Jimmy Carter has told the story of how he met his wife many times, over many interviews.
The way he recounted it, he was supposed to go on a date with a Georgia pageant queen the night he met his future wife.
But his date had a family obligation and – like so many dates throughout human history – she bailed.
So Carter, who was on a break from the US Naval Academy at the time, drove around his hometown of Plains, Georgia, instead.
That was how he spotted the woman who would change the course of his life.
He saw Rosalynn Smith on the steps of a local Methodist church that evening and asked her out to see a movie, he told Winfrey.
The next day, his mother asked him how the evening had gone
“I said: ‘She’s the one I’m going to marry,'” Carter said.
“There was just something about her,” he told Winfrey – who then interrupted the interview to tell the elderly Carter that he was blushing.
Carter had actually caught Rosalynn’s eye years earlier, when she visited his sister Ruth and saw a photo of a young Jimmy.
“I fell in love with that picture,” she told the New York Times in 2021, in an interview timed to their 75th wedding anniversary.
But, as he recounted, Rosalynn took a little longer to conclude they should wed. She initially said no when he proposed over Christmas break.
They eventually did marry in 1946, when Jimmy was 21 and Rosalynn was 18. They were not to be separated until her death last year.