'We've been blessed': How Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter reflected on their historic marriage

Former President Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter weren't supposed to go on their first date.

On a Sunday night in 1945, Jimmy Carter, on a break from the U.S. Naval Academy in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, was supposed to go out on a date with a pageant queen. But after she was busy at a family reunion, the future president sought another date – and laid eyes on his future first lady.

"I wanted to have a date because I was getting ready to go back to Annapolis for another time of isolation," Carter told Oprah Winfrey in an interview in 2015. "I was cruising around Plains and saw Rosalynn on the front steps of the Methodist church."

The two went to a movie, and Carter told his mother the next morning: "She's the one I'm going to marry."

"She was quiet. 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 very timid, by the way, 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 late May, she maintained 'No.' I kept trying, and finally, she said 'OK.'"

The former president died Sunday in Plains, more than a year after announcing that he was ending medical intervention and moving to hospice care. He was preceded in death by Rosalynn Carter in November 2023.

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

'The best thing I’ve ever had happen to me'

In an interview with The New York Times in 2021, Jimmy Carter said marrying Rosalynn was "the best thing I've ever had happen to me."

“I’ve been very happy,” he told the newspaper, reflecting on the couple's 75th wedding anniversary. "And I love her more now than I did to begin with – which is saying a lot because I loved her a lot."

Rosalynn Carter, who was friends with Jimmy Carter's younger sister Ruth, recalled in a 2021 interview the time before they started their courtship.

"I spent a lot of time at (the Carters') house, but he was always off at school," said Rosalynn Carter, then 93. "He was so good to Ruth. He would write her letters, and she talked about him all the time. And she had his photograph on the wall in her bedroom. And I literally did fall in love with that photograph."

Jimmy Carter became president with his wife's help

When asked what he was "most proud of having accomplished as a couple," Carter told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Having been elected president with Rosa's good help."

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

"I love it. I love campaigning. I had the best time. I was in all the states in the United States. I campaigned solid every day the last time we ran,” she said in 2021, The Associated Press reported.

He later described their marriage as his proudest achievement.

"The best thing I ever did was marrying Rosalynn," Carter said in an interview at The Carter Center in 2015. "That's the pinnacle of my life."

Rosalynn Carter, for her part, said in 2021 that "everything with Jimmy Carter has been an adventure."

"We've been blessed to be able to travel the world, almost."

How Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter worked and stayed together

Jimmy Carter and his wife spent decades side by side.

"We found out a long time ago that we needed to share everything. I gave her plenty of space," Carter told The Washington Post. "She does what she wants to, and I do what I want to. But then we searched for things that we could together."

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

"I think we give each other space and we try to do things together. We're always looking for things we can do together, like birding and fly-fishing and just anything we can find to do together," Rosalynn Carter told PBS in 2021.

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

"We've had kind of a standing rule that we follow pretty meticulously – sometimes with great difficulty – 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 that argument before we go to sleep."

Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter shared their faith

Jimmy Carter also considered his wife his muse.

"She'd smile, and birds would feel that they no longer had to sing, or it may be I failed to hear their song," Jimmy Carter wrote in a poem titled "Rosalynn" from his 1995 book "Always a Reckoning and Other Poems."

The Carters long read passages from the Bible together in the evening, and the couple said they read Scripture when they were apart.

"When I'm overseas and Rose is at home, we know we're reading the same biblical text, and even though we're separated physically, it makes us think about the same Scripture and admonition from God, direction from God, before we go to sleep," Jimmy Carter told "Good Morning America" in 2021.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn Carter: How they fell in love and lived