Relationships Talk

My grandmother, who raised me, loved to give me relationship advice. When it came to marriage, one of her favorite sayings was, “Always respect each other. Once respect is lost, it’s hard to get it back.”

Toni Coleman, a licensed psychotherapist and relationship coach, said that parents can make a great resource for marriage advice. “Parents have years of experience that have taught them many lessons about love,” she told Business Insider.

Coleman said that many parents have learned what love is and is not, how it can change for the better or worse, and how, in marriage, it will be tested and tried in ways no one anticipates when they say “I do.”

“If we’re open to what our parents have to share, we could be spared a lot of grief learning it all the hard way,” Coleman said.

Here, I asked 15 people for the best marriage advice they ever received from their parents. (Responses have been condensed and edited for clarity.)

From their many adorable Instagram tributes to each other to rocking out together at Jay-Z concerts, Barack and Michelle Obama’s marriage seems to be the stuff of fairy tales. But even America’s favorite #couplesgoals couple has had their fair share of relationship struggles.

In a new interview for the December issue of Elle, the former First Lady admitted to Oprah that their marriage of 26 years has not always been as easy as they make it look. “When you get married and have kids, your whole plan, once again, gets upended. Especially if you get married to somebody who has a career that swallows up everything, which is what politics is,” Obama said, noting that being married to Barack taught her how to “swerve.” “But his swerving sort of—you know, I’m flailing in the wind,” she added.

She went on to explain that both she and her husband had a lot on their plates—he was traveling between Washington and Springfield while she was trying to hold things down at home—so they decided to go to counseling to work on their relationship.

“Well, you go because you think the counselor is going to help you make your case against the other person. ‘Would you tell him about himself?!’ And lo and behold, counseling wasn’t that at all,” she says. “It was about me exploring my sense of happiness. What clicked in me was that I need support and I need some from him. But I needed to figure out how to build my life in a way that works for me.”

For Obama, counseling also helped her learn to communicate and understand love in a different way, she explained: “I feel vulnerable all the time. And I had to learn how to express that to my husband, to tap into those parts of me that missed him—and the sadness that came from that—so that he could understand.” She continued, “He didn’t understand distance in the same way. You know, he grew up without his mother in his life for most of his years, and he knew his mother loved him dearly, right? I always thought love was up close. Love is the dinner table, love is consistency, it is presence. So I had to share my vulnerability and also learn to love differently. It was an important part of my journey of becoming. Understanding how to become us.”

In an interview with Good Morning America on November 9, Obama also elaborated on why she’s chosen to speak publicly about her and her husband’s decision to go to counseling. “I know too many young couples who struggle, and think somehow there’s something wrong with them,” Obama told host Robin Roberts. “I want them to know that Michelle and Barack Obama—who have a phenomenal marriage and who love each other—we work on our marriage and we get help with our marriage when we need it.”

She noted that while it may often feel like marriage is “supposed to be easy,” counseling can be a good opportunity to learn.

“What I learned about myself was that my happiness was up to me and I started working out more, I started asking for help, not just from him but from other people,” she said. “I stopped feeling guilty.”

https://twitter.com/GMA/status/1060875880363307009

See more: Michelle Obama Helped a Chicago Couple Say Their “I Do’s”

Obama, who is currently promoting her upcoming memoir, Becoming, also shared to GMA how she had a miscarriage 20 years ago, and how she hopes telling story will help destigmatize fertility issues.

“I felt lost and alone, and I felt like I failed,” she said. “Because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were, because we don’t talk about them. We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken.”

Becoming hits shelves on Tuesday and will no doubt be filled with even more marriage advice from the house of Obama.

Michelle Obama is opening up about her relationship with her husband, Barack Obama.

The 54-year-old former first lady speaks to Oprah Winfrey for a primetime special on OWN —  which is set to air Nov. 15 at 8 p.m. ET/PT — ahead of the release of her book, Becoming, on Nov. 13. Excerpts of the conversation, which will also be released in Winfrey’s podcast on Nov. 15 and Nov. 19, debut in Elle‘s December issue.

In the magazine, Obama tells Winfrey that she’s decided to be open because “I don’t want young people to look at me here and now and think, ‘Well, she never had it rough. She never had challenges, she never had fears.'”

Throughout her book, Obama details her meticulous life plan: good grades, good school and a high paying job. After a while, Obama “hated” her job as a lawyer in Chicago, Illinois, but decided to stick it out on the advice of her mom. That decision to stay led her to meet her now-husband, someone who definitely didn’t fit into her plan.

“I met this guy Barack Obama. He was the opposite of a box checker. He was swerving all over the place,” she tells Winfrey, 64. “Barack Obama taught me how to swerve. But his swerving sort of, you know, I’m flailing in the wind.”

The pair fell in love, got married and eventually had two children — Malia, 20, and Sasha, 17 — through in-vitro fertilization. Though their love never waned, her husband’s rising political career led to disagreements, largely about quality time together.  

“There was work we had to do as a couple. Counseling we had to do to work through this stuff,” she says. “… You go because you think the counselor is going to help you make your case against the other person. ‘Would you tell him about himself?!’ And lo and behold, counseling wasn’t that at all. It was about me exploring my sense of happiness. What clicked in me was that I need support and I need some from him. But I needed to figure out how to build my life in a way that works for me.”

As a result of counseling, Obama came to terms with her “vulnerability” and learned “to love differently,” something she calls “an important part of my journey of becoming. Understanding how to become us.”

Eventually, her husband’s political career had risen enough to make running for president a real possibility. While she knew that “Barack was a decent man” and “smart as all get-out,” she was initially hesitant about the campaign.

“Politics was ugly and nasty. I didn’t know that my husband’s temperament would mesh with that. And I didn’t want to see him in that environment,” she reveals. “But then on the flip side, you see the challenges that the world is facing. The longer you live and read the paper, you know that the problems are big and complicated. I thought, Well, what person do I know who has the gifts that this man has? The gifts of decency, first and foremost, of empathy second, of high intellectual ability. This man reads and remembers everything, you know? Is articulate. Had worked in the community. And really passionately feels like ‘This is my responsibility.'” 

“How do you say no to that? So I had to take off my wife hat and put on my citizen hat,” she says.

After winning the election, Obama did her best to maintain normalcy in their house and in their family.

“That was one of the things I brought into the White House — that strict code of, ‘You gotta catch up with us, dude.’ This is when we’re having dinner. Yes, you’re president, but you can bring your butt from the Oval Office and sit down and talk to your children,” Obama says. “Because children bring solace. They let you turn your sights off the issues of the day… And hearing about what happened with what school friend. Immersing yourself in the reality and the beauty of your children and your family.”

What followed was eight years in the White House, something that Obama only began to come to terms with after moving into their first post-presidential home. During the initial weeks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Obama found herself for the first time in nearly a decade, and celebrated by doing something totally mundane — making toast.

“So here I am in my new home, just me and [my dogs] Bo and Sunny, and I do a simple thing. I go downstairs and open the cabinet in my own kitchen — which you don’t do in the White House because there’s always somebody there going, ‘Let me get that. What do you want? What do you need?’ — and I made myself toast. Cheese toast,” she recalls. “Then I took my toast and I walked out into my backyard. I sat on the stoop, and there were dogs barking in the distance, and I realized Bo and Sunny had really never heard neighbor dogs. They’re like, What’s that? And I’m like, ‘Yep, we’re in the real world now, fellas.'”

She continues, “It’s that quiet moment of me settling into this new life. Having time to think about what had just happened over the last eight years. Because what I came to realize is that there was absolutely no time to reflect in the White House… We were busy. I would forget on Tuesday what had happened on Monday. I forgot whole countries I visited, literally whole countries… So the toast was the moment that I had time to start thinking about those eight years and my journey of becoming.”

Watch the video below for more with Obama:

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