Usha Vance is opening up about the marriage rumors that have plagued her and husband, Vice President JD Vance, over the last few months.
“I find that one of the really curious things about this life is that people really like to read the tea leaves, and there’s a kind of an industry building stories about everything that they can imagine,” the second lady said in a Dec. 8 interview with USA Today that was published over the weekend.
Speculation about the Vances’ marriage ramped up after the lawyer was spotted without her wedding ring in November, weeks after JD Vance and Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk made headlines for exchanging an intimate hug at an event honoring Kirk’s slain husband, Charlie Kirk.
Of the missing ring, Usha Vance said she simply wears it “when I wear it, and I don’t when I don’t.”
“Sometimes I’m wearing it, and sometimes I’ve just been to the gym and showered and I’m not wearing it,” she said, explaining that she and her husband find it “kind of funny” that people are interested in such things.
“I’d rather just sort of live in my marriage and in the real world, and less in kind of the fever dreams that surround it. So I mean, it is kind of a family joke, but also not something that I spend very much time thinking about,” she explained.
A spokesperson for the second lady previously responded to ring rumors in late November, telling People magazine that Usha Vance is “a mother of three young children, who does a lot of dishes, gives lots of baths, and forgets her ring sometimes.”
JD Vance later told NBC News in December that he and his wife get a “kick out of” the speculation about the two.
“With anything in life, you take the good with the bad,” the “Hillbilly Elegy” author told the outlet on Dec. 5. “You accept that there are some sacrifices and there are some very good things that come along with it, too. But our marriage is as strong as it’s ever been.”