Kelley Paul on Life & Love with Rand

By Caroline Downey

Kelley Paul had started the weekend in low spirits. She was fresh out of a breakup, and most of her friends had either gotten engaged or moved away. Her social calendar was looking pretty open, until the phone rang with an invitation to an oyster roast that Saturday. “Why not?” she thought.

At the backyard barbeque, Kelley chatted with some University of Georgia students and started to forget the funk she was in, when all of a sudden high-pitched yelps cut through the fun. The outdoor deck collapsed, and a group of girls with it.

“It’s a good thing we have all these doctors from George Baptist Hospital,” someone next to Kelley said.

Someone she recognized - that curly-haired boy she had overlooked moments before because he looked a bit young - swooped in to help the damsels in distress lying on the grass. Kelley watched as he examined necks and limbs for injuries.

“That guy is a doctor??” she exclaimed in disbelief. 

“Yes, that’s Randy Paul!”

Before leaving the party, the two connected. They conversed about brainy subjects like Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, discovering they had quite a bit of compatibility and chemistry. He asked for her phone number but didn’t jot it down, promising he’d remember it.

“He called me the next day and that was it,” Kelley reflects.

Kelley and Rand Paul will celebrate their 32nd wedding anniversary on October 20.

Through an 18-year ophthalmology practice, three sons, and an eleven-year commitment to the Senate, the pair have been on the adventure of a lifetime. Empty nesters now, they look forward to peaceful evenings together on the little lake they live on in Kentucky. Their romantic ritual is a paddle board ride at dusk with a glass of wine in hand. “That’s my happy place,” she says. 

They put down roots in Kentucky so they could be close to Kelley’s family, which has been there for generations. “Rand feels so grateful that I got him to Kentucky,” she says. “And now he’s our senator!”

She had spent 13 years out of her home state and decided one day that it was 13 years too long. “I wanted to be close to my parents. I just felt that grandparents were so important” she says.

So far, her kids don’t plan to follow in Rand’s footsteps, but “you never know,” she says. A “girly girl” at heart, Kelley says “it took me a little getting used to at first, realizing I wasn’t going to have a daughter.” But without batting an eye, she became a supportive baseball and ice hockey mom.

“You embrace what you get in life. Sometimes the things you don’t plan bring you the most joy and happiness,” she adds.

Kentucky is known for horse racing, of which the Pauls are big fans. Sporting funky hats and camp-style clothes, they can be seen cheering at the Kentucky Derby each year. “It’s a little over the top and that’s good. At Derby, more is more,” she says. It’s located in Louisville, pronounced “Loo-eh-vull,” Kelley corrected in her kind southern twang. “It’s kind of like you’ve got your mouth full of marbles,” she chuckles.

In October, Kelley’s favorite month, they can’t wait to get over to Keeneland race track in Lexington for more lowkey, intimate spectating. The Paul family has their own betting system in which competitors put down $2 for “win,” “place,” and “show,” so the most anyone can earn is $6. “So you can bet all day and have fun and if you lose it’s not a big deal. If your horse comes in first second or third, you’re in the hunt,” she says.

She’s not much of an equestrian herself; that’s her friend, Suzanne Youngkin. The governor and First Lady of Virginia often take their horses out to Great Falls Park for riding, Kelley says.

To find her balance, amid re-election campaigns, Congress sessions, and the craziness of everyday life, Kelley does yoga. She takes her mat out to her back deck and tunes into an instructional video for a restorative routine. “That’s been my calming, centering, meditative outlet,” she says.

When it comes to politics, Kelley has tremendous faith in her husband to serve his constituents well – even when that means taking the harder path. Back when Covid-19 was rearing its ugly head, most lawmakers were justifiably concentrated on the immediate fallout. But that early on, only one was putting the public health bureaucracy on trial. At a time when even the majority of Republicans accepted the ‘expert’ explanations and dictates, Rand was saying: “Wait a second!”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Rand has been on a quest for truth, Kelley says. She remembers the Fauci hearings as perhaps the senator’s finest hour.

“Rand is someone who believes in questioning. He believes that the citizenry deserve the right to know answers. We shouldn’t just be told things and believe it,” she says. “He’s very bold and he’s not afraid to speak out and stand alone.”

Between interrogating the nation’s chief immunologist and scrutinizing reckless spending bills, Rand challenges authority out of a sense of obligation, Kelley notes. He is still a lone voice on fiscal responsibility, a former GOP priority that seems to have gone out of style for everyone but the Kentucky legislator.

Last year, Kelley tweeted a picture of an old costume Rand debuted at a Halloween party many years ago, long before he had entered politics. He dressed as the national debt, then only ten trillion dollars (now it’s $30.9 trillion). Confused onlookers thought he was the Powerball lottery game. But Rand was ahead of the curve in bringing awareness to an issue that he believes will bring a “day of reckoning and will be a great threat to our national security,” according to Kelley.

A walking encyclopedia, a dutiful husband and father, a noble heart – these are just a few ways Kelley describes the love of her life. Her dating advice to young women is to find someone who shares your worldview, which she says is crucial to a lasting relationship. “From the moment I met him I had incredible respect for him but also knew that we came from the same background and values,” she says.

Both Kelley and Rand’s parents have been married for over 65 years. It sounds like they’ll hit that milestone, too.

Caroline Downey is the Editor-in-Chief of The Conservateur and an education reporter at National Review. She can be found on Twitter @carolinedowney_.

Featured photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images