So What Exactly Is "Fexting"?

First lady Jill Biden is President Joe Biden's biggest supporter, both in public and behind the scenes, but that doesn't mean the two don't get into marital spats every once in a while.

Dr. Biden, Harper's BAZAAR's June cover star, reveals in an exclusive interview what she does when the president gets on her nerves. Dr. Biden says that during former President Barack Obama's administration, when Biden was vice president, she took to hashing out their occasional arguments over text—to avoid fighting in front of the Secret Service. They christened the action "fexting," as in fighting and texting.

Not long ago, she remembers, they actually got into a bit of a heated text fight, and she wrote something that shocked even him—her husband of 45 years. "Joe said, 'You realize that’s going to go down in history. There will be a record of that,'" she recalls with a smile. "I won’t tell you what I called him that time."

The Bidens married in 1977, two years after they first met in Delaware. The president proposed to his now-wife five times, before she finally said "yes," and at the time, Dr. Biden says she was scared the marriage would fail like her first, and that her life would again be turned upside down. (She married her first husband when she was 18 and was divorced by her mid-20s, with no money or a place to live.)

Now, even as she remains happily married to the most important figure in the United States, she holds on tightly to her independence.

"I knew I would never, ever put myself in that position again—where I didn’t feel like I had the finances to be on my own, that I had to get the money through a divorce settlement," she says. "I drummed that into [my daughter], Ashley: Be independent, be independent. And my granddaughters—you have to be able to stand on your own two feet."

Now, Dr. Biden—an educator—is the first first lady to maintain a career while in the role.

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