The woman who Barack Obama proposed to – twice - before he met Michelle was seen quietly getting on with academic life this week after revelations about their relationship emerged in a new presidential biography.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager, 53, appeared in good spirits as she walked with a female friend on the campus of liberal arts Oberlin College where she is a professor of East Asian studies.
Jager revealed she was the former president’s first love in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by Pulitzer prize-winning biographer David J. Garrow.
She shared secrets of their relationship including that she continued to see Obama on and off for at least a year after he met the First Lady.
‘I always felt bad about it,’ Jager told Garrow.
Even after Obama began dating Michelle, he continued to see Sheila throughout the 1990-91 academic year
Her husband, Jiyul Kim, said that his wife did not wish to speak about the book when contacted by DailyMail.com at their home.
Jager, who is of Dutch and Japanese descent, received her Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Chicago, where she was studying in the mid '80's when she met Barack Obama, then a community organizer.
The couple dated for a couple of years and met each other’s families before splitting up.
Yet Jager was almost entirely omitted from Obama's own biography, Dreams of My Father, where she was simply combined with his other white exes into one character.
According to Rising Star she played a huge role in Obama's formative years. So much so that even after Barack met his wife-to-be Michelle, he kept seeing Jager on and off for at least a year, the book claims.
The couple were very much in love in the late-1980s when they were living together in Chicago, according to Jager, who described them as being 'an island unto ourselves.'
They even had a cat together named Max.
Their relationship quickly progressed and in the winter of 1986, while visiting Sheila's parents, Barack popped the question, Jager told Garrow.
But Jager's parents were concerned that she was too young - Jager was 23 and Obama was 25 - and she had to turn down his proposal.
They remained together, and Jager began to realize her then-boyfriend's 'deep-seated need to be loved and admired.'
Jager told Garrow that Obama became 'so very ambitious very suddenly.'
'I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.'
But Obama believed he needed to 'fully identify as African American' to fulfill his political ambitions - and believed that having a non-black spouse could damage his prospects, according to the book.
This reportedly put pressure on Obama's relationship with Jager who is of Dutch and Japanese heritage.
Kim, 59, served in the U.S. Army for three decades and was on duty at the Pentagon during 9/11
By the time he was getting set to leave for Harvard Law School, their relationship was rocky.
But Obama was not ready to give up on Jager, and proposed to her for a second time - asking her to join him in Harvard.
Again Jager turned him down.
She believed that his proposal was 'out of a sense of desperation over our eventual parting and not in any real faith in our future.'
According to Garrow, Obama made emotional judgments on political grounds. A close mutual friend of the couple recalls Obama being concerned about running for president with a white wife.
