For years the Obamas have given us all relationship goals, but there was reportedly a woman Barack wanted to marry before Michelle.
A new book titled Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama the author, David J. Garrow, claims that the 44th President of the United States had actually proposed marriage to another woman before he met Michelle. However, she turned him down ... twice.
Yahoo Celebrity noted that Garrow's book alleges that while still living in Chicago, Obama proposed to his girlfriend named Sheila Miyoshi Jager.
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The pair lived together when they dated and did talk about marriage, but Jager's mother thought at 23 she was too young to marry the then 25-year-old Obama.
“In the winter of ’86, when we visited my parents, he asked me to marry him," Jager recalled, but said she declined because of her mother's feelings.
She went on to say that Obama's political aspirations eventually got in the way of their relationship.
"I remember very clearly when this transformation happened and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president," Jaeger told Garrow. According to her, trying to come up as a black politician in a racially-charged Chicago and dating a woman who was white (she is of Dutch and Japanese descent) was a liability for Obama.
Despite that, Jager said that he proposed to her a second time before going off to Harvard for law school and her leaving for South Korea to do dissertation work.
“Mostly, I think, out of a sense of desperation over our eventual parting,” she said of the reason for that proposal.
Obama and Jager parted ways and he of course met his future wife, Michelle Robinson, at a law firm in 1989 and for those two the rest is really history.
As for Jager, she is now a professor at Oberlin College.
But had she said "yes" to his proposals, this is the woman that could have very well been our First Lady.