These days, it’s tough to find two people more committed to each other than Joe and Jill Biden. Simply put, the two of them make marriage look easy. But would you believe there was very nearly no marriage at all?
When Joe Biden proposed marriage to Jill, she didn’t agree right away. In fact, he had to propose five different times before she agreed to marry him. Why did Jill keep saying “no,” though, and what made her finally say “yes?” Keep reading to find out!
A surprising first date
Long before they were husband and wife, Joe and Jill Biden were just two young people who were dating one another. And when Jill first saw Joe, she didn’t see him as marriage material. In fact, she could hardly see herself dating him in the first place.
The reason for this was that she saw them as coming from two very different worlds. In an interview with Vogue, Jill said, “I was a senior, and I had been dating guys in jeans and clogs and T-shirts, he came to the door and he had a sport coat and loafers, and I thought, ‘God, this is never going to work, not in a million years.’”
Fortunately, the date went very well. They went to go see A Man and a Woman, and when Joe brought Jill back home, he kept things classy. “When we came home … He shook my hand good night … I went upstairs and called my mother at 1:00 a.m. and said, ‘Mom, I finally met a gentleman.'”
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Joe’s sons approved of marriage to Jill
If Joe Biden wasn’t already a believer in love at first sight, Jill most definitely changed his mind. As he later admitted to Drew Barrymore, “My brother set us up on a blind date, and when I went out with her the first time, I knew that this was the woman, I really did.”
Even though Joe knew he wanted to propose to Jill, he held off at first, likely because he didn’t want to scare her away. Given just how often she was destined to say “no,” being cautious about the proposal was probably a good call. Nonetheless, it was Joe’s children that convinced him to finally ask her.
“Beau finally said, ‘Dad, we were talking. We think we should marry Jill,'” Joe told Drew Barrymore. Obviously, everyone was all aboard with the marriage except for one person: Jill. It was going to take a bit of time before she ultimately said yes.
Jill’s hesitation to say “yes”
The primary reason that Jill didn’t immediately say yes to Joe’s proposal, and why she kept declining the next several proposals, was quite simple. She had been married once before, and her subsequent divorce left her rather gunshy about running back into marriage once more.
As she wrote in an article for Time, “After the disappointment of my divorce, I never wanted to feel so out of control of my heart again.” And she was left asking all the hard questions that anyone who has been burned by love would be asking when hit with a marriage proposal. “What if he changed his mind? What if it didn’t work? What if I took another chance, and I was left humiliated? What if I failed?”
Still, things eventually came full circle, and what made Jill say “yes” was the same thing that made Joe ask in the first place: his children.
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The surprising reason Jill finally accepted Joe’s proposal
When Jill finally said yes to Joe Biden’s proposal (his fifth one), the reason was simple. She hadn’t just fallen in love with Joe…she had fallen in love with his children, too.
In her article for Time, Jill explained her decision by saying that she “knew that he and the boys had my heart, and we were too intertwined now to protect ourselves from each other. Marriage license or not, we were already a family.”
After they had been dating for years, Jill realized that she really did love Joe and his kids and they were already a family in all but name. And that was when she decided to marry him and make things official.
Living happily ever after
After Joe and Jill Biden got married, it’s fair to say they lived their own “happily ever after.” Nonetheless, the road got bumpy on more than one occasion.
For example, Jill stood by Joe’s side during his failed presidential bid in the 1980s. She was his rock when Joe became Vice President of the United States and again when he was elected president. And they supported one another through the heartbreaking and sudden death of Beau Biden.
As Jill wrote for Time, Joe made her a promise when they got married that he could never really keep: that their lives would “never change.” She soon realized this was “wildly untrue” because “life is change.” But in a way, the man who had to propose marriage five different times ended up being right in one crucial way: “Joe and I have always had each other.”
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