Jay Leno, Wife Mavis Leno’s 5-Decade Love Story

His future wife was just as practical. She turned down his offer of an engagement ring as they had just bought a house and, she explained, “I’m not that kind of person.” (Though she didn’t mind the massive diamond he gave her years later.)

Mavis also didn’t think she was the marrying kind, but was “insanely in love” with Jay, she said. The self-described “voyager” compared a previous long relationship to an island she spent time on before sailing along—and “with Jay, I realized all this time I’d been sailing, he was the destination.”

Neither did it hurt that, over the years since, “he made me laugh till I almost died many times in the course of a lifetime.”

But a couple can’t be laughing all the time.

“From day one, he just saw me,” Mavis said. “He thinks the same things are important that I think are important, the same things are wrong that I think are wrong. We have the same temperament, and we understand each other completely.”