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Michelle Obama Discusses Her New Book 'Becoming' With Michelle Norris

Source: Paul Marotta / Getty

If you’ve started reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming (which is sooooo good by the way and needs to become required reading for all), then you have a better understanding of how her relationship with Barack Obama came to be than you probably had before. While she was working as a junior associate at a law firm in Chicago, he came in as an intern from Harvard’s prestigious law firm whom she helped to acclimate to the business. They would hang out and get lunch as friends (she would even try and hook him up with another friend), before they inevitably came to the conclusion that they had deeper feelings for one another. From then on, they were head over heels in love with one another, and it helped that Barack wasn’t one to waste time. He knew he wanted to be with Michelle, told her he loved her sooner than later, and his upfront approach was something that she encourages other men to practice out here who are actually serious about finding their certain someone.

“Falling in love all over the place. I fell hard and fast and deep and quick, but we still didn’t marry until we got to know each other,” she said to moderator Michele Norris at the Boston book tour stop recently. “So by the end of that summer, Barack had told me that he loved me. Brothas, another thing, do not play games! He wasn’t playing games. That was another thing! He was like, ‘I love you, let’s figure this out.’ It wasn’t like, ‘Well, I’m trying to do these kind of things.’ Trust me, I had plenty of that, people just trying to keep their options open. I was sick of that. Barack was like, ‘Nope, this is who I am, this is what I think we want. Let’s give it a shot.’ He was clear, gentlemen. He. Was. Clear.”

Maybe it was fate (if you believe in that type of stuff) that helped them meet up and fall in love, but it also didn’t hurt that, according to Michelle, she “wasn’t thirsty” and ready to do or deal with things she wasn’t comfortable with. That’s the type of way she encourages other women to go about dating, too.

“High bar, ladies. High bar. Keep your bar high,” she said. “Because it’s hard enough with a high bar, it’s hard. So you don’t want to start making huge, huge compromises in who you are and how you want a man or a partner to show up in your life. And I think it helped that I wasn’t looking. That I wasn’t thirsty. That I was pushing him off a little bit and he had to work a bit.”

With two kids and 26 years of marriage under their belt, it’s clear that their way of going about the courting process worked out pretty fantastic, am I right?

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