How they fell in love and lived

Former President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter weren’t supposed to go on their first date.

One Sunday evening in 1945, Jimmy Carter was scheduled to date a beauty queen during a break from the U.S. Naval Academy in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. But after she was busy with a family reunion, the future president looked for another date – and spotted his future first lady.

“I wanted to go on a date because I was getting ready to go back to Annapolis for another period of isolation,” Carter said in a 2015 interview with Oprah Winfrey. “I was driving through Plains and saw Rosalynn on the front steps of the Methodist Church.”

The two went to the movies and Carter said to his mother the next morning, “She’s the one I’m going to marry.”

“She was calm. She was extremely intelligent,” Jimmy Carter told Winfrey after being asked what he knew after his first date with Rosalynn Carter. “But I knew that she was, by the way, very shy and beautiful and there was just something about her that was irresistible.”

Less than a year after their first date, the future president proposed.

“She said no,” Jimmy Carter later admitted. “From then until the end of May, she stuck to ‘no.’ I kept trying and finally she said ‘OK’.”

The former president died Sunday in Plains, more than a year after he announced he would stop medical procedures and move to hospice care. He was preceded by Rosalynn Carter in November 2023.

They were married for 77 years, making them the longest-married presidential couple. Here’s a look at their decades-long marriage and enduring love.

“The best thing that ever happened to me”

In an interview with The New York Times in 2021, Jimmy Carter said marrying Rosalynn was “the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“I was very happy,” he told the newspaper, recalling the couple’s 75th wedding anniversary. “And I love her more now than I did in the beginning – which says a lot, because I loved her very much.”

Rosalynn Carter, who was friends with Jimmy Carter’s younger sister Ruth, recalled the time before they began their relationship in a 2021 interview.

“I spent a lot of time at (the Carters’) house, but he was always at school,” said Rosalynn Carter, then 93. “He was so good to Ruth. He wrote her letters and she talked about him.” And she had his photo on the wall in her bedroom all the time and I literally fell in love with that photo.

Jimmy Carter became president with the help of his wife

When asked what he was “most proud of accomplishing as a couple,” Carter told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Being elected president with Rosa’s good help.”

The former first lady said she loved campaigning and meeting Americans across the country, and she appreciated hearing directly about the challenges they faced.

“I love it. I love campaigning. I had the best time. I have been to every state in the United States. “The last time we ran, I ran a good campaign every day,” she said in 2021, the Associated Press reported.

He later described their marriage as his proudest achievement.

“The best thing I ever did was marry Rosalynn,” Carter said in an interview at the Carter Center in 2015. “This is the highlight of my life.”

For her part, Rosalynn Carter said in 2021 that “everything with Jimmy Carter was an adventure.”

“We were lucky enough to be able to travel almost the world.”

How Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter worked and stayed together

Jimmy Carter and his wife spent decades side by side.

“We figured out a long time ago that we had to share everything. I gave her a lot of space,” Carter told The Washington Post. “She does what she wants and I do what I want. But then we looked for things we could do together.”

After leaving the White House, the two shared a love of humanitarian work. But they also focused on hobbies like tennis, fly fishing and more.

“I think we give each other space and try to do things together. We’re always looking for things to do together like bird watching and fly fishing and just anything we can do together,” Rosalynn Carter told PBS 2021.

And the Carters have long embraced a central rule in their marriage.

“We have a kind of standing rule that we follow quite meticulously – sometimes with great difficulty – and that is not to go to sleep angry,” Carter told Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2017. “We have a lot of arguments about our family, but we try to get over this argument before we go to sleep.

Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter shared their faith

Jimmy Carter also considered his wife his muse.

“She would smile, and the birds would feel like they didn’t have to sing anymore, or maybe I didn’t hear her singing,” Jimmy Carter wrote in a poem called “Rosalynn” from his 1995 book “Always a Reckoning and others”. Poems.

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How they fell in love and lived

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