As former TV host and entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey continued her 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus Tour with WW series, she sat down with former first lady Michelle Obama during an all-day interview and invited the Princeton/Harvard grad to open up about numerous aspects of her life, including the personal side of her marriage to President Barack Obama. 

During the discussion, Oprah asked Obama if she feels closer to her husband after being married for 28 years and if she feels that marriage 'gets better' or becomes 'more seasoned?'

Obama responded by saying, "It's all of that. And this is what I keep trying to tell young people. Marriage is hard and raising a family together is a hard thing. It takes a toll." 

After this, the former first lady delved into some of the more challenging years of their marriage and explained that through all of the ups and downs, their friendship acted as an anchor to their relationship.

Obama described the current state of their relationship with her usual candor, saying, "We're coming back to that point where we see each other again because some of the hardest times in our lives we just escaped, we survived it. We went through a tough time, we did some hard things together. But now we're out on the other end and I can look at him and I still recognize my husband. He's still the man I fell in love with."

She said that at one point, they went to couple's therapy to improve their marriage and she described the benefits of therapy, saying, "It taught me that I was responsible for my own happiness. I didn't marry Barack for him to make me happy. No one can make me happy."

"If I'm going to show up equal in this partnership, I have to be able to make myself happy and so I had to stop focusing on what he wasn't doing and start thinking about how to carve out the life that I wanted for myself, with or without Barack."

"The more I succeeded in defining myself for myself, the better I was in my partnership."

In Obama's book, Becoming, she briefly discussed the same subject, letting readers in on what it was like to go to therapy with President Barack Obama.  

Oprah's interview with Obama took place in front of an audience of 15,000 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.