Michelle Obama, 59, admitted she doesn’t want people looking at her marriage with her husband, Barack Obama, 62, as inspiration for their own love stories. The former first lady talked about her romance with the former president and more aspects of her life, in a new interview that was shared on Monday.
“I don’t want people looking at me and Barack like hashtag couple goals and not know that no, no, there are some broken things that happen even in the best of marriages,” Michelle said on the On Purpose With Jay Shetty podcast.
Michelle and Barack were married in 1992 and have spent more than three decades together. Despite the many good times together, the doting wife admitted there are some things she wishes she could take back. “After 31 years, yeah, we still do [cross the line], but you know it quicker. And then you apologize,” she explained. “You learn how to say my bad, right? That takes a second, right?”
“I talk about marriage because I just think that No. 1, most people don’t talk about it,” Michelle continued. “Because what happens is that by not knowing, you hit, in your relationship, some natural, like, understandable rough patches, and you want to quit. And it’s like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not quit worthy. That’s just the nature of things.’ That’s why I joked, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re mad at your partner, you’re mad for a year and you think the marriage is over.’”
She also said that in reality, couples will have “decades” of thinking “I don’t know if I like you,” because in marriage there are arguments that you must overcome to make you stronger.
“You don’t quit on it, right? You learn from it. And that’s what sustaining a relationship is,” she further explained. “It’s the choice to figure it out, not to quit when it gets hard. So yeah, I said something that I didn’t mean to say, right? Year five, we might’ve had hurt feelings and it would have taken days to rectify it. Year 30, it’s like, ‘Ah, there she goes again, or there he goes again.’ I know how to talk to him about it and when, because we’ve practiced it.”
“[The] hardest thing you will ever do … is to try to build a life with another person who wasn’t raised in your shoes, who has a totally different temperament,” Michelle, who shares daughters Malia, 25, and Sasha, 22, with Barack, continued, before adding that once children are brought into the situation it gets much tougher.
“Of course, it’s going to be hard, you know, but I wouldn’t trade in my marriage for anything in the world with all the ups and downs, with all the running for president stuff,” she shared. “And if we hadn’t hung in there, we would have missed all the good.”