Celia Wade: Michelle Obama is right – every woman resents her husband sometimes

Michelle Obama surprised audiences with her admission about feelings for her husband. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

OPINION:

“There were 10 years when I couldn’t stand my husband.”

Now there’s a headline. Especially when this extraordinary statement has been made by Michelle Obama. Yet when the former First Lady’s comments were broadcast last week, during a TV interview to promote her new book, wives around the world nodded in quiet agreement.

Over the past five days, her comments have prompted women to open up about the complexities of their own marriages in print and in person. To so many this wasn’t extraordinary or even surprising but stating the obvious: it is possible, at times, to dislike the person you love.

In another surprising admission, Obama revealed that this decade did not, as you might think, coincide with her husband’s time in the White House – the period in which the accomplished Princeton graduate and high-flying lawyer was forced to join her husband on the campaign trail, stand grinning beside Barack behind podiums, plant vegetable gardens, have her past, her clothes, her body, hairstyles and her every casual utterance dissected in the media. No, the 10 years of loathing took place, she says, “when those kids were little”.

Michelle Obama's point is “we don’t talk about how much work is required [to make a marriage work] ..." writes Celia Wade. Photo / Getty Images

“For 10 years while we’re trying to build our careers,” she explained, “and, you know, worrying about school and who’s doing what and I was like, ‘Ugh, this isn’t even’. And guess what? Marriage isn’t 50/50, ever, ever.”

I don’t know a single wife who would argue with that. I certainly wouldn’t. When Obama goes on to say: “There are times I’m 70, he’s 30. There are times he’s 60, 40”, it reminds me of something my mother told me on the eve of my wedding day: “There will be times when he’s riding high and you’re not; when you are and he’s not”. What she meant is that a couple won’t always be in sync, that there are so many fluctuations within a marriage but that you need to think of it as the sum of its parts.

Easier to say than to live through, granted. And I suspect more than a few husbands out there would dismiss that notion and characterise Obama’s comments as bitter. Probably the largely absent ones who haven’t noticed the not-so-petty resentments building and believe raising children looks a little like those shampoo ads where sumptuous-maned women gallivant around sunlit cornfields tossing their kids in the air.

Obama’s point is not that marriage is a ghastly life sentence for women, that there isn’t enormous joy in parenting, or indeed that it’s always women who end up making the sacrifices, but that “we don’t talk about how much work is required [to make a marriage work] and how hard it is even when you are madly in love with the person, even when everything works out right”.

Her point is that it’s okay, natural even, to resent the person you are married to from time to time – although since we’re being honest, a decade does sound like a long time - that you can actively dislike a husband, wife, family member or best friend, on occasion, without it chiselling away at the love.

Hillary Clinton has said she felt like "boiling husband Bill in oil" after the Lewinsky scandal. Photo / Getty Images

Being honest about that can only be helpful to women and men, whether they’re newly married, long married or even thinking of saying “I do” in the distant future. After all, most celebrity autobiographies persist in flogging the public a romantic lie. I’m thinking of the famous couples who have probably despised one another for a lot longer than a decade and cheated on one another but persist in putting out marital harmony press releases year after year – complete with double-page spreads of themselves in his and hers bathrobes or engaging in lucrative “vow renewal” photoshoots – all because conjugal bliss is a part of their brand.

There’s a special place in hell not just for the women who, as Madeleine Albright famously said, “don’t help other women”, but for those who deliberately make other wives feel their marriages are flawed if they’re not rose-petals-on-the-bed perfect, 24/7.

When I interviewed Hillary Clinton three years ago, the former First Lady was just as candid as Obama about her marriage. Asked whether, after the Lewinsky scandal broke, she had ever considered divorcing Bill, Clinton almost laughed. “Oh, I thought of everything, Celia. Everything. I thought about boiling him in oil. So sure – of course I thought of divorce. But it was an affirmative decision to stay; it wasn’t a default decision. I made it very thoughtfully and carefully – and I have lived with it ever since.”

To me that, and Obama’s assertion that “I would take 10 bad years over 30″ is more romantic than a thousand boxes of heart-shaped truffles. Although I’m not sure how much romance has to do with it. As anyone whose union has endured that long will tell you, a lasting marriage is made of sterner stuff.