Joe And Jill Biden Have A Bigger Age Gap Than You Might've Known
Jill and Joe Biden's age difference is probably more significant than you might have realized — though not as big as some Americans mistakenly believe. "She was 12; I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done," Biden said in a September 2022 speech at the National Education Association Headquarters, drawing laughter from the crowd. The internet went up in flames as many interpreted Joe was inferring he had met Jill when she was a preteen.
"People laughing in the crowd because it's not their 12 year old daughter that was involved with a 30 year old. Horrific," one user tweeted. A few days after his speech, conservative pundit Matt Couch posted a photo to Instagram of a young Jill sitting in Joe's lap with the infamous quote attached to it. But Joe wasn't talking about Jill. He was addressing an old friend he recognized in the audience, USA Today pointed out. At the time, Joe's reference to his friend being 12 was presumably a joke about how well she's aged compared to him.
When Jill met Joe on a blind date in March 1975, she was already in her 20s and about to graduate from the University of Delaware with an English degree. Not only that. She had already been married once before and was in the home-stretch of her divorce proceedings by then. (Jill's divorce was finalized two months later.) She was definitely an adult, but she was still a lot younger than Joe.
Joe Biden is nearly a decade older than Jill
Jill Biden was born in June 1951 while Joe Biden was born in November 1942. That means he was 8-and-a-half years old when his future second wife was born. When he and Jill met, he was 32 and she was 23. The age difference did seem like a problem for Jill initially. "He was 9 years older than I am!" she exclaimed in a 2016 Vogue interview. And he looked it, too. Still a college student at the time, Jill was used to guys who were nothing like Joe.
"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 said. When they returned from seeing "A Man and a Woman" in Philadelphia, Jill thought that the problem had been the other men she was used to. "I went upstairs and called my mother at 1:00 a.m. and said, 'Mom, I finally met a gentleman,'" she recalled.
But all the evidence hasn't stopped the Bidens from being at the center of fake narratives about her being a teenager when they met. In 2021, shortly after Joe assumed the presidency, a viral post started to circulate claiming a 15-year-old Jill had been babysitting for Joe and his first wife, Neilia Biden, when the relationship started. The post used a photo shared by Jill herself in 2020, seen above.
Joe Biden was younger than his first wife
While Joe Biden does have a considerable age gap with Jill Biden, he doesn't have a history of dating younger woman. Neilia Biden (pictured above) was, in fact, older than him — not by a lot, but older nonetheless. Neilia was born in 1942, the same year as Joe, but in July, making her about four months his senior. They were both in college when they met in the Bahamas during spring break of 1963. Despite being a bit older, Neilia was a sophomore at Syracuse University while Joe was a already a junior at the University of Delaware.
At 30, Neilia, who became Joe's first wife in 1966, died along with their 1-year-old daughter Naomi in a car accident in December 1972, shortly after he was elected senator. Joe, with the help of his siblings, raised their surviving sons, Beau and Hunter, as a single father until Jill came along three years later. His brother, Frank Biden, was responsible for introducing him to Jill. In some ways, Joe believes Neilia wanted the two to meet, he said in the Vogue profile.
Joe is grateful he has been lucky enough to fall in love twice. "No man deserves one great love, let alone two," he said on the "Jay Shetty Podcast" in July 2023. "For real. The two women that I married, one passed away, were women I knew, when I went out with them the first time, I wanted to marry them."