Over the past year, rumors have been swirling that Barack and Michelle Obama are heading for divorce. According to these rumors, Barack and Michelle have been living “separate lives” for quite some time.
Now, Michelle is revealing why she initially turned Barack down when he asked her out on a date. This comes as their divorce rumors continue to spread like wildfire.
Michelle’s Reluctance To Date Barack
Michelle, 62, and Barack, 64, met back in 1989 when they were both working at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin. Michelle was a first-year associate and adviser to Barack, a summer associate.
While talking to the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia last Saturday, Michelle admitted that she initially had no interest in dating Barack.
“I wasn’t gonna date him at first, because I thought it would be tacky for the two Black folks from Harvard to fall in love,” Michelle said. “I even said that, I was like, ‘We can’t date. This is too cliché.’ But he was like, ‘Screw them.’”
Michelle went on to talk about what it was like working with Barack.
“He was late the first day,” Michelle recalled. “He blamed it on the weather, but I, as a box-checker, thought, ‘You’re trifling.’”
“I was skeptical, because I read his résumé. I was like, ‘OK, he seems smart, but he’s a Black kid that grew up in Hawaii.’ Thought that was strange,” she continued. “So, I was expecting the typical sort of nerd that — forgive me — that white people would think was a nice Black guy. But I was surprised, because he walked in with a little swagger.”
Michelle Gives Barack A Shot
The next day, Michelle and Barack had lunch. The former First Lady said that “it was during that lunch that I got to know him.”
“He was funny, and he was humble and he was wicked smart,” Michelle recounted of Barack. “And his background was very much like mine, working class, but not like mine in the sense that he came — his mother was a single mother, he and his mother lived all over the world. He spent time in Indonesia, his grandparents were white folks from Kansas.”
“But our values, our morals, the things that we believed in, were the same,” she added. “And he had taken a completely different path. You know, he went to law school, but he was a community organizer. He wasn’t at Harvard to become, you know, the next hoodie-do. He wanted to use those skills to help the community.”
Michelle And Barack Fall In Love
Over the course of that summer, they began to fall in love. At the end of the summer, Barack reportedly told Michelle, “Let’s get serious about life.”
“We started dating, and the story goes on from there,” Michelle explained. “But our meeting, my interaction with Barack, the way he thought about the world, the way he sort of thought that there were many paths to doing things, made me question mine.”
“I was also having this philosophical kind of debate with myself about what am I on this earth to do,” she concluded. “Did I really have this journey to spend it working on the 47th floor of a law firm, looking over at the community that made me in a way that didn’t give me connection to it? So I decided to leave my firm primarily because my boyfriend — soon to be fiancé, soon to be husband — he was a swerver, and so together we started swerving.”
The Obamas went on to marry in 1992. They later welcomed daughters Malia and Sasha in 1998 and 2001 respectively.
Obama Divorce Rumors
Michelle and Barack’s love story may have started off strong. However, it might not be going so well now. Indeed, the Obamas have been plagued by rampant divorce rumors for the past year.
These divorce rumors escalated in a big way back in January of last year, when Michelle skipped both the funeral of Jimmy Carter and the inauguration of Donald Trump. She was the only living former First Lady to miss each of these events. This forced Barack to attend both events alone.
“I have been hearing this rumor that the Obamas are getting a divorce by reputable people,” political commentator Meghan McCain said on reporter Tara Palmeri’s podcast in 2025. “I’m not talking about TMZ, I’m not talking about Perez Hilton, although I love him, he’s my friend.”
“I’m talking about like very serious journalists telling me that they’re hearing that the Obama divorce rumors are true,” she continued.
“We’ve heard that for a long time,” replied Tara, who has long covered Washington politics. “Like I just heard that they live separate lives.”
Listen to Meghan and Tara talk more about this in the clip below.
Michelle Accused Of ‘Really Disliking’ Barack
Michelle launched her IMO podcast back in March of last year. Since then, Michelle has used it to bash Barack and air his dirty laundry seemingly every chance she gets.
In fact, Michelle has complained about Barack so many times on her podcast that the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has claimed that the former First Lady “really dislikes her husband, and it’s super obvious.”
“I’m not just saying that to be catty,” Tucker explained. “I think I’m trying to feel compassion for her but her hostility toward the guy is unbelievable.”
Tucker’s fellow former Fox News host Megyn Kelly was quick to agree. She pointed out that “everything Michelle says about her husband is negative.”
“I almost never say negative things about Doug,” Megyn added, referring to her own husband Doug Brunt. “He’s not perfect but when I think about him, I don’t immediately go to whatever is negative. I go to what’s positive and what I love about him.”
The Obamas Respond
Back in July of last year, Barack appeared on Michelle’s IMO podcast. There, they desperately tried to shoot down the escalating divorce rumors.
“There hasn’t been one moment in our marriage where I thought about quitting my man,” Michelle claimed. “And we’ve had some really hard times. So we had a lot of fun times, a lot of adventures, and I have become a better person because of the man I’m married to.”
“These are the kinds of things that I just miss, right?” Barack chimed in to add. “So I don’t even know this stuff’s going on. And then somebody will mention it to me and I’m all like, ‘what are you talking about?'”
Unfortunately for the Obamas, however, many are still not buying their claims that their marriage is still going strong.
Michelle publicly recounting her initial romance to even date Barack will certainly do nothing to help her case that all is well in her marriage. Only time will tell if the Obama marriage actually survives!