Barack and Michelle: Their Marriage Secrets

An inside look at the First Couple’s life together.

-Christopher Andersen

Jackie Kennedy spoke for nearly every First Lady in recent memory when she reached for Arctic metaphors to describe her marriage to JFK. "We are like two icebergs," she said, "the public life above the water, the private life submerged." In the case of Barack and Michelle Obama, everything seems to be pretty much above the water line. From the moment they stepped on the national stage five short years ago, the Obamas have made the conscious decision to let us in on their troubles — both small (he snores, she nags) and big (Michelle calls their daughter Sasha's bout with meningitis as an infant "the nightmare that brought us closer together.") But there are still some things about the First Couple you may not know:

When they met, Michelle was the one with the big career. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988 — three years before Barack — she went straight to work in the intellectual and copyright department of Chicago's Sidley Austin, one of the world's biggest law firms. By the time Barack arrived there as a summer intern assigned to Michelle ("Barack Obama? Who names their kid Barack Obama? He grew up in Hawaii! Who grows up in Hawaii?”), she was already handling the trademark interests of two of the firm's biggest clients: Barney the purple dinosaur of children's television fame, and Coors Beer.

Read 25 Things You Might Not Know About Michelle Obama

For him, it was love at first sight. For her, not so much. Unimpressed with the rave reviews the young Harvard law student was getting from colleagues ("I've got nothing in common with this guy"), Michelle repeatedly refused to date Barack on the grounds that she was technically his boss. Besides, she told her brother Craig, "Barack and I are the only two black people in the department, and if we start dating it'll just look, well, tacky." Eventually, she relented--but only if they kept their date a secret. They went to see Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing — and there, standing in the lobby, was Michelle's boss Newton Minow, and Minow's wife, Jo. "They were like a couple of teenagers, both obviously flustered that they'd been spotted together," recalled Minow, who had served as head of the Federal Communications Commission under President John F. Kennedy. "It struck us as kind of sweet." Years later, Barack thanked Lee for making the movie. "It was the first time," he told the director, "Michelle let me touch her knee."

"I'm not the sort of girl who just hangs out forever..." Fed up over Barack's reluctance to commit after a nearly three-year courtship, Michelle was ready to call it quits when, over dinner at Gordon's in Chicago, the waiter arrived with the restaurant's signature dessert — flourless chocolate cake. On the plate was a small velvet box containing a one-carat diamond engagement ring. She looked up at Barack in stunned silence. "That," he said, "sort of shuts you up, doesn't it?"