Former president and first lady Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have celebrated 74 years in their record-breaking marriage.
The pair celebrated 74 years of marriage on Tuesday, making them the longest-married presidential couple in history, which was previously held by former President George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, who were married 73 years and 111 days at the time of Barbra's death in 2018.
Jimmy Carter talks about the secret to his and Rosalynn's long marriage:The Carters first met in the 1940s when he was on a break from the Naval Academy, and they went on a date to the movies, which Rosalynn's sister also attended.
"I just felt compatible with her," the former president revealed in Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas' book What Makes a Marriage Last. "She was beautiful and innocent, and there was a resonance. We rode in the rumble seat of a Ford pickup - Ruth and her boyfriend in the front - and I kissed her on that first date. I remember that vividly."
Jimmy said to his mother the next day "Rosalynn was the one I wanted to marry."
The Carters married on July 7, 1946, and at the time of their one year anniversary, Rosalynn was giving birth to their first child, Jack.
The pair went on to have three more children, sons Chip and Jeff and, 14 years later, daughter Amy.
Per People, a source told the magazine in 1976: "If Rosalynn okays you, you're in, If she doesn't, you're dead."
"Jimmy has always thought I could do anything. Always. And so I've done everything," Rosalynn said in What Makes a Marriage Last. "I campaigned all over the country. I've done things I never dreamed I could do."
In the 1970s while on the presidential trail, Jimmy used to say "Rosalynn's my secret weapon", and when he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980, she took it hard.
"I searched for good things about not being reelected, to ease her pain," President Carter told Donahue and Thomas in their book. "I was just fifty-six years old, I told her, and she was just fifty-three, so we had at least twenty-five years of life ahead of us. That's when the Carter Center was born. It has been a wonderful challenge."
