Barack Obama and Michelle Obama addressed the ongoing rumors of their divorce in a new episode of her podcast, “IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson.”
The episode featured the former president speaking about a variety of topics, including the fact that people began to speculate that the couple had split up after Michelle didn’t join Barack at Donald Trump‘s inauguration in January.
“She took me back!” Barack joked on the podcast. “It was touch and go for a while.”
“It’s so nice to have you both in the same room together,” Robinson, Michelle’s brother, replied. Michelle added, “I know, because when we aren’t folks think we’re divorced.”
Robinson recounted being approached by a woman at an airport, who asked him about the couple’s marriage. He said she asked him, “What did he do?”
“These are the kinds of things that I just miss,” Barack said. “So I don’t even know this stuff’s going on and then somebody will mention it to me and I’m like what are you talking about?”
Michelle confirmed that she and her husband are perfectly fine, responding, “There hasn’t been one moment in our marriage where I’ve thought about quitting on my man. And 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.”
This isn’t the first time Michelle has used her podcast as a platform to clarify rumors about herself and the former president. She discussed her decision to skip the inauguration in an episode earlier this year.
“My decision to skip the inauguration, what people don’t realize—or my decision to make choices at the beginning of this year that suited me were met with such ridicule and criticism,” she noted. “People couldn’t believe that I was saying ‘no’ for any other reason that they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart.”
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Elsewhere in the new episode, Barack discussed the challenges of raising sons and how he believes communities need to support young men. “If you’re not thinking about what’s happening to boys and how they are being raised, then that can actually hurt women, and I would argue that some of the broad political trends we’ve seen not just in this country but around the world have to do with this sense of boys, men not feeling as if they are seen, feeling as if they count,” Barack said. “That then makes them more interested in appeals by folks who say, ‘You know what, the reason you don’t feel respected is because women have been doing this or this group has been doing this or that group’s been doing this.’ And that is not a healthy place to be.”
He added, “We rightly have tried to invest in girls to make sure that there’s a level playing field and then they’re not barred from opportunities. But we haven’t been as willing, I think, to be intentional about investing in the boys, and that’s been a mistake.”
