Jill Biden has opened up about her relationship with husband President Joe Biden and how they have handled their arguments through text messages.
The First Lady recalled how she and Joe, who’ve been together for over 40 years, have communicated with each other during an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, which saw her pose on the cover of the magazine’s June-July issue.
According to Jill, in order to avoid having spats in front of the Secret Service, back when Barack Obama was president, they would stick to having their disagreements through text messaging, a routine to them that is known as “fexting”. She then remembered how she recently sent him a photo of himself looking somewhat annoyed.
“Joe said, ‘You realise that’s going to go down in history. There will be a record of that,’” she explained. “I won’t tell you what I called him that time.”
During the interview, the 70-year-old former professor also reflected on her relationships before Joe, as she got married to her first husband, Bill Stevenson, at 18, and got divorced in her mid-twenties.
Jill then detailed how during her divorce, she struggled financially, which helped her encourage her and Joe’s daughter Ashely, 40, to “be independent”.
“I knew I would never, ever put myself in that position again—where I didn’t feel like I had the finances to be on my own, that I had to get the money through a divorce settlement,” she explained. “I drummed that into Ashley: Be independent, be independent. And my granddaughters—you have to be able to stand on your own two feet.”
Joe also has a 52-year-old son, Hunter, with his first wife Neila Hunter, who died in a car crash in 1972 with their one-year-old daughter, Naomi. Joe and Neila’s first child, Beau, died at the age of 46 in 2015 due to brain cancer.
Jill has previously opened up about her marriage with Joe and how they try to carve out time for each other. During an interview with Vogue in June 2021, she said that even though they’re “so busy,” they make sure quality time with each other is “part of the day”.
“And so we have to, I think, try a little harder to make time for one another,” she explained. “Even the thing about having dinner together: Sometimes we eat on the balcony; last night we ate in the yellow Oval, upstairs. It’s just part of the day that we set apart, and we still light the candles, still have the conversations, still put the phones away.”
