Michelle Obama has revealed why she and her husband, Barack, don’t make many public appearances together anymore amid speculation about the state of their marriage.
On Thursday, the former first lady was a guest on NPR’s Wild Card podcast with Rachel Martin, where she said she’s not photographed alongside Barack because of their age.
“The fact that people don’t see me going out on a date with my husband sparks rumors of the end of our marriage,” Michelle said. “It’s like, OK, so we don’t Instagram every minute of our lives. We are 60. We’re 60, y’all. You just are not gonna know what we’re doing every minute of the day.”
The couple first sparked divorce rumors when Michelle did not attend Jimmy Carter’s funeral and President Donald Trump’s inauguration back in January.
Speaking to Martin, Michelle defended her decision to skip the events, regardless of how the general public may have viewed it.
“One of the major decisions I made this year was to stay put and not attend funerals and inaugurations and all the things that I’m supposed to attend,” she said. “That was a part of me using my ambition to say, ‘Let me define what I want to do, apart from what I’m supposed to do, what the world expects of me.’ And I have to own that. Those are my choices.”
“Whatever the backlash was, I had to sit in it and own it. But I didn’t regret it, you know? It’s my life now, and I can say that, now,” she added.
The former first lady has previously addressed the rumors she was divorcing her husband back in April during an appearance on Sophia Bush’s Work in Progress podcast.
“The interesting thing is that, when I say ‘no,’ for the most part people are like, ‘I get it, and I’m OK,’” she said at the time, referencing people who ask her if she’s getting divorced.
“That’s the thing that we as women, I think we struggle with disappointing people. 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 for herself, right?” she added. “But that’s what society does to us. We start actually, finally going, ‘What am I doing? Who 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.”
