Malia and Rory Farquharson reportedly first met on campus at Harvard, where both attend school. TMZ released a video in 2017 featuring Malia kissing an unknown young man while attending her first Harvard-Yale game tailgating party.
Around this time is when Malia began to gain reputation as Michelle and Barack Obama’s “wild child,” and the video of the young lady “making out” with a fellow student in public, as well as footage that captured her smoking a cigarette, cemented that idea in the minds of many.
The mystery man turned out to be Farquharson, a British citizen with a fairly impressive pedigree of his own. The son of Charles and Catherine Farquharson, the chief executive of a London investment firm and an accountant respectively, Rory Farquharson is thought to be the same age as his American girlfriend.
He’s a year ahead at Harvard, however, because Malia took a gap year after completing high school. As with many other well-to-do British families, the Farquharsons have a (very) distant connection to the British royal family.
A second cousin used to be a courtier for Queen Elizabeth and eventually became Deputy Master of the Household for Prince Charles before his position was made redundant during a series of cuts in 2009.
As for Rory Farquharson himself, he seems to be adjusting to life as the boyfriend of the former president’s daughter very well. Since the beginning of their relationship, Farquharson has refrained from making any comments, whether about the relationship or anything else, to the press.
Furthermore, like many other young adults, Farquharson had several social media accounts, but after he and Malia began dating, those accounts were deleted. This is widely regarded as a measure taken to ensure his privacy as well as a measure to protect his well-known girlfriend and her family from any embarrassment or negative press due to his past postings.
The move is also very telling since it was definitely a decision taken with the idea that his relationship with Malia Obama would be a long-term one. That’s probably something that gives Barack Obama a lot of comfort as he makes his own adjustments to seeing his daughter enter the dating world.
Obama is a very proud “girl dad,” and he’s been very vocal over the years about how much he loves and admires his daughters Malia and Sasha. Shortly before leaving the White House, Obama sat down with Abc’s George Stephanopoulos and he spent some time bragging about his daughters. “All I can say is they have turned out to be terrific young women,” Obama said.
They are sweet, kind, funny, smart, respectful people, and they treat everybody with respect.
The proud parent added, “You know, we feel pretty good when…they go to other folks’ houses and when the parents say, ‘Oh, you know, Malia, she’s just so sweet,’ or ‘Sasha helped to pick up the dishes. What is it that you’re doing?’” When a father is that happy with his daughters, it could be difficult for him to accept that his little girls are all grown up and pursuing boys, but Obama seems to be handling this new era in his life just fine.
About a year before Malia Obama and Rory Farquharson were first linked, Obama revealed that he was “pretty relaxed” about the prospect of his daughters starting to date. There were two main reasons the former president was able to feel that way:
One is, Michelle, she’s such a great example of how she carries herself, her self-esteem not depending on boys to validate how you look or you know, not letting yourself be judged by anything other than your character and intelligence.