Woman says a counselor told her husband to consider what mattered to him, then she divorced him over his vote: ‘which clearly wasn’t me’

A woman says she warned her husband that his vote for Donald Trump would change how she saw him, and the marriage ended after he cast it. According to her TikTok video, the two had been talking about it for six months before they separated. Her caption reads, “Posting this on the day of the midterms feels almost poetic. Some of y’all are about to be more upset about my divorce than I am.”

She begins the video by telling viewers it is “about a whole lot more than just a vote.” The couple saw a counselor once, she says, and the counselor told her husband he “really needed to consider what was important to him which clearly wasn’t me.” Each time she brought it up, she says, he accused her of attacking him. She allows that she may have handled parts of it badly.

Looking back, she says the trouble was in the marriage before the ballot and the vote only brought it out. She calls her husband selfish and says he showed no empathy and never gave her feelings any weight. She says he told her he had no real liking for the candidate, yet each talk ended with him arguing the candidate’s side.

When the vote got personal

The issue hit home for her, she says. Speaking “as a survivor of sexual assault,” she told him she doubted the marriage could survive a vote like that. In her words, “that does not make me feel safe.” She says he dismissed her concern, telling her it was not hers to place on him. A Minnesota wedding planner links dismissive comments to a marriage that will fail and a disengaged groom to a couple that will divorce.

Her warning to him was, “Voting this way is going to change the way that I see you.” She thinks he cast it “in spite of me,” because “he couldn’t have a woman telling him what to do.” By her count, she gave six months to explaining how hurtful his vote would be and then, in her words, “just couldn’t keep having the same conversation.”

She is certain he still holds her responsible, she says, and he never apologized. The split, she suggests, came down to values, empathy, respect and consideration more than politics. While they were separated, she lost her cat, her uncle and her grandmother, and he offered no support.

She says she has no regrets and feels better off. Her advice to other women is to “stop sacrificing your happiness, your peace, your emotional well-being for a man that can’t even be bothered to consider yours.” She adds, “A relationship should not require you to abandon yourself in order to make other people comfortable.” She closes by inviting other women to tell their own stories, or to “make a documentary.”

A University of California, Irvine study published in PNAS Nexus drew on four datasets covering nearly 3,800 participants. In the authors’ most recent national survey with YouGov, 37% of Americans reported a political breakup. Among those, 10% involved a romantic partner, compared with 62% for friends and 40% for family members.

She states that North Carolina requires a year of separation before a divorce can be filed. Under North Carolina law, a divorce can be granted once the spouses have lived separate and apart for one year. One of them must also have lived in the state for six months. According to CDC provisional data, the U.S. recorded 672,502 divorces in 2023 across 45 reporting states and D.C., a rate of 2.4 per 1,000 people.

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