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They were paired as writing partners for their first major assignment at Yale Law School—a striking, high-achieving daughter of immigrants and a Navy veteran “hillbilly” who could trace his family’s Scots-Irish roots back generations to the Appalachians.

It may sound banal and corny, but Usha Chilukuri and JD Vance really came from completely different worlds. And they fell in love in yet another country: in an East Coast Ivy League across the country, from Usha’s childhood home in California and across a yawning cultural divide from her future husband’s Rust Belt hometown.

In less than fifteen years, the couple, now the Vances, took two families’ American dreams to new heights as they attempted to take the White House alongside the 45th president.

And it all started during an on-campus class — where Vance soon “fell hard,” he writes in his 2016’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

“As luck would have it, we were appointed partners for our first major writing assignment, so we spent a lot of time getting to know each other during that first year,” Vance wrote.

‘She seemed like some kind of genetic anomaly, a combination of all the positive qualities a person should have: smart, hardworking, tall and beautiful… she had a great sense of humor and an extremely direct way of speaking.’

Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, where he faced family dysfunction in a clan that hailed from Jackson, Kentucky, and clung to Appalachian traditions and values. It was a triumph for him to earn a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State after four years in the Marines and an even bigger coup to start at Yale Law School.

For Usha, whose Indian immigrant parents are both professors, the journey was a more natural progression; After excelling academically while growing up in suburban San Diego, she had also attended Yale as an undergraduate. She graduated summa cum laude with a degree in history before studying in England as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, where she initially earned a Master of Philosophy degree. modern history.

Upon her return to New Haven, Vance writes, Usha acted as his “Yale spirit guide” who “knew all the best coffee shops and places to eat.

“However, her knowledge went much deeper: she instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask, and she always encouraged me to look for opportunities I didn’t know existed,” he writes – and advised him to add office hours to live, so that he could, for example, benefit from the involvement between professor and student that was ‘part of the experience’.

“In a place that always seemed a bit strange, Usha’s presence made me feel at home.”

The relationship started as a friendship; the following year Hillbilly elegy‘s publication – and just weeks before the birth of their first child – Usha spoke about her own first impressions.

“We were in all our classes together, so I saw him several hours a day,” she told NBC News in 2017. “And then we were assigned to work on an assignment together. We were friends, and I liked that he was very diligent, showing up at 9 a.m. appointments I made for us to work on the assignment together.

However, Vance was already in love.

“I had dated other girls before, some seriously, some not,” he wrote. “But Usha was in a completely different emotional universe. I thought about her constantly. One friend described me as ‘heartbreaking’ and another told me he had never seen me like this.

“Towards the end of our freshman year, I heard that Usha was single, and I immediately asked her out. After a few weeks of flirting and a single date, I told her I was in love with her. It violated every rule of modern dating I had learned as a young man, but I didn’t care.”

His gamble paid off and the two began a lasting relationship fueled by Yale professor Amy Chua, author of the 2011 book Battle song of the Tiger Mother – who also encouraged Vance to write his memoirs.

“He describes it as ‘a bolt of lightning’ — and I saw that,” Chua told NBC in 2017, calling the couple an “extremely unlikely” pairing. ‘I mean, I’ve never seen anyone so impressed. It was love at first sight.”

When Vance was considering a federal internship, Chua advised him to forget about it — partly to keep Usha in his life.

“She knew I had a new girlfriend and that I was crazy about her,” Vance writes, echoing Chua’s words: “This internship is something that destroys relationships. If you want my advice, I think you should prioritize Usha and figure out a career move that really suits you.”

He withdrew his application – and he and Usha decided to go through the internship process together, both ending up in northern Kentucky, not far from where he grew up. They loved their judicial bosses so much that years later they finally asked them to officiate the couple’s wedding – although it wasn’t all smooth sailing until then.

In law school, after the clerkships, “there were signs that things were not going so well, especially in my relationship with Usha,” Vance writes.

“I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all. I could yell at her when she did something I didn’t like, but that seemed mean. Or I could retreat and get away… The thought of fighting her reduced me to a morass of traits I didn’t think I inherited from my family: stress, sadness, fear, anxiety. It was all there, and that’s what it was intense.

“So I tried to get away but Usha wouldn’t let me,” he wrote. “I tried to break everything off several times, but she told me that was stupid unless I didn’t care about her… Usha hadn’t learned how to fight in the hillbilly school of hard knocks.

“The first time I visited her family for Thanksgiving, I was amazed at the lack of drama. Usha’s mother did not complain about her father behind his back. There was no suggestion that close family friends were liars or backstabbers, no angry altercations between a man’s wife and the same man’s sister. Usha’s parents seemed to really like her grandmother and spoke fondly of their siblings.”

Usha taught him not only about Yale, but also about healthy relationships – as well as more practical matters, such as how to properly use utensils in front of potential employers at fancy dinner parties: ‘Go from the outside in, and don’t use the same utensils. for separate dishes; oh, and use the fat spoon for soup.”

The couple’s relationship continued and grew throughout the remainder of their law school years, and their families met for the first time when they graduated. The young lawyers then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, for a year of internship, built a house with two dogs, and were married in an interfaith ceremony in Eastern Kentucky; Usha was raised Hindu, while Vance was raised in the Christian tradition. At the time of their marriage she was a registered Democrat.

“My entire family was present for the occasion and we both changed our names to Vance,” he wrote, the last name of his maternal grandparents.

Usha pursued a career in corporate litigation before earning a clerkship at the Supreme Court, which she began the month after the birth of the couple’s first child, Ewan Blaine Vance, in June 2017.

“I think we’ve emotionally sealed ourselves that the next year is going to be pretty chaotic,” Vance told NBC in the weeks before Ewan’s birth. “And I see that as a classic hillbilly thing: you don’t plan the baby around your life, you plan your life around the baby and we’ll figure it out.”

The couple had two more children as Vance’s profile rose: Vivek, born in 2020, the same year of the film adaptation of Hillbilly elegy; and Mirabel, born in 2021, the year before her father was first elected as a Republican to fill an Ohio Senate seat.

Usha, who has three young children and a legal career of her own, has appeared with her husband but has not been too visible in his political career so far. She also sits on the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, according to her LinkedIn profile.

However, she did star in a campaign ad for her husband in the Senate — “where my favorite person tells my story,” Vance posted alongside the video on Instagram.

In a Fox News interview, she said her husband’s first campaign — for Senate — “had been a shock.

“It was so different from anything we had done before,” she said. “But it was an adventure.”

After Trump’s announcement as vice president, she resigned from the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, where her work had focused on areas such as higher education, local government, entertainment and technology. The Washington Post reported – citing an archived version of her professional biography that has now been deleted.

“Usha has informed us that she has decided to leave the company,” Munger, Tolles & Olson said in a statement Monday. “Usha has been an excellent attorney and colleague and we thank her for her years of work and wish her the best in her future career.”

Usha, meanwhile, made a statement to SFGate; the company has offices in San Francisco.

“In light of today’s news, I have resigned from my position at Munger, Tolles & Olson to focus on caring for our family,” the 38-year-old said. “I am forever grateful for the opportunities I have had at Munger and for the excellent colleagues and friends I have worked with over the years.”

If the Senate campaign was “a shock” and an “adventure,” one can only imagine what awaits Usha and the Vance family as they enter the Trump fray. Usha seemed philosophical in a recent interview with Fox before the announcement.

“I don’t feel like changing anything in our lives right now, but I believe in JD and I really love him,” she said. “And so we’ll just see what happens with our lives. We are open.”