Michelle Obama Opens Up About Falling in Love With Her Husband—Plus, Their First Kiss
What was it like to fall in love with a future President of the United States? Former First Lady Michelle Obama has been unveiling that process in great detail ahead of the release of her memoir, Becoming.
The pair famously first met at the Disney Austin LLP law firm in Chicago. He was a summer associate, while she was beyond hesitant about any romance in the workplace. “He was like, ‘You’re crazy. We should date. I like you. You like me,'” she told Robin Roberts this weekend in an interview. “I like that about him. He was very straightforward.”
Eventually, she caved. The pair went on their first date to an ice cream parlor, where they also happened to share their first kiss. (It was after the future POTUS showed up behind schedule.) “He played it real smooth,” she said. “He just leaned in for a kiss. And that really was it. You know, from that kiss on, it was love. And he was my man.”
ABC News also revealed an excerpt from the memoir, which reads: “As soon as I allowed myself to feel anything for Barack, the feelings came rushing—a toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment and wonder.”
Prior to meeting Obama, Michelle was a meticulous box-checker in life. “I take you on the journey of who that little striving star-getter became, which is what a lot of hard-driving kids become: a box checker,” she recently told Oprah Winfrey in a Q&A. “Get good grades: check. Apply to the best schools, get into Princeton: check. Get there, what’s your major? Uh, something that’s going to get me good grades so I can get into law school, I guess? Check. Get through law school: check. I wasn’t a swerver. I wasn’t somebody that was going to take risks. I narrowed myself to being this thing I thought I should be. It took loss—losses in my life that made me think, Have you ever stopped to think about who you wanted to be? And I realized I had not. I was sitting on the 47th floor of an office building, going over cases and writing memos.”
It was during that period that she met her husband. “He was the opposite of a box checker. He was swerving all over the place,” she noted to Oprah. “I mean, here’s this guy and—at the time, I was a young professional. This is when I was coming into my own, right? I had a job that paid more than my parents ever made in their lives. I was rolling with bourgeois class.”
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The pair married in 1992. In her memoir, the former FLOTUS goes into detail about struggling through the initial years of marriage—and seeking marital counseling. “Well, you go because you think the counselor is going to help you make your case against the other person. ‘Would you tell him about himself?!’” the mother of two shared with Winfrey. “And lo and behold, counseling 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.”
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