The Truth About Joe & Jill Biden’s Marriage 》

Whenever America elects a new president, we learn more about his life, including his family member. And presidential spouses achieve a kind of worldwide celebrity that many of them never really wanted.

This is the case with Joe and Jill Biden. It was a day of celebration when Joe found out that he had become president-elect. But Jill was likely not that thrilled, especially after decades of playing politics with her husband.

It will all make more sense once you understand the strange truth about Joe and Jill Biden’s marriage.

Airport love

Joe Biden fell for Jill before he even really met her. That sounds sweet on paper, but this was mostly a side effect of Joe getting lonely when he traveled.

Back in the mid-’70s, Joe Biden had to fly quite a bit for various political engagements. He kept seeing a cute woman in New Castle County’s Parks and Recreation advertisements. Thanks to her 2019 memoir Where the Light Enters, we know this woman was Jill.

After seeing this ad, Joe told brother Frankie that this billboard woman was his dream date. Fortunately for Joe, Frankie knew one of Jill’s friends and was able to get her digits. Jill was understandably curious as to how Joe got her number, and she remembers Joe glossing over the answer before quickly asking her out.

He told her, “My brother Frank gave it to me. I just got back into town and was wondering — are you free tonight?” While she said “yes” to the date, this was much less “love at first sight” for Jill the way it was for Joe.

A strange coincidence

Jill Biden is, of course, Joe Biden’s second wife. But in a truly strange twist of fate, Jill met his first wife shortly before her death.

In 1972, Jill met Joe’s first wife Neila Biden. This was at a party celebrating Joe winning his first Senate election. And in her memoir, Jill has nothing but good things to say about Neila. Jill remembers that Neila had an “easy, natural beauty that made her look almost out of place in the frantic crowd” and that she looked “happy, and incredibly proud.”

Both Neila Biden and her one-year-old daughter Naomi would die in a car accident by the end of that year. But Jill is grateful that she had a chance to meet Neila and introduce herself before her untimely death.

Opposites attract

They say that opposites attract. But that wasn’t the case when it came to Jill Biden and Joe… at least, not in her eyes.

As she told Vogue in 2016, the whole thing felt pretty weird. She was concerned about the age gap (Joe is nine years older than her). On top of that, Joe wasn’t like any other guys she had met. “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.”

The good news is that it only took one date for Joe to win her over despite these reservations. She told Vogue about how nice their first date really was: “we went out to see A Man and a Woman at the movie theater in Philadelphia, and we really hit it off.” Joe was even a hit with her mom! “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.’”

So far, so good. But when Joe eventually proposed, it did not go as he had planned!

Second, third, and fourth thoughts

For most couples, a marriage proposal is pretty straightforward: they either say “yes” and there is a wedding or they “no” and there’s a breakup. Leave it to Joe and Jill Biden to really buck the tradition.

When Joe first proposed, Jill actually said no. She knew that marriage to a senator meant giving up her life as she knew it. As she wrote in her memoir (via Time), “I knew that if I married Joe, I’d have to give up my apartment, the only space that was just for me.” Furthermore, “I’d have to quit my job for the boys’ sake … And I’d have to become Jill Biden, senator’s wife. It was all too much.”

Joe asked several more times and kept getting rejected. Eventually, he forced her to make a choice. She remembers that he said, “I’ve been as patient as I know how to be, but this has got my Irish up. Either you decide to marry me, or that’s it — I’m out. I’m not asking again…I’m too much in love with you to just be friends.”

Not the greatest romantic speech in history. But this was enough for Joe Biden to finally win Jill over, and she accepted his proposal.

Jill stands by her man

By all accounts, Joe and Jill Biden have had a happy marriage. But Joe has gotten into some pretty awkward scandals related to women he has met, and Jill is often forced to stand by her man during these scandals.

The most infamous scandal was when Joe is when ex-Nevada State Assemblywoman Lucy Flores of sniffing her hair and giving an unwanted “big slow kiss” on her head (via New York magazine). In a #MeToo moment, this led to a further examination of Joe’s problematic behavior toward women.

Jill had to go on Good Morning America and perform some damage control for her husband. There, she said, “I think what you don’t realize is how many people approach Joe. Men and women, looking for comfort or empathy.” She then claimed that “going forward, I think he’s gonna have to judge — be a better judge — of when people approach him, how he’s going to react. That he maybe shouldn’t approach them.”

Sadly, many political spouses have had to help shield their husbands from such scandals. And this seems to echo her original misgivings about marriage to a powerful politician: in many ways, her life is no longer her own.

Mixed feelings about Joe’s victory

Did Jill particularly want Joe to become president? From everything she’s said, the answer seems to be “no.”

In her memoir, she compares herself to Michelle Obama. According to Jill, Michelle Obama “had a career of her own — the title of First Lady wasn’t one she was seeking, but she believed deeply in Barack’s leadership and did everything she could to support him,” and this is similar to how she felt during Joe’s presidential run. Later in the memoir, she declares that she was far happier to be “working with first-generation college students” and “teaching them to write essays” than she was to be the “Second Lady” when Joe was Vice President.

Her thoughts on the matter aren’t exactly a secret. The Washington Post eventually wrote about their paradoxical relationship with a headline that says it all: “Jill Biden has never wanted to be first lady, but Joe can’t win the White House without her.” Nonetheless, she has been publicly supportive of Joe’s campaign and his victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Perhaps the best example of this comes from her tweet on November 7, 2020. In it, she is humorously covering up the word “vice” on a sign that reads Dr. and Vice President Biden Live Here,” and she proudly tweeted that “He will be a President for all our families.”