two of Ms McCray’s favorite phrases – “Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins” and “I never want to be stuck” – and one praised by his brother, a Tibetan Buddhist: “Avoid attachments. ”
They will continue to share the house “for now”, Ms McCray said. For now, a photo of the couple in Times Square on New Year’s Eve is still greeting visitors, which may include suitors.
Mrs. McCray dryly asked if their phone numbers could be in the paper.
“Can I put a picture of the gym in there?” asked Mr. de Blasio. (He added that he was “not a believer” in online dating.)
As the conversation drew to a close, the former mayor pulled out his phone to play a song called “Mango,” saying it might best explain their feelings right now.
“I don’t want anything but you,” it went. “Get what you need / Even if it’s not mine.”
Mr. de Blasio hummed a little from his chair. Mrs. McCray danced behind him, staring ahead.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” he said.
