At best, it’s a partnership in which the two parties involved evolve a series of best practices that keeps the relationship on an even keel and empower themselves with strategies and ‘what-to-do-when’ rituals that prevent the other party from blowing up, retreating or walking out.

Each marriage goes through ecstatic peaks and dismal lows till it reaches a kind of flat middle ground that is, by then, welcomed by both parties.

Most marriages also draw strength and sometimes even hiding places behind them, seeking escape from the pressures of being responsible for a whole lot of things. Sounds complicated? But most of us try our luck and while some retreat in haste, others bite the bullet and brave on till the end.

If marriage is such an adventure and challenge for us ordinary mortals, can you imagine what it is being married to the President of the United States? Or, for that matter, being the First Lady of the US? Theirs is a marriage that is played out on the biggest and possibly the most widely watched and discussed stage in the world.

I recently caught up on The New York Times’ White House Correspondent Jodi Kantor’s book, The Obamas, A Mission, A Marriage and by the time I had read the last page and put the book down, my significant other had almost moved out of our room because she can’t sleep when the lights are on half the night.

The book is about as close a look as we can hope to get about the way the two most important people in the US — the President and his wife — live within the confines of their home and how their love and, indeed, their life, pans out in public. The genesis of the book itself came from a 2009 interview that Kantor did with the Obamas, on their marriage. Asked about the challenges of having an equal marriage when one of the partners in the marriage is the President, Kantor says the First Lady let out a sharp “hmmmmpfh” as though she was finally relieved somebody had asked. The President, she says, took three stop-and-start tries to respond, finally ending with, “My staff worries a lot more about what the First Lady thinks than they worry about what I think.” Michelle Obama, Kantor says, rescued him by responding with an answer about how their private decisions were made on an equal basis.

And that, it seems, is the crux of the issue and that of Kantor’s book. When you are the President and First Lady of the US, there’s nowhere private you can go to sort out your private matters. In fact, you cease to have anything private. Even her husband, Michelle Obama seems to have discovered at some point, was not hers for the asking.

The Obama’s lives, from the time he became President, has been a tug-of-war between a man who has the most important job in the world and the woman he loved and married, before he got politically ambitious. Theirs was an equal marriage in every sense, both of them have Harvard law degrees, were both ambitious and had a social conscience.

All that changed with his becoming Senator and Michelle’s first taste of anxiety and uncertainty about his political ambitions, when he became a long-distance husband and father.

Well that was just a tame trailer, it would seem, when it came to their life together in the White House. Michelle played the role of the supportive mate to the T during Obama’s campaign to become President but when they finally moved in, Kantor says both parties were not probably prepared for the fact that their lives would run on two almost parallel tracks. He leading his largely in the Oval Office, while she lived hers, with her children, surrounded by her aides, but with mostly no well-formed role.

It certainly affected their marriage where, from a marriage of equals, she was overnight catapulted into the White House and expected, by its suffocating, conservative traditions, to take a backseat. For a visibly strong woman, this could have been hard to take.

Kantor’s book provides an up-close look into the First Couple’s life. Most women would baulk when told that a particular dress or purchase was way too expensive and probably not needed. Michelle Obama, it seems, has spent her years in the White House being constantly chided, albeit indirectly, by her husband’s aides and image managers, about her unconventional and mostly big-label sartorial choices. She wanted clothes, makeup and shoes that made her and indirectly, the President, look and feel good but the aides thought it was the wrong image to send out to the public, in a recessionary phase in the economy.

While his staff in the West Wing insisted she restrict herself to appearance in community events and talk about her life in magazines such as Good Homes, she got her back up on them by accepting the invitation to appear on the cover of Vogue.

The tension in the couple’s relationship is also believed to have come from the fact that Michelle was unhappy and often angry with her husband’s aides and staff for keeping her from having a meaningful role in his official life and, more importantly, because she felt they were not serving her husband enough or giving him the right advice.

The flashpoint of the face-off between the aides and the First Lady, with the President caught in the cross-hairs, seems to have come when the couple’s ambitious health care bill almost went off the rails and seemed to be headed for a defeat, because of what she thought was inept handling by his staff.

In particular, she often had issues with Rahm Emanuel, his first Chief of Staff, who according to Kantor, wanted her to be a warm, welcoming First Lady who greeted tour groups and a partner who buoyed the President’s spirits rather than deflating them. He is believed to resented the fact that she gave him a hard time with her unflinching and unfailing criticism. She, on the other hand, is believed to have suffered because she thought her husband was losing faith in himself and their common vision of bringing about a change. While Rahm wanted Obama to scale back his healthcare efforts, Michelle wanted him to push them forward, linking them often to all their shared sacrifices. In the end, Obama did her bidding and Michelle was happy, at least for that moment.

The book has an almost fairy-tale ending with Michelle Obama — the woman who almost considered staying back in Chicago with their two kids while Barack became President — opting to put the full force of her support to Obama’s re-election bid. If she hates politics, she certainly does not show any signs of it now, says Kantor who writes about her enthusiasm at fund-raisers, community meetings and on the campaign trail.

That was the way she could get back against the Republicans who had blocked and humiliated her husband. Michelle Obama is in her “mama bear” mode these days and she usually is that way when her husband is threatened, Kantor writes. This is Obama’s last race and she will make sure she will win it for him, she writes.

patrick@khaleejtimes.com