Former US first lady Michelle Obama has hit out at people who have assumed she and former president Barack Obama are divorcing.

The 61-year-old has been married to Obama for 32 years, and she has hit out at people making assumptions about her relationship, simply based on her making her own decisions since the couple left the White House in 2017.

“The interesting thing is that, when I say ‘no,’ for the most part people are like, ‘I get it, and I’m OK’,” She told the Work in Progress with Sophia Bush podcast.

“That’s the thing that we as women, I think … we struggle with disappointing people.

“I mean, so much so that this year people were … they couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself, that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing.”

Obama argued that if people didn’t fit the “stereotype” others expected of them, then their actions were portrayed in a certain way.

This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions for herself, right?” she said.

“But that’s what society does to us.

“We start actually, finally going, ‘What am I doing? Who am I doing this for?’.”

“If it doesn’t fit into the sort of stereotype of what people think we should do, then it gets labelled as something negative and horrible.”

Obama — who has daughters Malia, 26, and Sasha, 23, with her husband — is in a place where she wants to be “making some big girl decisions” after entering her 60s.

“If not now, when? What am I waiting for? How am I going to spend 20 years?” she said.

“Now is the time for me to start asking myself these hard questions of, ‘who do I truly want to be every day?’.”

“I’m trying to do that more and more, so what does it look like? It looks like whatever I want it to look like, and I still find time to give speeches and to be out there in the world and to work on projects.”