Persistence was key in the love affair between President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden.
The Bidens appeared on “The Drew Barrymore Show” Monday, where they gave a peek into their decades-long relationship. The couple married in 1977.
Biden told host Drew Barrymore that it took five times before the longtime teacher finally accepted his marriage proposal.
“When I went out with her the first time, I knew this was the woman. I really did,” he said, adding that his youngest brother Frank Biden set them up on a blind date in 1975. “Only twice in my life have I ever fallen in love. Both times I knew immediately.”
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Biden’s first wife Neilia died in a car crash in 1972, along with their daughter Naomi. The couple’s sons Beau and Hunter were in the vehicle and survived. Beau later died of brain cancer in 2015.
Beau and Hunter were the ones who pushed Biden to continue his efforts in pursuing the first lady, despite her previous rejections. “My boys — our boys — were young and they came in and said, ‘Dad, we were talking. We think we should marry Jill,'” Biden recalled.
Biden’s final proposal came after returning from South Africa in an attempt to see Nelson Mandela, who was still imprisoned at the time.
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“I came back, got off the plane in Philadelphia, drove straight to her apartment, knocked on the door,” Biden recalled being wound up as he said, “‘I’m asking you one more time. You don’t have to say when, but if you say no, I understand, and that’s it.’ I looked at her and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ She goes, ‘OK.’ Swear to God.”
The president later learned from his sister Valerie Biden Owens, who was friends with Jill Biden, that his now-wife finally decided to say yes because “she fell in love with the boys.”
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Jill Biden chimed in, adding, “I had to make absolutely sure that this marriage was going to work because (the boys) had lost their mother and they had lost their sister. I knew that it had to work because they had lost so much. They had to feel secure that this marriage would work.”
The couple also took a five-question pop quiz about each other on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” with Biden coming up short on a few answers about Jill Biden. He guessed just three correct answers.
Biden was correct in guessing that the Truman balcony, which is part of the private residence, is his wife’s favorite place in the White House, that she’d now prefer to stay in on a free Friday night and that he was the first one in their relationship to say “I love you.”
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“Oh, that’s easy. Me. I said it first,” Biden said. “I said it first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth.”
But he flunked on questions about what the longtime community college professor snacks on from the White House kitchen when she’s starving and wants to be naughty, and the habit of his that she’d like to change.
He said he thought she’d want him to “not talk to everybody I see” but the first lady said her husband of 45 years “leaves his reading light on at night” and she’d like him to start a new habit by turning it off.
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The Bidens taped the interview on Dec. 9, according to the White House. Asked if the president is a good “gift giver,” the first lady confirmed that he is.
“One thing that Joe gives me every year is a poem,” she said. “He has a book that he bought for me and every year he writes a poem.”
For a birthday, he gave her a rose garden. “A full rose garden. I loved that gift,” she said.
Biden said he feels good about her Christmas present this year, but obviously couldn’t reveal what it is.
“He pretty much gets it right,” Jill Biden said.
Contributing: The Associated Press
