Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray plan to separate
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Former New York mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, are planning to separate after about 30 years of marriage, McCray confirmed in an email to The Washington Post. The couple announced their separation Wednesday in the New York Times after making the decision about two months ago. They will not file for divorce, but they will start dating other people and continue living together in their Brooklyn townhouse, she told The Post.
“We will live with greater independence from each other,” McCray said. “It’s fair to say the relationship was not fulfilling for us anymore.”
De Blasio and McCray went public with their announcement on Wednesday “so that our actions and behavior were not misconstrued in any way,” she told The Post.
In a three-hour interview with the Times, the couple said their relationship became stale in recent years and they had lost the spark, with both seeking a change. The pandemic didn’t help their relationship, either, they said, nor did de Blasio’s presidential bid in 2020.
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“Even at this moment of change, this is a love story,” de Blasio said in a tweet Wednesday. De Blasio did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Both said that de Blasio’s run as New York mayor contributed to their separation, too.
“Everything was this overwhelming schedule, this sort of series of tasks,” de Blasio told the Times. “And that kind of took away a little bit of our soul.”
The former New York mayor also told the Times he had some doubts about his relationship because McCray had written an article titled “I Am a Lesbian” for Essence in 1979. In the story, McCray wrote that she discovered her “preference for women” before she was married and before having children. She later told the magazine in a 2013 interview that she put “aside the assumptions I had about the form and package my love would come in” when she fell for de Blasio.
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“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 in the Times, “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.”
De Blasio, who is White, and McCray, who is Black, first met in the ’90s while working under former New York mayor David Dinkins, who was also the city’s first Black mayor, according to the Associated Press. They married in 1994 and have two children, both of whom are now in their 20s.
The couple rose to fame after de Blasio became the New York mayor in 2013, bringing a fresh face to the city after 12 years under Mike Bloomberg’s administration. The couple often appeared at news conferences together.
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Throughout their time in the spotlight, McCray led the charge on a mental health program called ThriveNYC. She is still working in the mental health space as a senior adviser at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. De Blasio, meanwhile, is a visiting professor at New York University and teaches a class on public policy.
McCray told The Post she was “surprised and relieved” by the “mostly if not all positive” feedback she received after announcing their separation.
“We were hoping that people would understand that our romance is over, but the love remains,” she said.
“I hope people are inspired by how much we love each other and our kids,” she added, “and how we are figuring out together how to move forward.”
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Source: The Washington Post
