Barack Obama Proposed Marriage To A Woman Before Meeting Michelle

A new biography about former President Barack Obama claims that he asked another woman to marry him in 1986 prior to meeting Michelle Obama at her Chicago law firm. The biography points out that Barack asked this woman to marry him while the two were visiting her parent’s home in Chicago.

The new biography named “Rising Star” written by David J. Garrow, was reviewed Tuesday in the Washington Post. According to the review, Sheila Miyoshii Jager, the woman he proposed to in his early 20s while he was residing in Chicago, declined his proposal and subsequent advances at that time because her mother said she was too young. Obama was 25, while she was 23-years-old then.

Despite Jager’s mother’s disapproval of the couple, the two continued to spend time with each other, but Jager told Garrow that shortly after the proposal in 1986, Obama became more ambitious about his political career.

“I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president,” she said, according to the book. She told Garrow that Obama’s “resolution of his black identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career,” according to the Washington Post review.

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Before leaving for Harvard, Obama proposed to Jager and asked her to get married. However, Jager, who currently works as a professor at Oberlin College, thinks the proposal was mostly “out of a sense of desperation over our eventual parting and not in any real faith in our future.”

Soon after Obama went to study at Harvard Law School, he met Michelle Robinson at the Chicago law firm where she was employed. Following that Michelle and Barack were in a serious relationship, the book says.

According to the book review, Barack was planning to run for Mayor of Chicago or a U.S. Senator. The review also talked of another book at that time, which mentioned that during the 1980s it would be considered a liability for a Black politician to have a wife who was not African-American.

However, Jager was not completely out of the picture when she had come to Harvard on a teaching fellowship. “Barack and Sheila had continued to see each other irregularly throughout the 1990-91 academic year, notwithstanding the deepening of Barack’s relationship with Michelle Robinson,” Garrow wrote in his book, according to the review.

“I always felt bad about it,” Jager reportedly said, according to Garrow’s book.

In Obama’s 1995 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” Jager was virtually written out and compressed into one single character along with two other girlfriends Obama had earlier. Jager also studied anthropology like Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Jager was of Dutch and Japanese origin and she soon realized that they were a natural fit. She told Garrow, that Obama had “a deep-seated need to be loved and admired.”

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Garrow is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr.