After nearly three decades of marriage, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray are separating but not planning on divorcing. They will keep sharing their home but will also date people, according to the New York Times. McCray said they will keep sharing the residence “for the time being.”
“Even at this moment of change, this is a love story,” de Blasio tweeted when sharing a link to the outlet’s article.
McCray has said de Blasio and she “are still very much in love” and that they had mutually arrived at their decision.
They tied the knot back in 1994 and now have two adult children.
According to the Times, McCray recounted that around two months ago, de Blasio had asked her, “Why aren’t you lovey-dovey anymore?” This lead to a discussion about their relationship.
“You can’t fake it,” McCray noted on Tuesday, according to the outlet.
“You can feel when things are off,” de Blasio remarked, “and you don’t want to live that way.”
“I can look back now and say, ‘Here were these inflection points where we should have been saying something to each other,'” de Blasio said, according to the outlet. “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?'”
According to the Times, the spouses concluded — though with de Blasio being more forceful about it — that the marriage would not be in this condition if de Blasio had not served as mayor of the Big Apple. “Everything was this overwhelming schedule, this sort of series of tasks,” he said. “And that kind of took away a little bit of our soul.”
Earlier in life, before meeting and marrying de Blasio, McCray had publicly identified as a 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,'” 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.”
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