Barack and Michelle Obama in August 2023.
The couple have been married since 1992 and share two daughters
Barack Obama has a new reason to add fun things to his schedule.
During a conversation with Hamilton College President Steven Tepper on Thursday, April 3, the former president, 63, said he was “in a deep deficit with my wife” after his two terms in the Oval Office ended, per The Daily Beast.
“So I have been trying to dig myself out of that hole by doing occasionally fun things,” Obama, who has been married to Michelle Obama since 1992, continued. Obama and Michelle, 61, have two daughters, Malia, 26, and Sasha, 23.
The Obamas have been open about the strain being in the White House put on their marriage in the past. In December 2022, Michelle said there was a decade during their relationship when “she couldn’t stand” her husband.
“People think I’m being catty by saying this — it’s like, there were 10 years where I couldn’t stand my husband,” she said in a conversation with Revolt T. “And guess when it happened? When those kids were little.”
The Obamas lived in the White House from January 2009 to January 2017.
In May 2023, when Obama was asked about those remarks on CBS Mornings, he replied, “Let me just say this: it sure helps to be out of the White House. And to have a little more time with her.”
“Michelle — when our girls were growing up, that was priority number one, two, three and four,” the former president continued. “And so, I did not fully appreciate, I think, as engaged of a father as I was, the degree of stress and tension for her, knowing that not just me and Michelle were under scrutiny and in this strange environment, but that we were raising our daughters in a kind of situation that just wasn’t normal.”
In a 2018 conversation with PEOPLE around the release of her book Becoming, Michelle said she and her husband once saw a marriage counselor. “There were definitely times when I wished things were different… but I don’t think I ever thought, ‘I’m just checking out of this,’ ” Michelle said.
More recently, Michelle told her brother, Craig Robinson, in a talk at SXSW how she and Obama have stayed “sane” amid the gossip and rumors they faced during his time in office and since leaving the White House.
“Through it all, what kept us sane — and we tried to instill this in our daughters — is, you cannot live through social media,” she said in March. “I don’t think I have ever once looked at a comment section, period.”
