A Love Story

This week my husband and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary.  It was a beautiful day and the beginning of our life together.  Our love story is unique but I suppose not really.  It started in high school during our senior year when because of an eccentric AP English teacher, I ended up sitting behind this very quiet but nice guy.  We were up in the front corner of the room away from our friends and so we chatted here and there.  He worked in a movie theater and got to go see movies for free.  I did joke that he should share the wealth but I still was rather shocked the day he followed me out of the room after class and asked me  if I would like to go on a date with him.  This was the first time I’d been officially asked out and I said yes because I knew he was a nice guy.  He gave me his phone number on a gum wrapper and I called him later that night to work out the details.  

When he told his friends he had asked me out they said, “You know she’s a Mormon, right?”  He didn’t even know what that was so he looked it up in the encyclopedia (11 years ago, remember) and decided it didn’t sound too bad.  He was an active Catholic at the time and I respected him for being true to what he believed.

This would be a novel if I wrote out every detail so let me sum up the rest of senior year.  We went on a few dates, he sent me flowers, we talked on the phone for hours and hours, we held hands, we kissed, we broke up because I felt that our relationship wasn’t based on true friendship (too much frosting and not enough cake), I broke his heart, we stayed friends and went to our senior ball together and eventually I decided that I really did like him so we got back together.  My family had already moved away from Rochester to Boise, Idaho at that point so I had three weeks left before I was headed off to college with no plans to return to Rochester any time soon.  We had a fun three weeks and the day I left was one sad day.  I cried all the way across the country.  I told him that we just needed to not talk anymore because I was too sad and I didn’t know if I would see him again. Our relationship wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway because of the importance to me of marrying within my religion.  But he didn’t accept that answer and said God wouldn’t have brought us together without some reason.  

So we stayed in touch.  As my freshmen roommates can attest to, I was on the phone A LOT!  We talked just about every day while I was in Utah and he was in Florida at school.  He came to visit me that fall, I went to visit him that winter and he came back to Utah again in the spring.  Every time we were together it was just perfect and happy and I felt complete again.  He was my best friend and I told him everything and anything.  He knew me better than anyone and loved me for it.  However, I was still sad that every time the future came up, we had to acknowledge that we didn’t have one.  I would talk about his future wife sometimes and he would get really mad at me but things were clear: I had no desire to marry outside of my faith.  After attending church with me a few times, he eventually came to understand why it was so important to me and even wanted it for me too.  

Now someday I will have him type up his account of how this all happened but again, let me sum up.  He was active in the Catholic church but had an experience while at college that really caused him to question what he believed.  He had been attending a Bible study with a small and independent Christian church.  When they pressured him to join, he said no thanks but that he enjoyed coming to their Bible study.  They were very cruel to him and afterwards ignored him when they saw him on campus.  Having had the opportunity to stand up for Catholicism, he delved into a doctrinal study of his religion and faith and he came up with a lot of questions.  He asked his priests, he went on a weekend retreat, he read the Bible and still felt that so much went unanswered. He felt unsatisfied when he went to mass and his frustration increased.  He started asking me questions and I answered them for him.  He had asked me questions before but it was only because he was curious to understand me.  This was a turning point and he started asking me questions because he really wanted to understand truth.

After a few months of this I told him he needed to read the Book of Mormon and find out from God for himself if it was scripture or not, which he did and he received a witness from God that it is a true book.  He said he wanted to meet with the missionaries so that they could teach him.  Before he told me any of this though, because he understood the implications, he talked with his best friend who is not religious at all and told him the whole story to get his perspective.  His friend helped him realize that the happiness and excitement he was feeling over this new faith and the idea of joining my church was not connected to his love for me.  So it was that he called and told me he wanted to get baptized as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I knew that exact moment that we would get married and I felt great peace.  I knew he was not making this life choice just to marry me (which wouldn’t have been good enough for me anyway because I wasn’t going to marry someone who wasn’t 100 percent committed)  but because truth had distilled into his soul and he desired to make this life change for himself.  He was baptized on October 2, 1999 in Florida.

I suppose I should back up and explain why I felt such peace in that moment.  I had made a deal with God.  It probably isn’t wise to do that but I had prayed that no one had ever loved me like this wonderful man of mine did but I was willing to give him up if He would promise to send someone to love me even more.  I was planning on serving a mission when I turned 21 so I figured by the time I got back, He could have this figured out for me.  Either my man would be converted and baptized and ready to marry me or else someone truly amazing was going to come into my life at some point.  I trusted Him and was ready to move forward when I received that phone call.  I knew right then that there was no one else who could love me like he did and that we were meant to be together, which made me so happy because that is really what I had wanted all along.

A year later he left to serve a two-year mission for our church in southern California and eight months after that I left to serve an 18-month mission in Kiev, Ukraine.  We wrote letters the entire two and a half years we were apart and I never felt distanced from him.  We just knew we were going to be together.  It made my family nervous to put a deposit down on the place where I wanted to have the wedding reception before I even left for my mission but I felt great peace and knew it was all going to work out.  We were always emotionally close despite not seeing each other for so long.  It was hard and I missed him very much but we both were so committed to what we were doing that it strengthened us.

He returned home at Thanksgiving time and I stepped back into the country on the evening of March 4, 2003.  Two days later he flew to Idaho and I went to the airport to pick him up, filled with nervous excitement.  I saw him before he noticed me and when I called to him, he glanced over and in that look, I knew that we were still us.  He swept me up in his arms and for the first time in a long time, I felt complete again.  He proposed to me that night in a parking lot (he got excited and we hadn’t made it into the romantic park yet with the gazebo and the dancing he had planned).  My response was, “I thought you’d never ask.”  We were married six weeks later in the Palmyra temple on what was truly the happiest day of my life.  Not that everything went perfectly but we were too happy to care.  We were together, sealed for time and all eternity, and after the religious challenges, the long-distance dating, then the 28 months of separation, that was all we needed.