Socrates may have said that the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but Michelle Obama would have preferred it if her life was a little less examined.
Though that wasn’t an option once Barack Obama was elected president.
“People always ask me and Barack, how did we stay hopeful in, not just the eight years that we were in the White House, but beyond?” the former first lady—who shares daughters Malia Obama, 27, and Sasha Obama, 24, with the 44th POTUS—said in March during a taping of her podcast IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson at SXSW. “Because, let me tell you, there was a lot of negative energy flipping our way—a lot of rumors, a lot of gossip.”
Steering clear of the comments section on social media was key to keeping calm and carrying on for Michelle, but, by the time her husband’s second term ended in 2017, she was raring to set the record straight.
And, not least, live her life as she saw fit.
None of which occurred right away, the former first couple still compelled to fit a certain model of propriety when it came to the post-presidency.
And Barack, who’s turning 64 on Aug. 4, still has more obligations than his spouse as far as the expectations of his public life since leaving office are concerned—certain funerals and inaugurations he probably shouldn’t miss, for instance.
But now with way more distance between them and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—and divorce rumors shadowing them as if they’re some average celebrity couple—the Obamas’ latest chapter has been increasingly revelatory.
“I’m now at a stage in my life where all my choices are mine,” Michelle said on a June episode of NPR’s Wild Card podcast. “Now I can say that whatever I’m doing from this point on is about my ambition. And that’s fairly new, right?”
Read on for the Obamas’ most candid confessions:
Barack Obama Was in No Rush to Get Married
Not that Harvard Law student Barack Obama wasn’t in love with Michelle Obama (then Michelle Robinson), the associate assigned to look after him when he was an intern at her Chicago firm in the summer of 1988.
He just hadn’t thought about what came next all that much.
“For Michelle, marriage was a given—the organic next step in a relationship as serious as ours,” the former president wrote in his 2020 memoir A Promised Land. “For me, someone who’d grown up with a mother whose marriages didn’t last, the need to formalize a relationship had always felt less pressing.”
They tied the knot Oct. 3, 1992.
Michelle Obama Did Not Want Barack Obama to Run for President
While Michellepubliclysupported Barack every step of the way to him winning the presidency in 2008, she really didn’t want her husband to run at all.
“‘The answer is no. I do not want you running for president,’” he recalled his wife saying in A Promised Land. “’God, Barack, when is it going to be enough?’”
On NPR’s Wild Card podcastin June 2025, Michelle called her and Barack’s accomplishments “the team ambition,” which she went along with, “arguably kicking and screaming.”
Michelle Obama Didn’t Think Barack Obama Would Win the 2008 Presidential Election
In her 2018 memoir Becoming, Michelle wrote that she “had faith” in her husband but was “harboring a painful thought, one I wasn’t ready to share: I supported him in campaigning, but I also felt certain he wouldn’t make it all the way.”
Michelle Obama Was Mad at Barack Obama for All 8 Years of His Presidency
“I’ve never fully got out of the dog house for this,” the former president told Stephen Colbert in November 2020. That is, for putting his family “through an extraordinarily stressful, difficult sequence in deciding to run for president, right after I had just gone through a tough [Senate] race.”
And “Michelle stayed angry at me about it,” he added. “It would flare up every so often, but she stayed mad about it through all eight years.”
The Obamas Went to Marriage Counseling
Michelle confessed that her husband’s schedule once he entered politics—he was elected to the Illinois state legislature in 1997—took its toll on their marriage.
“I’m flailing in the wind,” Michelle told Oprah Winfrey for Elle in 2018. “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.”
Subsequently, there was “work we had to do as a couple,” she said. “Counseling we had to do to work through this stuff.”
The Obamas Were Skeptical About Hamilton
Lin-Manuel Miranda famously performed a song from his then-unfinished, future smash hit Hamilton at the White House in 2015. And you had to hear it to believe it, according to the president.
After learning that Lin was writing a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton, Barack wrote in A Promised Land, “We were politely encouraging but secretly skeptical, until he got up onstage and started dropping beats and the audience went absolutely nuts.”
Why Michelle Obama Didn’t Go to Donald Trump’s Inauguration
After spending Donald Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 “trying just to hold myself together,” as Michelle wrote in Becoming, she wasn’t going to put herself through that again.
“One of the major decisions I made this year was to stay put and not attend funerals and inaugurations and all the things that I’m supposed to attend,” Michelle, who also skipped the January 2025 state funeral for Jimmy Carter, said on Wild Card, acknowledging the speculation that was kicked up in her wake.“Those are my choices. Whatever the backlash was, I had to sit in it and own it. But I didn’t regret it, you know?”
Michelle Obama Thinks About Death a Lot Because She Loves Life
“My husband thinks this is morbid, but at 61, you know, if I am lucky, if I am truly blessed, I have like 25 more summers,” Michelle told Wild Card host Rachel Martin. “If you’re not mindful about time, like—we’ve been out of office for 10 years.”
She wanted “the next 10 years to go by slowly,” she explained. “Because guess what? I love life. I love my life…But what I feel is that if I’m not mindful about it, the years slip away.”
Why Michelle Obama Will Never Run for President
Michelle will not be putting her daughters Malia Obama and Sasha Obama through the aspiring-first-family experience again.
“When people ask me would I ever run, the answer is no,” she said on a March 2025 episode of Kylie Kelce’s Not Gonna Lie podcast. “If you ask me that, then you have absolutely no idea the sacrifice that your kids make when your parents are in that role.”
Even if she was interested, Michelle added, “The thought of putting my girls back into that spotlight when they are just now establishing themselves…They’ve already served their time.”
Michelle Obama Is Glad She and Barack Obama Don’t Have a Son
“I’m so glad I didn’t have a boy,” Michelle said on IMO in June 2025. Asked by guest Angie Martinez why they didn’t try for baby No. 3, she cracked, “Because he would’ve been a Barack Obama. I would’ve felt for him.”
What the Obamas Really Think About Divorce Rumors
“The fact that people don’t see me going out on a date with my husband sparks rumors of the end of our marriage,” a bemused Michelle said on Wild Card. “It’s like, ‘OK, so we don’t Instagram every minute of our lives. We are 60.”
She also promised that she wouldn’t be demure about it if there was trouble in paradise.
“If I were having problems with my husband, everybody would know about it,” she shared on an April 2025 episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast. “And he would know it and everybody would know it. I’m not a martyr…And I would be problem-solving in public, and be like, ‘Let me tell you what he did.’”
Sitting in on his wife and brother-in-law’s podcast in July 2025, Barack joked that the rumors were behind them because “she took me back.”
