He’s for Trump. She’s for Biden. Together, They Were in Hell.

Debbie Fish clicked on the television remote from her bed on Wednesday morning.

Like many Americans, she was engrossed by the results of the presidential election and wanted to get an early start on the day’s vote count.

Her husband very much did not.

“He didn’t say a word. He got up and left,” Fish said, speaking about her spouse’s response to the batches of incoming mail-in ballots that started to point, gradually, towards Joe Biden.

“He was just livid,” she said. “He wouldn’t talk to me about anything. We have not mentioned the election results at all because it will just blow up,” she said on Thursday. “We have not said one word since Tuesday.”

Suffering through a pandemic-era campaign that has often felt like several calendar years stacked together, it was almost natural in its bizarreness that Election Night finished in plural form. But for couples vocally split between support of Biden and President Donald Trump, the long-drawn-out week of drama was particularly tense, stressful, and even sad within some homes, according to interviews conducted with voters by The Daily Beast.

The familial strain amplified in some of the hardest-fought swing states. Fish, who lives in Lapeer, Michigan, a rural and Republican area, said that in addition to the general sense of misery that her husband unleashed after Tuesday, he was also upset with her for helping to prop up the man who edged out the president.

Successfully executing on his Midwestern strategy, Biden helped place Michigan back in Democrats’ control, once again shifting the political profile from Trump’s loose grasp in 2016, where he narrowly turned it red against Hillary Clinton.

“It’s been very stressful,” she said, summing up the past few days. “With the COVID thing, I have no outlet.”

Coronavirus was at the forefront of the dueling campaigns since March. Biden encouraged Americans to wear masks in public and keep a safe distance away from each other, while Trump went in essentially the opposite direction for months, leading some of his staunchest supporters to question whether the deadly pandemic was exaggerated or made up. Fish’s partner fell into the latter camp, she said.

“My husband not only is a Trump supporter, but he believes that the COVID was a hoax,” she said with an emphasis.

From Michigan to Ohio to Minnesota, couples have struggled with how to discuss and emotionally process the new democratically elected leader of the free world in the un-comfort of their homes. Through the week, the postponed call led some voters to reflect on more abstract questions about why their significant other’s love for Trump has remained so durable, even as his campaign’s walls closed around him in the final days.

Cindy St. Germain has been bewildered for years.

Married two decades, her husband was, as she described him, a “union” Democrat when the two wed. Deeply active in local grassroots organizing, St. Germain, who teaches in Ohio but resides and votes in Michigan, said they used to agree on most things when it came to politics. Four years ago, she was proud that the man she married did not need any convincing to vote for Clinton in the party’s primary.

She was floored when he flipped from Clinton to Trump “a month before the general” in the fall of 2016. “I didn’t marry a Republican or Trump supporter,” she said. “I married a blue collar, hard-core Democrat 20 years ago—or I wouldn’t have married him.”

Since then, he had become a rather emboldened Trump fan. On Tuesday morning, that was especially apparent when he was decked out in MAGA gear—both a red hat and red shirt, she said—as if to gloat visually about what he expected to be a favorable outcome by the evening’s wrap.

“That night, of course, he was very giddy,” St. Germain said. “He was rubbing it in my face” when some states went to Trump early on. In her immediate recollection, he was “just laughing about how this is going to go.”

She spent most of Tuesday making calls and volunteering for Biden outside of her house, throwing herself into mobilize mode to help Democrats. “My husband was always on my side,” she said, reflecting perplexedly on elections’ past.

When asked if they watched the results together, she said, “we don’t do that... it just ends up in a big argument.”

Trump ultimately carried Ohio again, this time by over 8 percentage points. But as the winning path to 270 electoral votes continued to look better for Biden day by day, she said she noticed that her husband “didn’t have his Trump stuff on” anymore.

Over in solidly blue Maryland, Chris, a federal employee, found himself in a surprisingly calming state on Tuesday night.

“My wife left a couple of weeks ago to go back to the Philippines,” he said, using only his first name for work purposes. “She is a Trump supporter and she just wanted to make sure before she left that she got her vote in. She was very adamant.”

The government staffer said that the bond with his wife, who will be visiting family abroad until sometime around January, is too tight to disintegrate over political grievances—no matter how consequential—but suggested that things can occasionally get heated. The two talk a few times every day while she’s away.

“She wanted to offset my vote,” he said, explaining why he believed she went for Trump. “She’s very blindly supportive of her side.”

Biden was eventually declared the winner after earning enough votes in Pennsylvania to become the 46th President of the United States. On Saturday night, he delivered a victory speech in Delaware meant to unify opposing sides.

After thanking his own base, the president-elect said: “And to those who voted for President Trump, I understand your disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple of elections myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance.”

“It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric,” he continued. “To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.”

It was a message that Monica Frischkorn, a 59-year-old Democratic voter in Minnesota, hoped her husband, a 75-year-old lawyer and registered Republican, heard from a separate room. When, after a roughly two-minute conversation, he acknowledged that he did not watch the address, Frischkorn felt deflated.

“I said that’s really too bad because he spoke to you,” she told him, in an apparent reference to the portions of Biden’s speech that included Trump fans in his calculation for unification.

Biden ended up winning Minnesota handily, despite questions towards the end of the cycle about its status as a baby battleground. Frischkorn said that the brief conversations around the state of play culminated in what was just a “really very hard” week.

“As we got closer and I got more confident about the outcome of the election, I found words to be able to say ‘You can’t treat me this way. You can’t say these things to me. It’s not appropriate. It’s indecent,’” she said, sharing a communication tip she got from a Facebook group that she had discovered filled with women whose husbands also expressed adulation for Trump. “So that has stopped.”

By Sunday afternoon, Frischkorn seemed ready to move on. “He is still very much a Trump supporter and is standing by his guy,” she said after the race was called, adding that he “believes that we need to investigate the ‘fraudulent’ voting that took place.”

The couple celebrated their 14th wedding anniversary on Election Day.