Joe Biden Proposed to Wife Jill Five Times Before She Said Yes

When President Joe Biden was sworn in as 46th President of the United States of America on January 20, 2021, the new First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, his wife of nearly 44 years, was by his side. The inauguration was a solemn and historic moment, to be sure, but the Bidens are used to facing all sorts of challenges together. When they met in 1975, Joe Biden was a young senator from Delaware, a widower, and a single father to two small children while Jill Jacobs Stevenson was a college senior who had just split from her first husband. It’s unlikely that they imagined that their love story and resulting partnership would eventually take them all the way to the White House.

Per Biography, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania on November 20, 1942, to Joseph Biden Sr., who worked cleaning furnaces and as a used car salesman, and Catherine Eugenia “Jean” Finnegan Biden. His family moved to Delaware when Joe was 13 years old. He attended the University of Delaware where he studied politics and history and played football.

On a spring break trip to the Bahamas, he met Syracuse University student Neilia Hunter and, in his words, “fell ass over tin cup in love — at first sight.” Biden started law school at Syracuse University in 1965 and he and his first wife Neilia married in 1966. They moved to Wilmington, Delaware in 1968 where Biden began practicing law and was elected to New Castle County Council. The Bidens had three children in three years—Joseph, who went by Beau, in 1969, Robert, who goes by Hunter, in 1970, and Naomi, who went by Amy, in 1971. In 1972 Biden ran a tight race for Senator against a popular Republican incumbent and won, becoming the fifth-youngest elected United States senator in the history of the United States at 29 years old.

In the spring of 1975, Joe Biden’s brother, a classmate of Jill’s, set up a blind date between Joe and Jill. In an interview with Vogue, Jill Biden remembered that first date: “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.’ He was nine years older than I am! But we went out to see A Man and a Woman at the movie theater in Philadelphia, and we really hit it off. 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.’ ”

Joe Biden reportedly proposed to Jill five times before she accepted. Jill Biden told Vogue she put him off so much “Because by that time, of course, I had fallen in love with the boys, and I really felt that this marriage had to work. Because they had lost their mom, and I couldn’t have them lose another mother. So I had to be 100 percent sure.” In his 2007 memoir Promises To Keep, Joe expressed particular gratitude for Jill, writing “She gave me back my life. She made me start to think my family might be whole again.”