Michelle And Barack Obama's Stunning Relationship Transformation
When he said goodbye to the nation as President, Barack Obama paid tribute to his wife. "Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, girl of the south side, you made the White House a place that belongs to everybody," he said (via YouTube). "And a new generation sets its sights higher, because it has you as a role model."
It was an acknowledgement of the strong partnership whose seeds were planted at a Chicago law firm where Michelle Robinson met Barack Obama in 1989. Obama was then a summer associate who was working to finish his degree at Harvard Law School. "Because I went to Harvard and he went to Harvard, and the firm thought, 'Oh, we'll hook these two people up,'" Michelle Obama told ABC. "So, you know, there was a little intrigue, but I must say after about a month, Barack, about a month in, asked me out, and I thought no way. This is completely tacky."
The former president remembers things a bit differently. "In the luckiest break of my life, [Michelle] was assigned to be my adviser, charged with helping me learn the ropes. I remember being struck by how tall and beautiful she was," he told Oprah.com. "I asked her out. She refused. I kept asking. She kept refusing. 'I'm your adviser,'" she said. 'It's not appropriate.' Finally, I offered to quit my job, and at last she relented. On our first date, I treated her to the finest ice cream Baskin-Robbins had to offer, our dinner table doubling as the curb. I kissed her, and it tasted like chocolate."
Michelle and Barack Obama married after two years of dating
They dated for two years before Barack Obama decided to pop the question during a dinner when they were celebrating his finishing the bar exam, as Michelle Obama recalled to Stephen Colbert. "He made an argument out of it [marriage]... He picks a fight, and so I deliver because I, too, am a lawyer, I have my points to be made " she said (via YouTube). "When it was time for dessert, the waiter served a platter with a little box with a ring on it. "He [Obama] opened up the box and said 'now that ought to shut you up.'"
On an Instagram post to mark their 25th anniversary, it seems their wedding day was just as memorable. Michelle Obama wrote, "You can't tell it from this photo, but Barack woke up on our wedding day in October, 1992 with a nasty head cold. Somehow, by the time I met him at the altar, it had miraculously disappeared and we ended up dancing almost all night. Twenty five years later, we're still having fun, while also doing the hard work to build our partnership and support each other as individuals. I can't imagine going on this wild ride with anybody else."
Times weren't always good for Barack and Michelle Obama
Things weren't always sunny and romantic for the couple, particularly after their daughters Malia and Sasha were born. As Michelle Obama famously reveals in her book Becoming, there was a point where she and her husband needed to go into marriage counseling. Obama told The Tonight Show (via Business Insider), "I was one of those wives who thought, 'I'm taking you to marriage counseling so you can be fixed, Barack Obama.' Because I was like, 'I'm perfect.' I was like, 'Dr. X, please fix him,. And then, our counselor looked over at me. I was like, 'What are you looking at? I'm perfect.'"
As she put it to Elle: "I was mad. When you get married and have kids, your whole plan, once again, gets upended. Especially if you get married to somebody who has a career that swallows up everything, which is what politics is. Barack Obama taught me how to swerve. But his swerving sort of — you know, I'm flailing in the wind. And now I've got two kids, and I'm trying to hold everything down while he's traveling back and forth from Washington or Springfield. He had this wonderful optimism about time. He thought there was way more of it than there really was."
But she had a revelation, as she explained on The Tonight Show, saying, "But marriage counseling was a turning point for me, understanding that it wasn't up to my husband to make me happy, that I had to learn how to fill myself up and how to put myself higher on my priority list."
Michelle and Barack Obama are a partnership
Michelle Obama doesn't make her dislike of politics a secret, and its something she reminds us all on a regular basis, even when she delivered her recent memorable address during the Democratic National Convention. Yet, she stood by the president's side throughout the eight years he was in office, and she left her day job as a lawyer to adopt a White House portfolio covering a range of interests to support the president, from her childhood obesity project Let's Move, to opening the grounds of the White House to those who never thought they might visit, to Joining Forces, which helps the members of the military and their families (via the Washington Post).
Now that the girls are in college and they are left on their own with their dogs Bo and Sunny, Michelle Obama indicates she and her husband are exactly where they want to be. "We're coming back to that point where we see each other again because some of the hardest times in our lives we just escaped, we survived it," she told The Independent. "We went through a tough time, we did some hard things together. But now we're out on the other end and I can look at him and I still recognize my husband. He's still the man I fell in love with."