Vice President JD Vance’s upcoming memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” follows his journey back to religion, but also details how he met his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance.
The new book will be released next month, 10 years after his bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which chronicled Vance’s upbringing in Ohio. In “Communion,” Vance reflects on his conversion to Catholicism after a Protestant upbringing and a stint as an atheist. He told USA TODAY that a key part of his journey was meeting his wife at Yale Law School, having become “obsessed” with her.
Here’s how he describes the interaction.
Vance’s ‘unhealthy obsession’ with wife Usha Vance started at Yale
In an excerpt from his book, Vance says he realized that he had never truly been in love until he met Usha Bala Chilukuri. He notes that it was her intelligence, confidence and indifference to status that deeply captivated him, leading him to quickly commit to her.
“Dude, I think I’m obsessed with this chick in my small group. It’s unhealthy,” he writes in the new book of a conversation with a friend. Vance describes his time as a bachelor as emotionally detached until he met his future wife in a Yale Law School small group. He ended his relationship with another woman at the time. Before the breakup, Vance described Ohio’s capital city Columbus as “nothing if not a target-rich environment for a couple of bachelors.”
He said he broke up with his then-girlfriend, Mary, due to long distance, “but mostly because I couldn’t imagine settling for anyone else.” he writes, referring to Usha.
“‘I will marry this girl,’” I told my friends. “‘Or I will be a lifelong bachelor.’”
Vance says that Usha was the only person he’d felt real passion for. “Everyone else was like a dim light bulb set against Usha’s radiance,” he described. He added that everything he thought he knew about himself, ambition and relationships had been turned around once he met her.
Now married with three children, the couple announced in January that they are expecting their fourth child, a boy, to arrive late July 2026.
The full excerpt on their meeting can be found on USA TODAY.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: JD Vance on wife Usha: ‘I will marry this girl or be a lifelong bachelor’
Reporting by Alex Perry, USA TODAY NETWORK / The Columbus Dispatch
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
