'2 people who love each other'
THE OBAMAS | Michelle's brother once said of Barack: 'Nice guy. Too bad he won't last.' He was wrong.
Her scolding him for not picking up his dirty socks. The chest-thumping family Scrabble tournaments. Date nights with the kids in tow.
The cynics will say the Barack and Michelle Obama love story has been carefully scripted to convince voters that this is an ordinary, imperfect couple to whom anyone in America can relate.
(AP file)
Perhaps, but those closest to the Obamas say the only contrived part of the marriage is the hard, sometimes frustrating, work that has led to almost 16 years of enduring love.
In a way, family and close friends say, the Obamas' relationship is anything but a typical American love story.
"It's unusual to have so strong a bond and so strong a marriage as the two of them have," says Michelle Obama's close friend Valerie Jarrett, a top campaign adviser. "They work very hard at it. It's not easy."
And when -- in an arena filled with 20,000 screaming supporters -- Barack Obama looks into his wife's eyes, it's as though they are newlyweds once again and they see no one but each other, Jarrett says.
If the South Side Democrat is successful in November, he and Michelle will make history as the nation's first African-American president and first lady.
The Obama romance began in the spring of 1988 -- with more fizzle than sizzle.
Michelle Robinson was a first-year attorney at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. Word rippled through the law office that a hot-shot Harvard law student would be working at the firm that summer. The future Michelle Obama saw a photograph of the new hire and was less than dazzled.
"I thought, OK, he's probably not all that terrific, and he's probably kind of a clown, and then I found out that his name was Barack Obama," Michelle Obama recalled in a 2004 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. "And like everybody else, I thought, 'Well, what kind of name is that?'"
And then Michelle learned she'd been assigned to mentor the new guy. In the flesh, though, Barack was less geeky than he appeared in his photo, and he wasn't the cocky Harvard student she'd been expecting.
He had both a worldly charm and a genuine desire to help the less-fortunate. Michelle found herself laughing at the same things as Barack. If she was cynical about something, he seemed to see it that way, too.
"I was charmed, and we became instant friends after [the] first conversation," Michelle Obama said.
Barack went a step further -- he told Michelle that he wanted to date her. At first, she said no -- repeatedly. She wasn't keen on office dating. Michelle even tried to fix him up with other young women. But the future U.S. senator wouldn't give in.
"Eventually I wore her down," he wrote in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.
Their first date included a day at the Art Institute of Chicago, a drink at the top of the John Hancock Center, and a movie -- Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing."
"He swept me off my feet," said Michelle Obama, recalling how her date made her laugh and intrigued her with his "deep understanding" of art.
Sitting on a curb, they shared their first kiss over Baskin-Robbins ice cream.
"I asked her if I could kiss her," Obama wrote. "It tasted of chocolate."
Michelle Obama's brother, Craig Robinson, remembers meeting Barack while he and Michelle were still dating.
"He was very, very low key," recalled Robinson, a Princeton graduate who now coaches the Oregon State University basketball team. "I loved the way he talked about his family because it was the way we talked about our family. I was thinking, 'Nice guy. Too bad he won't last.'"
But at one point, Michelle, who'd had few serious boyfriends, confided in her brother: "I really like this guy."
First, Michelle's suitor would have to pass a test. The Robinson men believed you could tell a lot about a person by the way they play basketball.
At his sister's urging, Craig Robinson -- a Princeton basketball star -- took Obama to play a pickup game.
Obama was "confident" and "very team-oriented," Robinson recalled recently.
"If the test had proven negative, who knows what would have happened," Robinson joked.
Obama's family got their chance to take a measure of his future bride when Obama took her to Honolulu for Christmas.
"From the start, Michelle was a ready convert to our lazy and fun Christmas rituals," said Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, recalling family Scrabble tournaments and a brunch of pancakes, cheddar cheese eggs and fresh O.J.
It took two years for Obama to finally propose. Though she knew he didn't fear commitment, Michelle had become a bit irritated with his struggle over whether marriage had become an outdated institution.
Over dinner at Chicago's swanky Gordon restaurant, now Naha, the future presidential nominee was singing the same tune, Michelle thought. But he had a peculiar smirk on his face. The waiter arrived with dessert. On the plate -- a box with a ring inside.
"So I'm sort of stopped in my tracks," Michelle Obama recalled years later. "... He's like, 'That kind of shuts you up, doesn't it?'"
Barack and Michelle were married in October 1992 at Trinity United Church of Christ. Their reception was held at the South Shore Cultural Center, which was once an elite private club off limits to African Americans and Jews.
"It was magical," said Jarrett of the wedding. "They were clearly madly in love with each other."
Michelle wore a traditional, off-the-shoulder white dress. In keeping with Barack's Kenyan roots, some of the guests wore traditional African dress.
The couple honeymooned along the California coast.
"They reveled in the majesty of the cliffs and the water," Soetoro-Ng said.
As Barack Obama wrote in his 2006 book, the couple spent the first few years of their marriage adjusting to each other's moods, quirks and habits. The same year the couple married, he began practicing civil rights law with the downtown firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland.
Six years later, the couple's first child, Malia, was born.
"For three magical months, the two of us fussed and fretted over our new baby, checking the crib to make sure she was breathing ... singing her songs, and taking so many pictures that we started to wonder if we were damaging her eyes," Barack Obama wrote in his second book.
In 1997, Obama was sworn in as a state senator.
The family lived in a first-floor condo in Hyde Park. Many of the stories about Obama's messy habits come from their time in that comfortably cluttered home. Michelle Obama has called her husband's office, tucked behind the kitchen, "The Hole." The Obamas were living there when their younger daughter, Sasha, was born.
Home family fun sometimes included a little Dancing with the Obamas.
"Our daughter will have us turn on Michael Jackson, and she and our little one will perform for us," Michelle Obama said in 2004. "And Barack will get up and dance with them every now and then. ... He thinks he's a much better dancer than he is, but he's not bad."
But along with the fun came serious marital stresses. Obama talks about it in his second book. Things began to get particularly rough during his ill-fated 2000 run for Congress. Michelle was juggling her own career and motherhood, which meant the couple had little time for intimacy.
To Michelle Obama, it seemed her husband was never at home.
"You only think about yourself," a frustrated Michelle Obama would tell her husband. "I never thought I'd have to raise a family alone."
What got the couple through the rocky times, Obama has said, is his wife's strength and her willingness to "manage these tensions and make sacrifices on behalf of myself and the girls."
Friends and family say Obama, even with the unique pressures and demands of a presidential campaign, never forgets his family. When he's on the road, he does his best to call home every night, friends say.
If he wants to talk to his girls, he knows he has to reach them before bedtime, Jarrett says.
"It's 10 minutes to eight, and he's rushing out the door because he knows Michelle will put the kids to bed promptly at eight," Jarrett says. "She does not keep them awake waiting for their father to call."
And Michelle Obama said in a recent TV interview that her husband remains "very romantic." The couple have date nights -- that often include the kids. Their Father's Day "date" was at Roy's, a River North eatery that features "Hawaiian fusion" cuisine.
Even after nearly 16 years of marriage, he frequently gives her flowers. Sen. Obama has been known to surprise his wife with a downtown spa package.
Yvonne Davila, a close friend of Michelle Obama's, says the couple's relationship may sound kind of Pollyanna-like, but at its core, it's a "great marriage."
"These are two people who love each other," Davila said. "For me, more importantly, there's a huge respect on both ends."