Michelle Obama Opens up About Years When She ‘Couldn’t Stand’ Barack Obama

Former First Lady Michelle Obama said she “couldn’t stand” her husband, former President Barack Obama, for about 10 years at one point. When the future president was just getting his political career on track and their daughters were young, the Obamas hit a rough patch in their marriage. They married in 1992 and are parents to Malia, 24, and Sasha, 21.

“People think I’m being catty by saying this – it’s like, there were 10 years where I couldn’t stand my husband,” Obama, 58, said during a roundtable with Revolt TV earlier this month, via Entertainment Tonight. “And guess when it happened? When those kids were little.”

Obama said that she learned marriage isn’t always about evenly splitting up roles between spouses. “We’re trying to build our careers and, you know, worrying about school and who’s doing what and what, I was like, ‘Ugh, this isn’t even,’” Obama said. “And guess what? Marriage isn’t 50/50, ever, ever.”

“There are times I’m 70, he’s 30,” Obama continued. “There are times he’s 60, 40, but guess what? 10 years – we’ve been married 30. I would take 10 bad years over 30 – it’s just how you look at it. And people give up… ‘Five years; I can’t take it.’”

Obama and Barack met at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin in 1989 and are both Harvard Law School graduates. They celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary this year. They shared sweet tributes to one another on their Instagram pages.

Elsewhere in her Revolt TV special, Obama talked about the lessons she learned from her father, Fraser Robinson III. Robinson worked at a Chicago water plant and battled multiple sclerosis. He died at 55 when Obama was 27.

“He never felt sorry for himself, he never expected others to do for him, and just the sheer act of him getting up every day and going to work was a statement that – ugh, now I’m going to cry – that stays with me every day of my life,” Obama said of her father, via PEOPLE. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about the lessons he taught us and how he is not here to see any of it, and so much of it is because of him… That is the power of what a working-class Black man can do in the world, which is why I don’t want any Black man out here to think that they don’t have something to offer their kids.”

Obama’s Revolt TV special aired earlier this month and is available in full on YouTube. H.E.R., Kelly Rowland, Winnie Harlow, and Tina Knowles-Lawson joined the discussion, with Angie Martinez as moderator. Obama’s latest book, The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, was published in November.