While I was over here mourning my former appreciation for <a href="http://www.gq.com/story/under-armour-just-endorsed-president-donald-trump?mbid=social_twitter" target="_blank">Under Armour</a> after their CEO turned out to be quite the Donald Trump fan, a woman actually dropped her husband over his support of the 45th president. Well played...
<img src="http://madamenoire.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Gayle-M.png" alt="Trump support" width="772" height="401" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-785124" />
And we're not talking about any ol' marriage here. Gayle McCormick, 73, has been married to her husband, who is 77, for 22 years. She always knew that he was conservative, and she's always been what she described as a "Democrat leaning toward socialist." However, with all that was at stake in last year's election, and the fact that Trump won, McCormick couldn't overlook how "incensed" she was when she overheard her husband tell a group of their friends he was going to vote for Trump. She initially felt betrayed, and then she had an epiphany.
"I felt like I had been fooling myself," McCormick said in an interview with news wire <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-relationships-insight-idUSKBN15M13L" target="_blank"><em>Reuters</em></a>. "It opened up areas between us I had not faced before. I realized how far I had gone in my life to accept things I would have never accepted when I was younger."
McCormick's interview was part of a bigger piece by <em>Reuters</em> that reached out to people who found their relationships, particularly those with family, friends and folks online, were impacted by one's support of Trump. A poll they did of 6,426 people from late December to mid-January found that there was a jump in the number of people who argued with loved ones about politics after the election in comparison to before it.
One woman in Ohio said she can hardly bring herself to talk to two of her sons who voted for Trump, a man she calls "a nut." On the opposite end of the spectrum, a man from Missouri said he just avoids having such rough conversations with his brother, sister-in-law and brother-in-law, who were Clinton supporters. "We don't have to talk about politics," he said.
But for McCormick, just the fact that her husband was even considering backing Trump was too much for her. You see, he actually had a change of heart and <em>didn't</em> vote for Trump, instead, writing in House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich's name as a presidential option. Still, it was too little too late for McCormick (who actually wrote in Bernie Sanders herself, so she didn't really help things...). She's open to vacationing with her estranged husband down the line and still calls him a friend. She actually said that she doesn't plan on divorcing him because, as she told <em>Reuters</em>, "we're too old for that." However, she has moved into her own place in Washington. She's feeling quite free and much less stressed.
"It really came down to the fact I needed to not be in a position where I had to argue my point of view 24/7," McCormick said. "I didn't want to spend the rest of my life doing that."
<em>Images via Reuters and Gayle McCormick </em>
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