When comparing recent presidents, it’s difficult not to remember how tight Barack Obama was with his family. He seemed to really want to give his children a better world with the power of his office. And he clearly has nothing but love and respect for Michelle Obama, someone who has always been his source of strength.
Wait, did we say always? It turned out Barack Obama was once very much in love with another woman. These two came close to getting married even before Barack met Michelle, and they stayed in touch far longer than you might think. Just who is this woman, and what caused her relationship with Barack Obama to fall apart? Keep reading to find out!
Barack Obama had many girlfriends
Before meeting Michelle, Barack Obama actually had plenty of rather serious girlfriends. As USA Today points out, one of those women was Alex McNear, someone whom he met at Occidental College and developed a close relationship with. Barack wrote her plenty of love letters, and now that these letters are public, many have been fascinated to see what the future president was thinking and feeling when he was younger.
Another woman that Barack Obama had a serious relationship with was Genevieve Cook. As Vanity Fair notes, she was a teacher three years older than Barack. She kept a detailed journal about their relationship and noted after it was over how much more she had always been into him than he was into her. Specifically, she wrote that “from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things and he’d let go and ‘fall in love’ with me.”
Unfortunately, that never happened. Barack would fall in love with the next woman, and he very nearly started a life with her rather than Michelle.
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The love of his life before meeting Michelle
Before Michelle came along, the greatest love of Barack Obama’s life was Sheila Miyoshi Jager. She is currently a college professor (it seems the former president has a thing for teachers). And in terms of intensity, it seems this relationship was full of the major sparks that Barack’s relationship with Cook seemed to lack.
According to the Daily Mail, the two of them were living together in Chicago in the mid-1980s. For a time, they seemed to live only for one another, and later biographer David Garrow would describe Obama and Jager as being “an island unto themselves” in those days. Unfortunately, things started to fall apart with the very event meant to bring them together: Barack Obama proposing marriage.
Barack proposed marriage to her (twice)
According to the New York Post, Barack Obama proposed marriage to Jager when they were at her parent’s house. Unfortunately, at least one parent helped to sabotage these plans. One of the reasons that Jager turned down his proposal of marriage is that Barack kept having lively political arguments with her Republican father.
Another reason she declined, though, is that she felt they were too young to be rushing into marriage. There is a certain bitter irony here because the next time Barack proposed marriage, it was already too late for them to succeed.
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Why their relationship fell apart
Later, Barack Obama would propose to Sheila Miyoshi Jager one more time. He was about to leave for Harvard and saw this as a desperate way to keep their fragile relationship together. This actually caused them to split up for good, especially once Jager realized Obama expected her to drop her own career to follow him.
Arguably, though, Barack already knew their relationship was doomed before that second proposal. As the Independent reports, biographer David Garrow has written that Barack didn’t want to marry her because he was already thinking about running for president and now had “a heightened awareness that to pursue it he had to fully identify as African American.”
In other words, he worried that if he was a Black man with a wife who wasn’t Black, it could hurt his political chances, especially in Chicago’s local political scene.
Keeping in touch even after meeting Michelle
Barack Obama eventually met Michelle Robinson (later to be Mrs. Michelle Obama) and almost immediately fell in love with her. And they’ve had an amazing relationship together now, including decades of marriage and raising two lovely girls together.
But as The Washington Post writes, one of David Garrow’s more outrageous claims in his biography of Barack Obama is that Barack Obama continued to see Jager for a time even as he continued to date Michelle. As Garrow writes, they “continued to see each other irregularly throughout the 1990-91 academic year, notwithstanding the deepening of Barack’s relationship with Michelle Robinson.”
We’ll likely never know what the former president was thinking or feeling at that time. But the idea that he was at least temporarily juggling multiple women certainly sheds new light on what we thought we knew about the Obama family.
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