Michelle Obama, who will become America's next first lady on January 20, opened up about how she first met her husband, a "no-thrills" guy, in a television interview broadcast Thursday, AFP reported.
"I probably did what a lot of people do when they hear about Barack Obama. First, I thought what kind of name is Barack Obama?" Michelle Obama told CNN.
"My assumption was, this guy's got to be a little weird. Probably a little nerdy. I'd already created an image of this very intellectual image of this nerd."
But when she got to know Obama better after he was hired at Chicago law firm Sidley Austin, where she worked, Michelle Obama said: "we clicked right away."
"He told me more about his background, and he fleshed it out a bit more. I found out that his father was from Kenya, his mother was a white woman from Kansas and that he had spent part of his life in Indonesia," she said.
"He was funny. He was self-deprecating. He didn't take himself too seriously. He was very down to earth despite having come from this very exotic background compared to mine."
Obama also stood out for his laid-back style, his wife said.
"He came out of a community-organizing background, right? So that wasn't, you know, Wall Street-button-down wearing suits," she said.
"You were working in communities, and you were, you know, working with single-parent mothers and grandparents raising grandchildren."
Michelle Obama, who says her husband "hasn't changed much over the years," also remarked that he wears the same shirts and pants today as when they got married. Some of his pants even have holes.
"He didn't care about what people thought about him" or about fashion, she said. Rather, he cared about the issues.
He is and always has been a "no-thrills" guy, she added.
