Barack and Michelle Obama are celebrating a major milestone: Twenty-five years of marriage. And the former first lady marked their anniversary with the most perfect tribute.
“A quarter of a century later, you’re still my best friend & the most extraordinary man I know. I ? you,” Michelle, 53, wrote in an Instagram post published on Tuesday, October 3. In the photo, the 44th President and the Harvard Law School graduate are seen beaming on their wedding day in 1992.
The parents of daughters Malia, 19, and Sasha, 16, tied the knot at Chicago’s Trinity Church of Christ in front of 200 guests. “It was beautiful,” Michelle’s close friend, PR exec Yvonne Davila, once told Us Weekly of the couple, who met in 1989. “Her dress was beautiful. She was happy. She was marrying the man she loves.”
Now, 25 years later, the couple are solid as ever. In Barack’s emotional farewell speech in January 2017, he praised Michelle for taking on her role “with grace and grit and style and good humor” and for making the White House “a place that belongs to everybody.”
“Michelle, for the past twenty-five years, you’ve been not only my wife and mother of my children, but my best friend,” he said, through tears, at the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago. “A new generation sets it’s sights higher because it has you as a role model. So you have made me proud and you have made the country proud.”
The 56-year-old also praised their girls, who were children when they moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Under the strangest of circumstances, you have become two amazing young women, smart and beautiful, but more importantly, kind and thoughtful and full of passion,” he gushed. “You wore the burden of years in the spotlight so easily. Of all that I’ve done in my life, I’m most proud to be your dad.”
