Consider it or not, the Vances had been launched by Amy Chua, writer of the controversial 2011 parenting e book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, who taught each Usha and J.D. at Yale Legislation Faculty. Chua has described the couple as “extraordinarily unlikely, nearly opposites of persona,” whereas J.D. has referred to Usha as his “Yale spirit information”—a reference to the assistance she gave him in navigating the unfamiliar terrain of their Ivy League alma mater. (J.D. described their dynamic in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy; when it was tailored into a movie by Ron Howard in 2020, Usha was portrayed by Freida Pinto.) The couple married in an interfaith ceremony in Kentucky in 2014.
Usha described her courtship with J.D. on the 2024 Republican Nationwide Conference, saying:
“I met J.D. in regulation faculty when he was contemporary out of Ohio State, which he attended with the help of the GI Invoice. We had been associates first as a result of, I imply, who wouldn’t need to be associates with J.D.? He was then, as now probably the most attention-grabbing individual I knew, a working-class man who had overcome childhood traumas that I may barely fathom to finish up at Yale Legislation Faculty, a tricky marine who had served in Iraq, however whose concept of time was taking part in with puppies and watching the film Babe. Probably the most decided individual I knew with one overriding ambition: to change into a husband and a father, and to construct the type of tight-knit household that he had longed for as a toddler.”
She went on:
“When J.D. met me, he approached our variations with curiosity and enthusiasm. He needed to know all the things about me, the place I got here from, what my life had been like. Though he’s a meat-and-potatoes type of man, he tailored to my vegetarian food plan and realized to cook dinner meals from my mom, Indian meals. Earlier than I knew it, he’d change into an integral a part of my household, an individual I couldn’t think about dwelling with out.”
A registered Democrat in 2014, Usha voted within the Republican main in 2022, when J.D. was working for Senate.