Michelle Obama has been married to former President Barack Obama for more than 30 years, but she wasn’t so sure about him at first. On a recent episode of her IMO podcast, which she cohosts with her brother Craig Robinson, Michelle explained how she met her husband. She also revealed that she thought he was “kind of weird.”
They met when Michelle was a first-year associate at a law firm. “Barack was a student at Harvard Law School. Barack is older than me but took time off and was at Harvard after I graduated. So when I was a first-year associate after I graduated, he was just a first year in law school,” Michelle explained, adding that law school students would intern at firms during the summer.
“I was on the Harvard recruiting team,” she said. “So I knew of him, this Barack Obama.” But while others around her seemed super impressed by Barack, Michelle remained skeptical.
“Everybody was abuzz about him, right?” she continued. “All the partners and the Harvard recruiting team were talking about this hotshot first-year Harvard law student, who was brilliant.” But when Michelle “got his profile,” she judged him.
“I thought, ‘What kind of name is Barack Obama?'” Michelle revealed. “I was like he’s Black and everybody at the firm was excited that he was Black, and I was like, he’s probably kind of weird because he’s a nerd. If a lot of white people are all infatuated with him, I was a little skeptical.”
Learning that he grew up in Hawaii didn’t help. “I read his bio and I saw that he grew up in Hawaii, and I thought, ‘Well, how many Black people grow up in Hawaii?’ So I already had this image,” she added. But Barack was assigned to be her advisee, which meant she had to reach out to him.
When she called him, her opinion started to change. “I had an image of this kind of nerdy guy, and then, the first kind of sparky feeling I felt actually was when I talked to him on the phone,” she admitted. “He had his Barack Obama voice.”
She added that Barack’s “voice was sexier than the image I had.” They had a “great conversation” on the phone, she said, so she “wasn’t feeling anything” at that point because the photo she had of him “wasn’t a great picture.”
On his first day at work, Barack was late, making Michelle think “he’s a trifling nerd with a good voice.” But when they actually met, Michelle was “pleasantly surprised” that Barack seemed “kind of cool.” Later, at lunch, they “really hit it off.”
Recently, Michelle and Barack have sparked divorce rumors — and laughed them off. “She took me back,” Barack joked during a recent episode of his wife’s podcast. “It was touch and go for a while.”
