Nikki Haley met her future husband while attending Clemson University. In her book “Can’t Is Not an Option,” Nikki detailed meeting her husband Michael Haley and how she quickly persuaded him to change his first name. “After we started dating, I looked at him one day and said, ‘What’s your name?'” Her partner was understandably perplexed by the question, confirming that his name was, in fact, Bill. “You just don’t look like a Bill,” she told him, before requesting his full name. “William Michael,” he responded, which led Nikki to start addressing him by his middle name instead, and this apparently caught on with other people. “Everyone who knew him before I did knows him as Bill, and everyone who met him after I did knows him as Michael,” she wrote. “He looks like a Michael.”
Nikki and Michael tied the knot in 1996 at a Methodist church in Hilton Head, although their wedding wasn’t without some drama. Hurricane Fran, which hit North Carolina between August and September of 1996, caused the couple to delay their wedding for safety reasons. Nikki also decided to convert to Christianity from Sikhism upon her marriage. In a cute Facebook post from September 2015, Nikki paid tribute to her husband, writing, “We met 26 years ago at Clemson. I was 17 and Michael Haley was 19. Today we are celebrating 19 years of marriage. We have grown up, lived, laughed, and loved together. How fun it has been!”
