In 30 years of marriage, Nancy Fagin had never told her husband about “the handling” — how, as an eighth grader volunteering at a small natural history museum in Chicago, she was sexually molested by a security guard.

That changed last week. As the couple discussed Michelle Obama’s speech condemning Donald J. Trump’s treatment of women as “intolerable,” Ms. Fagin, 62, who spent her career running a specialty bookstore in Chicago, turned to her husband and said that something had happened to her.

“I just sort of had to say that,” Ms. Fagin later said in an interview.

Her husband, Ron Weber, 75, said he responded by talking about how his former wife had also been assaulted.

“It’s widely occurring, and most women don’t bring it up,” he said.

Far from the campaign trail, the shock waves about Mr. Trump’s crude language, captured in a recording, and accusations against him of sexual assault by numerous women are reverberating through marriages and relationships across the country. Couples say they are talking to each other about the degradation of women in new ways and revealing assaults that had been buried for years.