Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has opened up about her decision to freeze her eggs, sharing parts of the process on Instagram and later discussing it on ABC News’ “This Week.”
The 36-year-old New York congresswoman said she had been saving up for the procedure and thinking about it for “a very long time.” She also said she wanted to make conversations about egg freezing more normal, especially for working women.
The personal update has also put attention on Ocasio-Cortez’s longtime fiance, Riley Roberts. The couple has been engaged since 2022, but their relationship goes back more than a decade.
Who is Riley Roberts?
Roberts is from Arizona, as per Business Insider. Not much is known about his early years, but after finishing high school, he went on to study sociology and finance at Boston University. Once he graduated, he moved back to his home state, where he worked as a UX growth consultant helping small businesses launch websites. A now-deleted LinkedIn profile also showed he did marketing work for the home-management service HomeBinder in 2014.
On that same profile, he had once described his work as helping other subscription startups grow using “Facebook Ads, website conversion-rate optimization, and user experience design”. Roberts later used those same skills to help Ocasio-Cortez with digital marketing and Facebook outreach during the early days of her campaign, per Business Insider.
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AOC and Roberts’ decade-long relationship
As per People, Roberts and Ocasio-Cortez met in college at Boston University. They got close through a weekly student event called “Coffee & Conversations,” where they’d talk about everything from the Afghanistan war to pop culture, as per the biography “Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC.” They dated in college but broke up after graduating, when Roberts moved back to Arizona and Ocasio-Cortez stayed on the East Coast. Her mother, Blanca, said the two got back together around 2015, and Roberts later moved to New York to be with her.
In April 2022, Roberts proposed, and the couple got engaged in Puerto Rico, where Ocasio-Cortez’s family is from. She shared the news on X at the time, writing, “It’s true! Thank you all for the well wishes.”
Blanca has spoken fondly of Roberts, telling the Daily Mail, “I love him. He is the most loving, supporting person I’ve seen. He helped her tremendously during the election.” She added, “I know they love children, and they do very well with children from the family. So, I hope they get married soon, although they haven’t told me anything about their plans.”
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Why AOC is talking about this now
Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram update came just hours before she appeared on ABC News’ “This Week.” Explaining her decision to go public, she told co-anchor Jonathan Karl, “In this political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy, I think it’s important for us as leaders to have these conversations and share these processes, especially for working women across the country and normalize them.”