How 'meat & potatoes' guy JD Vance, from a drug-addicted family, fell in love with elite Indian immigrant Usha Chilukuri
JD Vance and Usha Chilukuri come from vastly different backgrounds. Vance, the son of a drug-addicted mother and raised by his grandmother in a struggling community in Ohio, faced significant challenges. Meanwhile, Chilukuri, daughter of Indian immigrants, grew up in California with parents deeply invested in academic and professional success—her father a mechanical engineer from IIT and her mother a trained marine biologist.
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Despite their differences, their lives converged at Yale Law School, where they collaborated on a major writing assignment. According to Usha, “We were friends first; I mean, who wouldn’t want to be friends with JD?”
The Journey from Friendship to Marriage
Their paths continued to intertwine, leading them from friendship to love. Vance, in his book Hillbilly Elegy, describes his initial feelings for Usha as intense. He recalls, “I thought about her constantly. One friend described me as ‘heartsick’ and another told me he had never seen me like this.” After discovering Usha was single, he quickly asked her out, leading to a relationship that blossomed steadily.
Navigating personal differences and social challenges, Usha helped JD adapt to environments that he found unfamiliar. At one point, however, Vance’s inability to handle relationship stress tested their bond. He writes about an incident where he stormed out of a hotel room after an
