Barack Obama was once in love

◆ Passionate love: "the most profound romance"

In December 1983, Genevieve went to a friend's Christmas party in New York's East Village. At the time, she was a graduate student at Bank Street College and a teaching assistant at Friends School in Brooklyn, where she lived with her mother and stepfather.

Genevieve didn't know anyone except the owner. Bored, she slipped into the small kitchen on the right side of the corridor. She looked for a glass, but instead thought, Why not drink from a bottle? That's what she does. A filter-free Camel or Lucky Strike would be even better.

In the kitchen was a young man in blue jeans, a T-shirt and a dark leather jacket. His name is Barack Obama. After a casual exchange of pleasantries, they went their separate ways.

A few hours later, in the middle of the night, Genevieve rose to say goodbye to her host. Mr. Obama stepped forward and asked her to stop. They sat down in a corner of the living room and began to chat.

This chat is not tight, two people have a feeling of regret. We feel so close and so similar: we've been to so many places, but we don't feel like we belong.

When the time came to part, they exchanged phone numbers and were reluctant to part. Just six months after graduating from Columbia University, Obama embarked on "one of the most profound romances of his youth." He was 22 and Genevieve was 25.

After only knowing each other for a few weeks, the two began dating frequently.

Confused: "22 years old, how can you be so old?" In pieces

Genevieve came from a good family. His father was a distinguished Australian diplomat and his mother an art historian, the scion of a Melbourne banking family. When Genevieve was 10, her parents divorced and her mother soon married into a wealthy American family.

Genevieve rarely spoke of her origins, and Obama offered her an escape. She sees herself in Obama's league.

In Mr Obama Genevieve finds a similar soul: caught between the cracks and suffering. This mental sympathy was at once gratifying and strangely distant and wary. When she said "I love you" to Obama, the response was not "I love you too" but "thank you," as if grateful that someone loved him.

On January 26, 1984, she wrote in her diary: "He is only 22. How can he be so old? I was frightened by his appearance... Distance, distance, distance, and caution."

"His enthusiasm can be deceptive," she wrote on Feb. 25. "He talks sweet words, appears open and trustworthy, but has an air of indifference."

March 22. "I'm still curious about Barack, but there's so much about him that I can't get to. Prudence, restraint."

Obama's caution and restraint are not only related to his upbringing, but also to his ideological change at that time. Obama works for Business International, a nearly three-decade-old firm that edits and updates newsletters and reference materials for corporations.

Obama is a low-level employee, doing research and writing reports, which obviously doesn't fit his ambitions. Genevieve had a vague sense that he had a grand future in him. He wanted to fly, but he wasn't ready to take off.

In social circles, they go in and out as lovers. The most often attended parties are those hosted by Pakistani friends. They are very hospitable, with great food and many programs.

Obama is abstemious and refuses alcohol and drugs. Genevieve loved the party, but always came home early, and Obama often politely shrugged off his friends' offers to stay. Genevieve knew he wasn't doing it for himself, he was doing it for something else.

"Barack Obama, more than anyone I know, has worked hard to build his own identity, and his achievement is really to build his own identity in the modern world," mahmoud said. It was a significant time for him. First, he became not international, but American. Second, he doesn't look white anymore, he looks black."

The breakup: an unbridgeable racial rift

In Dreams From My Father, Obama highlights the racial rift between him and his "New York girlfriend" that inevitably led to their breakup. He gave an example. One day they went to see a new play by a black playwright.

It was a very angry but also funny play, full of typical black humor. The audience was mostly black, and everyone was laughing and clapping. After the show, "My friend asked me why black people are so angry all the time, and I said it's about memory -- nobody asks why Jews are obsessed with the Holocaust, it's the same thing. But she doesn't think so. She says anger isn't the answer. We had a big fight about it in front of the theatre. Back in the car, she cried.

She said she couldn't be black, she would be black if she could, but she couldn't.

Mr. Obama wrote about another experience in his memoir that exposed the cultural differences between him and Genevieve. One weekend in the late fall of 1984, Genevieve convinced him to visit his parents' home in northwestern Connecticut.

They paddled across a lake strewn with autumn leaves, surrounded by beautiful woods. Genevieve's parents were very kind. They knew every inch of their home, how the landscape came to be, the names of the first white settlers and the Indians who settled there before them.

The house was very old, the property of Genevieve's grandfather's grandfather. The library is filled with vintage books and photographs of Genevieve's grandfather with celebrities, including presidents, diplomats and entrepreneurs.

"Standing in the library, I felt as if we were two worlds apart, as far apart as Kenya and Germany," Obama wrote. I knew that if we lived together, I would eventually enter her world. After all, I've done that for most of my life. Between us, I'm the one who knows how to survive as an outsider."

Years later, when Genevieve read Obama's autobiography, what struck her most was the pressure the library put on Him and his assertion that he was the only one of the two who knew how to live as an outsider. In fact, it was Obama, not Genevieve, who ended up closer to the world of presidents, diplomats and entrepreneurs as an insider. "Ironically," Genevieve says, "he navigates the corridors of power much more easily than I do."

By the end of 1984, Obama had resigned from business International and was staying with Genevieve, planning to return to Hawaii for Christmas and find a new place when he returned to New York. This brief cohabitation life is not happy, two people often quarrel for some small things, each other depressed. Before leaving for Hawaii, Genevieve bought Obama an expensive white sweater that had holes in his original one. Obama was a little embarrassed because the sweater wasn't cheap.

They ended their relationship in mid-May. Soon after, Obama accepted an invitation from Jerry Kelman to do community work in suburban Chicago. He took the white sweater Genevieve had given him to keep him warm on Chicago's cold winter days.

Years later, he met Michelle in a prominent Chicago law firm. She was "strong, upright, laughing, smart, a fighter" and, crucially, black. In 1992, Obama married the woman he described as "the ideal of a teenage boy."