Our Courtship Story, Part Two

This is the next installment of a series I'm doing about our courtship in honor of our 20th anniversary this week. They're long, so don't feel obligated to read them! To see all of them (in reverse order) click on the "Courtship story" label at the bottom of this post.

I was gone on my mission for the next 18 months, but Nels was not in cold storage by any means. He practically dated the whole world while he was single. (He was 29 when we finally got married.) It was pretty common for years afterward that we’d be driving down the street, and he’d say, “I once dated someone who lived there.” The weirdest of those experiences was when we went to my cousins’ house in (the huge city of) San Jose and he said the same thing. Apparently they’d bought the house from another member family, and he’d taken out one of the previous owners’ daughters! It always made me feel pretty triumphant - I GOT him!. But I digress...

When I left on my mission, I was in that state of feeling like I’d just die if I married someone who didn’t ballroom dance. By the time I arrived home from my mission to the Philippines, I had accepted that it was unlikely, and that it would be just fine; I survived for 18 months without it, I’d be fine. But I was also planning on avoiding dance so as to not get too caught up in that again.

I was home the middle of April of 1988, and was off to BYU for the Spring Semester in early May. When I was looking for a place to live, I considered seriously one place north of the Marriott Center, but didn’t feel quite right about it. I finally found a place on the third floor of “The Treehouse” on 600 South. It was a great little place, but up this huge flight of stairs behind the building. The stairs were practically swallowed by a cherry tree. It was cool. The ward was great too. It felt like home to me. One of my roommates was also a returned missionary and Cindy Healy and I attended the Provo Temple every week that whole summer. It was awesome.

In late May or early June, (in accordance with his calculations,) Nels called my home in Draper and talked to my Mom. (Back then, you could get home phone numbers of students on microfiche at the library. Times have CHANGED!) Anyway, he called and she told him I was already down in Provo, and she gave him my phone number there. He called me, and after he had identified himself, I asked him, “Aren’t you married?” Last I knew, that was his plan! Anyway, he asked if I’d like to go dancing with him on such and such a day. His dance team was performing at the SLC Marriott Hotel earlier that evening, and if I went with him to that, we could go dancing at The Ritz afterward. Sounded fun, so I said yes. So our very first date was at the Marriott Hotel. (We later spent the first two nights of our married life at that very hotel.) During that phone call, he also was happy to discover that I lived around the corner, in his own BYU singles’ stake!

He picked me up at my home in Draper, since I had gone home for the weekend. Wow, was he a GREAT dancer. He says that he spent the two years I was gone getting ready for me to come home. He worked and worked on his dancing and was ready when I got back. By then, he was on the backup tour team, and was an amazing dancer. He knew all the steps I’d known and loved and more. He was a great lead, and I a good follower, so we had FUN!

He went home and wrote in his journal that he was going to marry me. He was 28 and had never done that before, with all his dating! I didn’t write in my journal that night, why, I don’t know; I was in the habit from my mission of writing almost every night. I even kind of had a goal to write about every first date, so I’d have a record of it for the man I eventually married...SAD, huh!

...To be continued...