Former First Lady Michelle Obama shared candid advice on picking your ideal life partner, saying that we should all be looking for our own LeBron James.
Using basketball as an analogy, she referenced the pro athlete as she described how a marriage should be like picking a basketball team - looking for “people you want to win with.”
Michelle spoke about marriage on her self-titled podcast, giving her own advice and sharing an insight into her relationship with former president Barack Obama. She was joined by talk show host Conan O’Brien, whose show she previously guest-starred on last year.
“You can’t Tinder your way into a long term relationship,” she said, advising her listeners to approach their marriages “like you would picking your basketball team.”
She said, “We’d have better marriages because if you’re looking at a team, people you want to win with? Number one you want everybody to be strong. You don’t want any weak links, you don’t want somebody that you can dominate. You don’t want somebody who’s kind of a loser, right?”
“And also, if you’re on a team, you’ve got to be able to do everything — especially in basketball, it’s like, you would never pick somebody that says, ‘I only dribble. I don’t shoot, I don’t defend, I just dribble.’ If we looked at marriage as a real team, you want your teammate to be a winner. You want LeBron,” she said, rather than the guy “third row on the bench.”
Over the course of the podcast episode, she also shared small glimpses into her relationship with Obama. She revealed they initially “went back and forth about the importance or the value of marriage” with herself firmly in the marriage camp, while the former president was more uncertain - referencing his mother’s divorce and grandparents’ rocky relationship as possible contributing factors.
She also opened up about her “fertility issues” early on into their marriage, explaining that their “first tough years came with kids.” Saying that her children Malia and Sasha Obama were a “wonderful joyfulness”, she added that kids could “mess up a marriage” as it brought new challenges into a relationship. She has also previously discussed going to couples' therapy with Obama in the past to work on their marriage.
Saying there were times when she “wanted to push Barack out of the window”, she urged young couples not to give up on their relationships: “Young couples, they face these challenges and they’re ready to give up because they think they’re broken. And I just want to say if that breaks a marriage, then Barack and I have been broken off and on throughout our marriage. But we have a very strong marriage.”
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“If I had given up on it and if I had walked away from it, then I would have missed all the beauty that was there,” she continued.
The Michelle Obama Podcast can be listened to on Spotify.
