Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama brushed off recent divorce rumors on an episode of her podcast released Wednesday — and the former first lady asserted “there hasn’t been one moment in our marriage where I thought about quitting my man.”
“Wait, you guys like each other?” Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s older brother, asked on the latest episode of their podcast, “IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson,” as the former first couple embraced.
“She took me back,” Barack Obama joked. “It was touch and go for a while.”
“It’s so nice to have you both in the same room,” Robinson said. Acknowledging the rumors, Michelle Obama said, “I know, because when we aren’t, folks think we’re divorced.”
Robinson spoke about how he had recently been approached by a concerned woman in an airport who asked him, “how’d he mess up?” referring to the former president.
“We’ve had some really hard times and we’ve had a lot of fun times, a lot of adventures, and I have become a better person because of the man I’m married to,” Michelle Obama said.
The Obamas, who have been married since 1992, had faced increased speculation about the state of their marriage in recent months, after the former commander-in-chief made several public appearances without his wife — including the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter in December and the second inauguration of President Trump in January.
Michelle Obama addressed those absences with actress Taraji P. Henson on an April episode of her podcast, saying, “people couldn’t believe that I was saying ‘no’ for any other reason, they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart.”
“It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was perceived as right, but do the things that was right for me, that was a hard thing for me to do,” Michelle Obama said at the time.
It wasn’t the first time the former first lady spoke about the realities of her marriage in the years since leaving the White House. She wrote about her relationship with Barack Obama in two bestselling memoirs, “Becoming” and “The Light We Carry,” and discussed it in a number of interviews, including one with Gayle King on “CBS Mornings” in 2023.
“Marriage is hard,” Michelle Obama told King. “We’ve been married for 30 years. If I fell out with him for 10 and we had a great 20 years, I’d take those odds anytime.”
Wednesday marked Barack Obama’s first appearance on his wife’s podcast, which launched in March, about a year after Michelle Obama concluded her last podcast project, “The Light Podcast.” The couple previously appeared together on her first podcast, “The Michelle Obama Podcast,” in September 2020.
