Joe Biden Names Jill's Emotional Reason For Finally Accepting His Marriage Proposal After Five Tries

Joe and Jill Biden's marriage may seem perfect nowadays, but it sure didn't start out that way. The current president and his beloved first lady originally got together a few years after Joe lost his first wife to an accident. Jill was in college at the time and didn't think that Joe, who was the senator of Delaware back then, was a good match for her. 

"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,'" she recalled in an interview with Vogue, adding that their nine-year age gap worried her too. "But we went out to see 'A Man and a Woman' at the movie theater in Philadelphia, and we really hit it off."

Jill continued, "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 and Jill dated for a couple of years before tying the knot, but the former VP had to propose to her five separate times before Joe finally got Jill to say "yes." 

Joe Biden already knew that he wanted to marry Jill Biden from the very first time they met. In a joint interview on "The Drew Barrymore Show" (via Twitter), the commander-in-chief confirmed that it was love at first sight. "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," Joe confessed. And, while Joe had always intended on proposing, it was his young sons, Hunter and Beau — who were only six and seven years old at the time — who convinced him to take the plunge. 

"Beau finally said, 'Dad, we were talking. We think we should marry Jill,'" he shared, detailing how he asked her multiple times before she finally agreed. Sweetly, Jill's decision involved the boys, too. As Joe revealed, "Later after it was all over, I call[ed] my sister, I said, 'What made her change her mind?' She told me [Jill] fell in love with the boys." In her book, "Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself," Jill also recounted Joe's proposals and the reason she finally said yes, acknowledging she knew that nothing was more important than his sons. 

Even so, "I could feel his love, and I knew it was forever, unconditional. I knew that he and the boys had my heart, and we were too intertwined now to protect ourselves from each other," (via Time).