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Michelle Obama has finally said something about the divorce rumors that have been plaguing the Obamas over the past few months, but in the process, she may have created more questions than answers. Such as: How random is it that her chosen venue for breaking her silence was One Tree Hill actress Sophia Bush’s podcast, such that now news outlets like the New York Times are having to cite Sophia Bush? But also: For a person who’s ostensibly shutting down breakup speculation, why didn’t she sound more convincing?
This week, Obama was the guest on two episodes of Bush’s show Work in Progress, which Bush has apparently been hosting since 2019 with the mission of featuring “frank, funny, and oftentimes deeply personal conversations with people who inspire Sophia.” (OK!) Obama brought up her marriage in a discussion with Bush over what her schedule looks like these days, sharing that now that her husband is no longer president and her kids are grown up, she feels more empowered to spend her time how she wants to. She referred to one particular “real big example” this year of her looking at her calendar, and “without naming names,” choosing “to do what was best for me, not what I had to do.” In response, people “couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself, that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing,” she went on. “This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions for herself, right? But that is what society does to us.”
It’s pretty clear Obama was alluding to her absences at both Jimmy Carter’s funeral and President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, which, along with what I still maintain was a perfectly nice and normal Instagram post from her husband wishing her a happy birthday but that many people saw as otherwise, prompted weeks of whispering about the state of the Obamas’ marriage. And on the podcast, I couldn’t help but notice that Obama was the one to raise the topic of her marriage and invoke the rumors, not the other way around.
Incidentally, this appearance and exchange is a perfect illustration of one of the problems with celebrity-on-celebrity interviews. If a journalist were steering the conversation, they surely would have had some follow-up questions upon Obama’s mention of the D-word. Bush, though, offered the sympathetic response of someone who has also had the surely unpleasant experience of being the subject of tabloid intrigue—“Yeah, well, there’s always got to be drama if it doesn’t look like other people’s choices”—and chose to move on to kissing the former first lady’s butt about all the “amazing stories” she is telling in her new life as a content creator. But I’m sure Bush knows her audience better than I do and is right that they would rather hear her gush about The Later Daters, the Obamas’ Netflix reality show about senior citizens’ love lives, than hear her ask Obama any actual revealing questions. Besides, if Bush and other celebrities were known for their probing questions, they might find it trickier to book guests, and the whole celebrity podcast economy, of which Michelle Obama is now herself a part, might come crashing down.
As for why else Obama might have wound up talking to Sophia Bush of all people about this, it’s also worth noting that Bush is a longtime activist—she memorably tried to frame her 2022 wedding (to a guy she has since divorced) as a bold act of activism. In a bit of self-flattery, Bush referred to herself during her conversation with Obama as “a person who’s been honored to know you for a long time.” That Michelle: Always palling around with one Bush or another!
So is there any chance this interview actually quiets all the Obama divorce gossip? Though I’ve up to now considered it all pretty unfounded, and can see that the intention behind bringing it up was to point out how ridiculous and therefore untrue it is, I’ll say that the way Obama was talking about living her life for herself in parts of this interview definitely caught my attention. Here’s more of what she said: “I feel like it’s time for me to make some big-girl decisions about my life and to own it fully, right, because if not now, when? What am I waiting for? What am I going to spend the next 20 years, you know, because look, the, you know, the summers are … We’re in summer countdown at 61, right?” She added, “Now is the time for me to start asking myself these hard questions of who do I want? Who do I truly want to be every day?” If you ask me, these don’t sound like the questions a woman is asking herself when she’s deciding whether or not to attend presidential funerals and inaugurations. They sound much more existential. Sorry, they just do! I continue to hope the Obamas are happy, and to think of them breaking up, especially now, would be terribly sad. But I am slightly more open to the speculation now than I was previously. Another reason I hope it’s not true, though? I really don’t want to have to admit that Sophia Bush somehow got the scoop of the century.
