By Daniel M | February 9, 2020

During a conversation with Oprah Winfrey on Saturday, former First Lady Michelle Obama revealed that she and her husband, the former President Barack Obama, went through marriage counseling to get through “tough times” that followed the birth of their two daughters.

Daily Mail reported that Michelle sat down with Oprah in front of 15,000 people as part of the 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus Tour with WW at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. There, she opened up about seeing a therapist to get through difficult times in her marriage.

“Sometimes you need an objective person to just hear you out,” Michelle said. “It taught me that I was responsible for my own happiness. I didn’t marry Barack for him to make me happy. No one can make me happy.”

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“If I’m going to show up equal in this partnership, I have to be able to make myself happy and so I had to stop focusing on what he wasn’t doing and start thinking about how to carve out the life that I wanted for myself, with or without Barack,” she continued. “The more I succeeded in defining myself for myself, the better I was in my partnership.”

“And you call [Barack] your soul affirming partner?” Oprah asked. “Is it more so now in 28 years than earlier. Does it keep getting better? Or it’s more seasoned?”

“It’s all of that. And this is what I keep trying to tell young people. Marriage is hard and raising a family together is a hard thing. It takes a toll,” Michelle replied.

Michelle went on to say that throughout the difficult times in their marriage, friendship has been the core of her relationship with Barack.

“We’re coming back to that point where we see each other again because some of the hardest times in our lives we just escaped, we survived it,” she said. “We went through a tough time, we did some hard things together. But now we’re out on the other end and I can look at him and I still recognize my husband. He’s still the man I fell in love with.”

During a previous interview, Michelle revealed she pushed for couple’s counseling because she wanted to “fix” Barack.

“I was one of those wives who thought, ‘I’m taking you to marriage counseling so you can be fixed, Barack Obama.’ Because I was like, ‘I’m perfect.’ I was like, ‘Dr. X, please fix him,'” she said. “And then, our counselor looked over at me. I was like, ‘What are you looking at? I’m perfect.'”

“But marriage counseling was a turning point for me, understanding that it wasn’t up to my husband to make me happy, that I had to learn how to fill myself up and how to put myself higher on my priority list,” she continued.

This piece originally appeared on Objectivist.co and is used by permission.

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