Sarah Huckabee Sanders' Painfully Awkward Moments With Her Husband

There are some couples whose chemistry you can feel even when they've been married for many years. Other couples prefer to keep the PDA to a minimum, but you can still feel that love is in the air when they are together in the same space. This doesn't seem to be the case with Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her husband, Bryan Chatfield Sanders. As governor of Arkansas — the first woman elected for the position — Sarah has many events to attend, and, as protocol dictates, the first gentleman is often by her side.

The couple is often photographed together, but unless you knew who they are, you'd be hard-pressed to guess that they are husband and wife. A lot more frequently than you'd think, they pose like they hardly know each other, which fuels rumors about the message they send to the public. Do they actually like each other? Are they normally awkward like that?

Of course, you don't expect politicians to worry too much about what their personal relationships look like when they have more important issues to deal with publicly. However, since family values are such a cornerstone of the Republican party, you'd think that they would work just a little bit to inspire other loving couples across the country.

The awkward way that Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her husband, Bryan Chatfield Sanders, pose for photos becomes even more evident during landmark events like the one shared on Instagram in November 2025. The picture that Sarah chose to share was intended to celebrate the fact that she had just filed for re-election in 2026. It's obviously a very important decision, but the picture that she posted — in front of the bronze doors of the Arkansas Capitol building — exudes distance. With a wardrobe choice that screams double fashion fail, they are side by side, but her husband has his hands behind his back. It also looks like she's barely hugging him, since you don't see her hand reach the other side of his body.

In Bryan Chatfield Sanders' defense, it looks like keeping his hands behind his back is a go-to pose for him. In this picture, taken at the Governor's Mansion during the 2023 Christmas season, you can see the first husband is again keeping his hands behind him, and it doesn't look like he is reaching for Sarah Huckabee Sanders' shoulders or the small of her back. This is the kind of picture that work colleagues would take at a company event, not husband and wife. Besides, it was a Christmas event, so there wouldn't be a better time for the couple to share a loving moment with the world.

The most awkward pose of all also came from Sarah Huckabee Sanders' Instagram. As 2025 turned into 2026, she posted a collection of pictures celebrating a great year she had. Once again, the couple was awkwardly posed in all of them, but one photo stands out. The governor is posing with her three kids, and Bryan Chatfield Sanders stands behind them — with his fists clenched. His left hand is balled up behind his wife, and you can see he made no effort to touch her shoulder. The same is going on with his right hand, which is also closed behind his daughter, Scarlett Wiles Sanders. What gives?

You'd think things would be different when she dedicated a whole post to celebrating her husband's birthday in 2025, but you'd be wrong. Once again, Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted some "traditional" side-by-side photos in which it hardly looks like they are hugging, and they are almost never seen close to each other in the 17-photo collection that she photo-dumped to her Instagram account. If there was a time when it would be perfectly acceptable to showcase a more affectionate side of the couple, this would be it. But, apparently, they thought otherwise.

When the time came to celebrate their 15th anniversary in 2025, Sarah Huckabee Sanders decided she would go overboard and share one image that would showcase the couple's PDA. Out of the 15 photos that she selected for the photo dump, you can see Bryan Chatfield Sanders' hand actually resting on his wife's right shoulder — one of the few times when it looked like the couple understood the concept of squeezing together for a snapshot. Huckabee Sanders is wearing an awkward smile, though, and the caption reads: "Whether we are dressed up, in a duck blind or even on a never-ending hike, there is not one I'd rather do it all with!"

One reason that the awkward positioning of the couple in almost all photos raises eyebrows is due to a since-deleted Instagram story that Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted in 2025, which might have hinted that her marriage is on the rocks. In a black and white photo of the couple, the governor wrote about the difficulties of marriage, and her choice of color and lighting is the kind that people on social media tend to use when somebody dies. If you are championing the fact that you have a partner who overcomes the woes of married life with you, wouldn't you go with a warm and cozy pic in which you are at least holding hands? Not the Arkansas governor. 

The farther back you go on Sarah Huckabee Sanders' Instagram account, the more obsessed you become with finding a photo in which she and Bryan Chetfield Sanders show even just a little bit of affection, but it's a hard search. It does get more awkward, though. In the 2022 campaign video she shared on social media, aside from revealing some of her major makeup mistakes, one of the "qualities" that she highlighted was that she was a wife. Since the idea of campaign videos is to connect with voters, you'd think that husband and wife would do more than stand awkwardly next to each other, right? At this point, you already know the answer.