Rachel Maddow and Susan Mikula first started dating in 1999.
The couple met when Maddow was working odd jobs and Mikula hired Maddow to do yard work. “It was very Desperate Housewives,” joked Maddow. The pair, who have a 15-year age gap, say it was love at first sight. “I know that people don’t believe in love at first sight. It was absolutely love at first sight,” Maddow told The New Yorker. “Bluebirds and comets and stars. It was absolutely a hundred percent clear.”
Two decades later, when Mikula got very sick from COVID-19, it put things in perspective for Maddow. “Seeing Susan suffering with it is the scariest thing in my life, and I would now do anything to prevent that sort of risk to her,” she told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “It was revelatory to realize I care a lot more about my partner and her safety than I do about myself.”
She also talked about how much she cares for Mikula on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “I’m lucky I have the world’s greatest relationship, and I’m totally in love, and she’s the most important thing in my life.”
So who is Rachel Maddow’s longtime partner? Here’s everything to know about Susan Mikula and her relationship with the MSNBC host.
She is an artist
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Mikula is a successful photogrpaher who uses a variety of different techniques, according to her website.
Her work has been featured nationwide in solo and group exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles and Northampton and Provincetown, Mass. Some of her photography also lives in permanent collections in the U.S. Embassy, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State. The Advocate described her work “as quintessentially American as the iconic regionalist painters’ work of the last century.”
She splits her time between New York and Massachusetts
Mikula grew up in New Jersey and New Hampshire and now splits her time between rural Western Massachusetts and New York City. In an interview with ArtSake she talked about her time living in Massachusetts. “Oh, in the hilltowns of Western Mass., we all live with way too many animals — red squirrels, daisy-eating groundhogs, arboreal weasels, moles, voles, minks, moose, you name it. I do love the critters, but admittedly, I love them best when they are outside rather than inside the house. Inside, we have an enormous dog who barks at floppy hats but not skateboarders and considers commands to be suggestions.”
She also discussed what it’s like living in Massachusetts and New York as an openly gay couple. “We kind of forget we’re gay,” said Mikula. “We live in western Mass and New York and it’s very accommodating. Every once and a while I’ll say, ‘Oh my God, we’re gay.’ ”
She helps Maddow put her on-air looks together
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Behind the scenes, Mikula has some say over Maddow’s fashion and beauty choices on The Rachel Maddow Show. “At some point, we figured out that you could wear suits and they could be gray, or gray, or brown or black or gray,” says Mikula. She also encouraged Maddow to wear makeup, saying that without it, “she looked like a dead person.”
She supports Maddow during her ups and downs
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“Rachel has always worked really, really hard,” said Mikula. “She works constantly. And not just busy work but really hard work.” Maddow has openly discussed her struggle with depression. In an interview with CBS in 2016 she talked about how Mikula supports her. “The time when it’s hardest is when I have forgotten that this happens to me and so I don’t know what it is and she will say, ‘You are depressed,’ and just being able to identify it and then knowing that it’s not going to be forever and that it will pass and that it will ease at some point, helps,” said Maddow.
She had a life-threatening case of COVID-19
Maddow moved her broadcast of The Rachel Maddow Show to her home in the fall of 2020. Mikula had a bad case of COVID-19. A month later she gave an update on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “She is OK. She had a real case of it, and like a lot of people who’ve had symptomatic cases, she’s got the long tail of the symptoms, which is true for almost everybody that I know that had it,” Maddow elaborated. “She’s got the fatigue and the headaches and the cough and stuff lingering, but she’s out of the woods in terms of us being scared that she could take a downturn. She’s going to be fine. It’s been a bear to deal with. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through in my life, but she’s going to be OK.”
She and Maddow complement each other
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In an interview with PEOPLE Maddow discussed the couple’s differences, saying Mikula has “become an avid home chef” while she “still can’t cook an egg.” When it comes to fashion Mikula “loves indulging in girlie accessories like purses” while Maddow “looks like a dude” according to Maddow.
They don’t have a TV in their Western Massachusetts home. “We realized that the two of us have the TV Disease,” explained Mikula. “Rachel can’t have one because she’d watch it all the time!” However, they do have a small TV in their NYC apartment, “so that I can watch her on Friday nights before I come pick her up,” Mikula added.
