Sometimes, parents really do know best.
And when it comes to her daughters Malia Obama, 27, and Sasha Obama, 24, Michelle Obama has advised them to take a page from her and President Barack Obama's book.
"I just try to get them to stay open to people," the former first lady explained in the Aug. 6 episode of her IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson podcast. "The thing that I did do was date a lot. When Barack showed up, I had experiences to compare him against."
Michelle—who tied the knot with Barack in 1992—emphasized that her history allowed her to know what she liked and didn't like in romantic relationships.
"Barack and I talk about our dating experiences," the 61-year-old said. "We try to educate the girls by sharing our experiences. So my whole thing is date. Date a lot, and if you run into a bad date or have a bad experience, move on quickly. If it's not working, next."
In Michelle's experience with Barack, 64, it was clear that something was definitely working. When the two met while Michelle was a first-year associate at her law firm and Barack was a law student, however, it took time for the former to warm up to him.
"Everybody was abuzz about him," she said of his first day at her firm. "All the partners on the Harvard recruiting team were talking about this hotshot first-year Harvard Law student who was brilliant."
Michelle, who was recruited to assist with law school summer interns, had gotten a hold of Barack's file.
"I thought, 'Ugh, what kind of name is Barack Obama?' she admitted to thinking before he started. "I had this image of, kind of this nerdy guy."
It was a phone call that piqued her interest, adding, "The voice was sexier than the image that I had about him, so I was sort of like, 'Ooh, I didn't expect this."
"He was older, so he was self-assured," she explained. "So we had a great conversation, but all I had was a picture and it wasn't a great picture of him. So I wasn't feeling anything."
Everything really changed when the pair went out to lunch.
"He was much cuter than his picture," she said. "The picture didn't do him justice, so I was pleasantly surprised that he was attractive. He was kind of cool, in a way I didn't expect."
"I had to take him to lunch and we really hit it off at lunch," she continued. "We had a long lunch, a great conversation and we just vibed. I would probably say, if he were here, there was a hint of a spark that started at that lunch."
For more of Michelle and Barack's most candid confessions, keep reading.
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 Michelle publicly supported 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 podcast in 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.”