THE OBAMA LOVE RULES
Michelle Obama on the politics of building a happy home
What makes a strong marriage? If anyone knows, it’s Michelle Obama. Since 1989 (the year of their first date), she and Barack appear to have had an unshakeable bond. But like all good relationships, it’s taken work. Here, she tells Oprah Winfrey their story…
OPRAH WINFREY: You write [in your memoir], about meeting him, “I’d constructed my existence carefully, tucking and folding every loose and disorderly bit of it, as if building some tight and airless piece of origami… He was like a wind that threatened to unsettle everything.” At first you didn’t like being unsettled.
MICHELLE OBAMA: Oh God, no. OW: This, I love – a moment that cracks me up: “I woke one night to find him staring at the ceiling, his profile lit by the glow of the streetlights outside. He looked vaguely troubled, as if he were pondering something deeply personal. Was it our relationship? The loss of his father? ‘Hey, what are you thinking about over there?’ I whispered. He turned to look over at me, his smile a little sheepish. ‘Oh,’ he said.‘ I was just thinking about income inequality.’” MO: That’s my honey. OW: You really let us into the relationship. I mean down to the proposal and everything. You also write about some major differences between the two of you in the early years of your marriage. You say,“I understood it was nothing but good intentions that would lead him to say, ‘I’m on my way’ or ‘Almost home!’” MO: Oh gosh, yes. OW: “And for a while, I believed those words. I’d give the girls their nightly bath, but delay bedtime so they could wait up to give their dad a hug.” And then you describe this scene where you’d wait up: He says, “I’m on my way, I’m on my way.” He doesn’t come. And then you turn out the lights – I could hear you click them off the way you wrote it. MO: I was mad. When you get married and you 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. OW: Yeah. MO: 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 travelling back and forth. He had this wonderful optimism about time. He thought there was way more of it than there really was. And he would fill it up constantly. He’s a plate-
spinner – plates on sticks, and it’s not exciting unless one’s about to fall. So there was work we had to do as a couple. Counselling we had to do to work through this stuff. OW: Tell us about the counselling. MO: Well, you go because you think the counsellor is going to help you make the case against the other person. And lo and behold, counselling wasn’t that at all. It was about me exploring my sense of happiness. What clicked in me was that I need support and I need some from him. But I needed to figure out how to build my life in a way that works for me…
OW: You also write, “When it came down to it, I felt vulnerable when he was away.” I thought that was kind of amazing to hear a modern woman – a First Lady – admit that.
MO: I feel vulnerable all the time. And I had to learn how to express that to my husband, to tap into those parts of me that missed him, and the sadness that came from that, so that he could understand. He didn’t [see] distance in the same way. You know, he grew up without his mother in his life for most of his years, and he knew his mother loved him dearly, right? I always thought love was up close. Love is the dinner table, love is consistency, it is presence. So I had to share my vulnerability and also learn to love differently. It was an important part of my journey of becoming. Understanding how to become us.
OW: What was so valuable to me – and I think will be for everyone else who reads the book – is that nothing really changed. You just changed your perception of what was happening. And that made you happier.
MO: Yeah. And a lot of the reason I share this is because I know that people look to me and Barack as the ideal relationship. I know there’s #relationshipgoals out there. But whoa, people, slow down – marriage is hard.