Michelle Obama seems to be a magnet for nagging rumors. Sometimes it’s that she’s secretly lying in wait to launch a presidential campaign of her own (she’s said definitively she isn’t, and never will), and lately, the scuttlebutt’s been equally dramatic but much more personal: that she and Barack are on the fast track to divorce.
Pretty much any famous couple will be subject to rumors of a split at various points in their public lives, but these divorce rumors about the Obamas flared up after Michelle was notably absent from Jimmy Carter’s state funeral and Donald Trump’s second inauguration, both of which Barack attended solo. The Obamas have left the speculation unaddressed — until this week, when Michelle spoke out about it on Sophia Bush’s podcast Work in Progress.
The conversation started innocuously enough, with Bush telling the former first lady, “I want to know what your life and your social life looks like right now.”
“It is whatever I want, Sophia, It’s whatever I want,” Michelle answered. “It’s the first time in my life all of my choices are for me.”
Here’s where the divorce rumors come in: Michelle explained that making those personal choices often comes with the pressure of meeting other people’s expectations, and deciding to act purely for her own best interest is what led to rumors about a possible split.
“That’s the thing that we as women struggle with — disappointing people,” Obama said. “I mean, so much so that this year people couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself. That they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing. This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions herself, right? But that’s what society does to us. We start actually going, What am I? What am I doing? What am I doing this for? And if it doesn’t fit into the sort of stereotype of what people think we should do, then it gets labeled as something negative and horrible.”
Though Obama didn’t specify, we could assume that not attending Carter’s funeral or Trump’s inauguration are among those choices she made solely for herself. As we already know, politics isn’t her favorite arena — in fact, her husband recently said he was in a “deep deficit” with Michelle after the intense commitments of his eight-year term as president. “I have been trying to dig myself out of that hole by doing occasionally fun things,” he told a crowd at Hamilton College on April 3.
On Bush’s podcast, Michelle explained she’s feeling liberated now, as compared to the days when she would turn down invitations to things she wanted to experience, using excuses like, “‘I have to make sure the girls are okay,’ or ‘My husband’s president, so I can’t do that.'” But that’s since changed, she said.
“Now, you know, I can’t blame my decisions and indecisions on anyone other than me,” Michelle explained. “I think if I’m honest with myself, I could have made a lot of these decisions years ago. But I didn’t give myself that freedom.”
One way she’s exercising her freedom these days is by devoting time to her newly launched podcast, IMO, which she co-hosts with her brother, Craig Robinson. “With everything going on in the world, we’re all looking for answers and people to turn to,” Michelle said about the show. “My brother Craig and I launched the IMO podcast to create a space for people to come as they are, ask honest questions, give their opinions, and have thoughtful conversations about life.”
