Marilyn Monroe's Marriage History Starts at Just Age 16 and Includes Three Romances

The life of Marilyn Monroe fascinated many, even after her death in 1962. The sweet model and actress rose to fame for her talents and good looks. The watchful eye of the public began to pick apart her personal life, though, as they became hypnotized by her. This led to many asking lots of questions about her relationships.

Famously, Marilyn was rumored to be involved with President John F. Kennedy. However, they never were married. Outside of that relationship, Marilyn was with several men and married three times. Let's take a look back at those relationships and the part they played in her life.

Marilyn was first married at only 16 years old to Jim Dougherty, who was five years her elder. Jim was a Los Angeles Police Department Officer and they met at Van Nuys High School. Their early marriage, according to The New York Times, was due to Marilyn's personal life where she spent time in an orphanage. The marriage was reportedly a way to help her out of a tough spot but was also genuinely driven by attraction.

“My marriage didn’t make me sad, but it didn’t make me happy, either. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn’t because we were angry. We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom," Marilyn allegedly said, according to Donald Spoto in the biography Marilyn Monroe. The couple divorced as her modeling career started to pick up.

In 1954, Marilyn married her second cousin, Joe DiMaggio. According to the biography, Joe and Marilyn met when she was 25 and he was 37. Another age gap relationship ensued and they dated for two years before deciding to tie the knot. In her memoir, My Story, Marilyn confessed that she was aware that it wouldn't be an easy relationship but decided to go forward nonetheless.

While the exact details are fuzzy, the pair reportedly got into a fight while Marilyn was filming The Seven Year Itch. According to PBS, a major strain in their relationship was that Joe sought a stay-at-home wife and Marilyn was a proud working girl. While she wasn't opposed to family life, she also wanted the autonomy to speak openly about her work. She filed for divorce in 1954.

Her third and final marriage was to Arthur Miller. The pair met in 1951. They coupled up as Marilyn's career exploded, so Arthur watched her transform from a star on the rise to the darling of Hollywood. “It is just that I believe that I should really die if I ever lost you,” The Crucible playwright wrote to Monroe, according to The Genius and the Goddess, a book about their relationship. “It is as if we were born the same morning when no other life existed on this earth.”

However, the pair eventually had a hard time working together on set which led to the end of their marriage in 1961. “They were not matched. They tried and they just bungled it. She was the rose and he was definitely the gardener. But he’s more of a rose and he needed a gardener. People can only play the other part for so long,” Arthur's daughter, Rebecca Miller, told The New York Times.