A house divided
He’s for Trump; she’s for Clinton. How do they and others make it work?
This election year has not been kind to the Pawloskis’ marriage. Murray supports Donald Trump, a presidential candidate his wife detests. Nicole backs Hillary Clinton, whom Murray distrusts. In an election marked by a wide gender gulf, their divided house is a microcosm of the nation.
Nicole grumbles that in September, Murray told her that for the next month, his only mission was to get her to vote for Trump.
“I was messing with her,” says Murray, sitting next to her on the couch.
For them, that kind of political needling is new.
“We decided a long time ago,” Nicole says. “We’re just not going to talk about it.”
Twenty-three years ago, when the couple met in high school, politics weren’t an issue. But over time, their differences grew. Murray, 41, works for a wine distributor and prefers fiscally conservative can-
“Probably the best strateg y is, agree to disagree.”
John Vincent, University of Houston Therapy for Couples Center
didates. Nicole, 38, is a fulltime mom who also runs a photography business. She generally votes for Democrats.
So at home in Katy, they long ago learned to observe boundaries. They don’t turn on the news when they’re together. They never talk politics at the dinner table, and they rarely discuss it elsewhere.
“In the past,” says Nicole, “I’ve been like, it all comes out in the wash.”
The strain on their marriage is unusual. Though the gender gap is especially marked in this year’s campaign — Clinton leads among women by 15 points, according to FiveThirtyEight — bipartisan couples are rare.
According to a Pew Research Center survey released Tuesday, only 3 percent of people who support either Trump or Clinton say their partners plan to vote for the other candidate.
In such cases, says John Vincent, a marriage counselor who co-directs the University of Houston’s Center for Couples Therapy, avoiding the topic can be healthy.
“A lot of couples operate based on the premise that you can essentially argue with the other person to the point where they change their mind,” he said. “The likelihood of that is actually quite remote. Usually what happens is they get angry and defensive and it turns into a personal attack. … Probably the best strategy is, agree to disagree.”
For Nicole, the split over presidential politics reprises an old family dynamic: Her parents disagreed, too. In 1988, her dad taught her toddler brother to run through the house yelling “Bush for President.” Her mom gritted her teeth.
‘Deplorable’ shirt
Last month, Murray asked for Nicole’s Amazon. com password — “with a smirk,” she says. “I asked what he was buying, but he wouldn’t tell me so I let it go. Once he started giggling …. I checked my Amazon account and saw what he purchased and about killed him.”
It was a T-shirt with the phrase “I’m a deplorable,” a reference to a Clinton comment about Trump supporters.
“He wears it at home all the time,” Nicole laments.
Nicole, a Cub Scout den leader, argues that Trump would make a poor role model for their boys, Dylan, 6, and Drake, 3. “He’s racist and sexist and has said things I wouldn’t want my children to hear a president say.”
Yes, Murray condemns Trump’s lewd comments caught on video in 2005. But as a Christian, he accepts Trump’s apology. Trump, Murray contends, has the business background needed to make government more efficient. Hardly any politicians really understand a budget, and Trump would stop sending “free money” to people who can work.
Nicole and some of her friends support Clinton simply because she’s a woman, Murray complains.
“There’s a part of that that is very appealing,” Nicole says. “It’s something different, something new.”
No, Murray counters, Clinton is just another member of the political establishment — “a grumpy old white man …”
Nicole laughs nervously: “Please don’t write that.”
Murray sticks to his guns: “I’m fine with it.”
‘Have empathy’
Another Houston marriage counselor, Denise O’Doherty, says that a couple who disagree should only talk politics if they can stay calm and listen to each other without rebutting.
“What you’re trying to do is have empathy,” she said. “Empathy is where you can say, ‘I understand why you feel that way, even though I disagree.’ ”
Neither O’Doherty nor Vincent has ever had clients who divorced primarily over political differences. But politics, Vincent said, can be one reason among many for a split.
Murray and Nicole have watched this year’s presidential debates separately: him downstairs on the TV, her upstairs on a laptop. Sometimes, though, politics catches them unawares.
In an episode of “The Americans,” an FX drama about Soviet spies in the 1980s, a vintage news clip mentioned Ronald Reagan as a loose cannon whose rhetoric could start World War III.
Murray piped up: Trump is like Reagan. “We need a tough person in the world, somebody that will be a bully,” he says. “We’ve been getting bullied everywhere.”
He knew that would bug Nicole. Still, he says, he “would never say something about politics just to get her in a bad mood.”
“I 100 percent disagree with that lately,” she says.
He laughs and backs down the tiniest bit: “Maybe one or two times I’ve talked politics just because I wanted to watch football.”