RICHMOND — When Adam Spanberger and his then-girlfriend visited Costa Rica years ago, he sat bemused as she spent an evening chatting in Spanish with her host family from a previous stay. He spoke only English and had seldom ventured farther than two hours from where he grew up in Virginia. She was fluent in multiple languages and loved to travel.
“It’s super hot and humid, no air conditioning. I remember sitting on the couch and just listening to her … thinking, this woman is a lot of fun and this is going to be an adventure,” Spanberger said.
It was just the beginning. Nineteen years of marriage later, after roaming the globe for the career she chose in the CIA, the couple have three daughters and are embarking on yet another new adventure: Abigail Spanberger (D) was sworn in Saturday as Virginia’s first female governor. And Adam Spanberger became the first first gentleman in the state’s long history.
“Hopefully I won’t be the last,” Spanberger said in a recent interview with The Washington Post, his first extended conversation with the media since his wife entered politics. Abigail Spanberger won election to Congress in 2018 and served three terms before running for governor last year.
Adam Spanberger, 45, works in technology for L3 Harris and is more comfortable behind a computer than in front of a microphone or crowd. He is an avid bicyclist who enjoys being “Dad Uber” to drive his daughters to events in the family minivan.
His job, which involves creating small-device communications systems for government or military customers in remote parts of the world, has enabled him to work from home through their many overseas assignments. He learned to love moving every few years, meeting new people, seeing new things. But the Virginia Executive Mansion was not a destination he ever expected.
“I would have never imagined this moment,” he said.
Adam Spanberger and Abigail Davis went to different public high schools in the Richmond suburbs but knew each other through overlapping friend groups. Both went to the University of Virginia for undergraduate degrees — his in engineering, hers in French — and started dating later as they began careers in Northern Virginia.
He worked for a defense contractor, she was an inspector for the U.S. Postal Service, and he figured they’d settle into a comfortable D.C.-based married life. Soon after their wedding, though, Abigail Spanberger’s earlier application to the CIA was approved and they launched on the first of many global postings.
By 2014, the young family was in California and poised to pick a new assignment in some exotic locale. But their daughters, having just visited grandparents and cousins in Virginia for the holidays, pleaded to move to Richmond. The Spanbergers decided to give that a try, figuring Abigail could rejoin the CIA if they got restless.
Then Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. “When we moved back, politics was not even remotely in the conversation,” Adam Spanberger said. But in the days after that election, with friends and neighbors polarized and angry, “we kind of both felt that … we needed to get uncomfortable and do something more.”
Six months later, Abigail Spanberger made the decision to run for Congress.
Adam never considered entering politics himself, he said; his one experience was a term as senator at the Boys State mock legislature during high school. He’s more comfortable working behind the scenes, he said.
In his wife’s first campaign, he helped build the website, delivered bumper stickers and yard signs, pitched in on the phone bank, knocked on doors. As professional staffers joined the effort over the years, he has served as more of a sounding board and, sometimes, driver, he said.
His wife’s three terms in Congress got him familiar with the role of first spouse. There, despite an increasing number of elected women, husbands sometimes faced awkward situations — group events designed for wives, gift bags with women’s fashion accessories. Adam Spanberger got to know Jason Hedberg, the husband of Mikie Sherrill, Abigail Spanberger’s close friend from their days together in Congress who was recently elected New Jersey governor.
“We have commiserated about all the things,” Spanberger said, laughing. “We just kind of joke about, you know, what kind of tux we’re going to wear to [an event], things like that.”
In Virginia, the first spouse traditionally plays a large role in running the Executive Mansion, the 1813 home next door to the Capitol where the governor’s family lives for four years. Adam Spanberger said he has gone through the mansion with his daughters as they picked out bedrooms and told them they get to help with some decisions, such as selecting artwork to hang in the public areas of the home.
Amy Bridge served as director of the Executive Mansion under Govs. Tim Kaine and Mark R. Warner and will reprise that role under Abigail Spanberger. She said there were no special preparations underway for a first gentleman beyond setting up a home office in the residence that the governor and her husband will share, as well as possibly creating an area for bike storage and maintenance.
Asked whether there were any plans for a man cave, Bridge laughed. “There is a garage, if you really wanted to go down that route,” she said.
Adam Spanberger has talked with previous first ladies Pam Northam, Anne Holton, Dorothy McAuliffe and Suzanne Youngkin for tips. Previous first spouses have chosen a few policy areas for emphasis, and Spanberger said he hopes to build on work Northam and McAuliffe began in areas of child nutrition and early-childhood education.
“I’m a product of public schools. My mom taught English for over 30 years,” he said. “I want to do what I can to advocate for more resources and more funding for teachers, buildings, counselors, music teachers, art teachers — all of those things, to provide an amazing public education in Virginia.”
Another big interest: cycling. Describing himself as “a shorts and T-shirt kind of guy,” Spanberger said he hopes to bring more attention to the state’s cycling trails and bike tourism, as well as promote bike and pedestrian safety.
As he prepared for the inauguration, the move into the mansion and the new duties, Spanberger said he hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about the historic nature of his position as Virginia’s first first gentleman. In a way, it doesn’t seem unusual to him, he said.
“I had one of her former bosses call me Mr. Mom once at a party. I just kind of shrugged it off and said, you know what, our generation is just different,” he said. “I think for our generation it’s more normal to have, you know, both spouses working, both spouses doing child care. … I view us as a partnership.”
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