In 2019, the First Lady Jill Biden published one of her most memorable works -- Where the Light Enters -- a story of the Biden family. It's a story of love, the tasks of marriage, and how she built the Biden family. The book is replete with interesting anecdotes of how Joe and Jill met and how they started dating and how they got married but this quote on marriage remains the most remarkable as Jill Biden did not paint a rosy picture of getting married to a politician -- to eventually become the First Lady. In simple words. she explained what marriage is and what a good marriage is.
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"Good marriages push us—not to become someone else but to become the best version of ourselves," Jill Biden wrote.
Jill Biden's first marriage
Jill and Joe's marriage was neither of their first marriage and both of them had their equal share of suffering. Jill married Bill Stevenson, a former college football player, in February 1970. They met as college students at the University of Delaware. In this book, Jill called this marriage a mistake of youth though she acknowledged that she truly believed sometimes that they were destined to each other.
"He was charismatic and entrepreneurial and eventually started his own business," she wrote of Bill. "We rented a sleek modern house. Suddenly, I wasn’t just a student, eating cheap food and living in student housing any longer—now I was a wife... My parents didn’t object; in fact, my parents loved him. And most importantly, I thought I had found a love like my parents’, a partnership built on loyalty and devotion."
"For a moment, we were happy. I had found my Prince Charming, and I was sure it would last forever," she added.
Jill Biden wanted a marriage like her parents who loved each other until their last day on this earth. But Jill did not find that love in Bill and had to take the hard decision of divorce. She wrote that she did not know anyone divorced back then. "The very idea horrified me. It meant failure, and in my still-young life, I had never failed at anything serious."
A blind date in 1975
Joe Biden was already a senator at that time. Jill met him at the victory party in 1972 for the first time, as Jill's first husband Bill, was a big supporter of Biden's Senate campaign. Three years after the first meeting, Jill Biden went on a blind date after her divorce and it happened to be with Joe Biden.
Joe Biden, by that time, lost his wife Neila and their one-year-old daughter Naomi in a car accident. Their two sons Beau and Hunter survived but were seriously injured. The accident took place soon after his Senate win and Joe Biden even considered resigning from the Senate after this personal tragedy.
In 1977, Joe and Jill got married and in 1981, they became parents to Ashley Biden. Another tragedy befell the Biden family in 2015 when Beau Biden died of brain cancer at the age of 46.
