So Is This Love?
Or could it be? The questions we all really want answered at some point or another.
When I was a little girl, I could never decide if Ariel or Cinderella was my favorite princess. The debate pretty much all rested on hair color: my hair is strawberry blonde, so I did know whether I was more like Ariel with her red hair, or Cinderella with her blonde.
I hope you can see the seriousness of my little-girl dilemma.
But one thing I’ve always known for sure, Cinderella has the dreamiest love song of any Disney princess. Do you remember it? In the animated classic, she wears that magical, intensely sparkly blue ball gown and she and the prince waltz to “So This Is Love.” If the melodic tune hasn’t popped into your head yet, go look it up on YouTube; I promise the song holds up and will still make you swoon.
Anyway, it is Cinderella’s voice singing the song (as if we are hearing her thoughts) and the first verse goes like this:
So this is love, mmm / So this is love / So this is what makes life divine / I'm all aglow, mmm /
And now I know / The key to all heaven is mine.
Now, 5-year-old-me didn’t think twice about those lyrics. But 25 year old me is in straight shock at Cinderella's confidence: she is apparently 100% sure that she has found love—the real kind. No doubt her mind. And on the first date to boot! (Or I guess “to glass slipper” in this case).
If I were to have my own version of that song to describe most of my dating life, we would need to make an important tweak and have the title read, “So is this love?” Not quite as romantic, to be sure, but I think more realistic to what most of us experience in our 20s. You like the boy, he likes you, and at some point in the relationship you start asking yourself, Is this love?
If I had a tried and true response to answer that question, you better believe I’d bestow it upon you all with a wave my magic wand. But I don’t know if such a succinct answer to the question of true love even exists. So while I may not be able to easily define true love for you, I have been keeping a close eye on what it looks like. I’ve been taking note when couples I admire talk about their dating days and how they felt confident this was their happily ever after.
And so, like the fairy godmother I aspire to be, I have compiled my examples into a convenient list for you!
Whether you are dating some right now or not, I hope these stories and thoughts will encourage you to look for and create a love that is meaningful, uplifting, and doesn’t leave you empty handed at the stroke of midnight.
You deserve to feel safe, loved, and appreciated. So before we dive into the examples, I would like to remind you that you are allowed to breakup with someone at any time. If you are not happy, you do not have to stay. Please don’t mistake that advice to mean you should expect an actual Prince Charming and immediately dump anyone who doesn’t line up perfectly to your dreams. What I am saying is that often it takes courage to walk away from a relationship that doesn't bring light into your life. So I need you to remember that you are a princess and deserve to be treated like one.
Alright, let’s put Cinderella aside and dive into what I think true love really looks like.
Russell and Barbara Ballard
Ladies, let me tell you how much I love President M. Russell Ballard. His commanding yet gentle presence, his straight to the point conference talks, and the fact that he keeps an Oreo in a little clear box on his desk (given to him by a refugee) have endeared me to him over the years. I’ve never met the Apostle, but yet I trust and love him like I do my own grandpas.
Some of my sweetest memories of President Ballard are when he talks about his late wife, Barbara Ballard, who passed away October 1, 2018. A year after her passing, President Ballard said this during general conference—and melted my heart in the process:
“As the days have turned into weeks, then months, and now a year since Barbara’s passing, I find myself more fully appreciating this scripture: ‘Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die.’ Barbara and I were blessed to ‘live together in love’ for 67 years. But I have learned in a very real way what it means to ‘weep for the loss’ of those we love. Oh, how I love and miss her!”
Of course it makes me sad to see President Ballard missing his sweet wife, but the love he still feels for her sounds like the final chapters of a love story we all want. So let’s rewind the tape and take a look at how the Ballard’s love began.
President Ballard’s biography, Anxiously Engaged, gives us some hints into how this all got started. President Ballard was 21 years old and had been home from his mission to England for only three days when he went to a “Hello Day” dance at the University of Utah. A friend introduced young Russ to Barbara and they danced for less than a minute before another young man tagged Russ for a turn with Barbara.
Of that initial meeting, President Ballard would later often say, “The greatest day in my life was the day I met Barbara Bowen.” (awwwww!!!)
So, he found her phone number, called her the next day, and they eventually set up a date. After that first date, Russ was ready for a second and third. Now, read this next paragraph from the biography and let’s see what we learn:
“I was smitten on the second date,” [Russ] said. “She was not only beautiful but had a sparkling personality.” The thing that really impressed the returned missionary was how genuine and down-to-earth she was. “People liked her because she was easy to like,” President Ballard said. “She was approachable and friendly to everyone. As a result, she had many friends, both young women and young men, who admired her depth and goodness.”
Now let’s read Barbara’s side of the story. Her initial impression of Russ was, “What a handsome boy! And he had this wonderful smile and beautiful brown eyes.” Then, after she has spent more time with him, here is what the biography tells us about how Barbara was feeling:
“I felt that he knew where he was going,” Barbara said. “He certainly was confident and knew what he wanted in life and how he was going to get there.” Although she loved and honored her father as a great and good man, he was not active in the Church, and so she was moved by Russ’s devotion to the Lord and was as attracted to his sweet love of the gospel as she was to his dynamic personality. “I wanted to marry someone who honored the priesthood and who would go to church with me, who would take our children to church,” she said.
There was so much good in Russ and in her growing relationship with him. The more time they spent together, the closer she felt to him.
As far as I can tell, Barbara and Russ began to love each other for who the other was, not because of outward appearance, worldly accomplishment, or a promising future career. Here were two people who had cultivated a personality the other could appreciate.
And a crucial part of this story is that, unlike Cinderella, Barbara and Russ weren’t singing about love after their first dance. The last sentence in the quote said Barabara felt closer to Russ “the more time they spent together.”
So I have two key takeaways from Ballards’ story:
1. True love looks like feeling a deep admiration for who the other person is.
2. True love looks like spending enough time with someone to see who they are.
Nnamdi and Deidra Okonkwo
In my job writing feature stories for LDS Living magazine, I get to meet and interview incredible Latter-day Saints from all over the world. I love learning from these people, and when they happen to be married, I usually can’t help myself from asking for the story of how they fell in love.
Nnamdi Okonkwo is a world-renowned sculptor who was raised in Nigeria, then came to BYU-Hawaii on a basketball scholarship where he later joined the Church. He then moved to Provo for graduate school where he met Deidra who had grown up in Idaho. In my interviews with them, they filled me in on all the details of their love story. Here is a portion of what I wrote in the article about them:
Deidra remembers Nnamdi being popular in Provo. His dynamic personality drew people to him, including many interested women. But Deidra found a way to spend some extra time with him.
“I noticed that he was going to the rest home every day. He felt like his mother, who was in Nigeria, needed someone to care for her because he wasn’t there. So if he was caring for someone else, then Heavenly Father would take care of his mother,” she says. “I knew the rest home was far away and he didn’t have a car, so I offered to give him a ride. I fell in love with him there; the way he interacted with the older people, finding out about them and spending time with them—he just loves people.”
It didn’t take long for Deidra to know that Nnamdi was the man God wanted her to marry. Nor did it take long for her to see the divine nature of his work as an artist.
“I never doubted. It was just so true. I can’t even explain it in any other way,” she says. “I knew so strongly that he was the person I was supposed to marry, and I believed so much in him and his calling as an artist.”
Later in the article, I wrote about how Deidra’s commitment to Nnamdi’s art career was essential to his eventual success. In fact, years later after they were married the market crashed and the family’s finances were extremely tight. Nnamdi told Deidra he thought he needed to look for a different job because he just didn’t know if they could make it on his art sales. Deidra’s response is almost straight out of a movie: “Over my dead body!” she declared. “You were born to do this.”
With his wife’s help, Nnamdi didn’t give up on his dream and now enjoys a financially stable life in a career he loves and through which he brings joy to millions of people around the world.
During our interview, he told me, “I could never ever say what I’ve achieved in art without acknowledging that she was the one who really made it possible.”
So my observation from Deidra and Nnamdi? True love looks like making their dreams your dreams, and committing your heart to making them come true. (And finding someone who will do the same for you.)
3. John and Beverly Haws
The last example comes from my own life: my mom’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Haws, or John and Bev as their friends called them.
My grandparents raised seven children and were married for 65 years before Grandpa passed away at age 92. They lived in the small, beautiful town of Afton, Wyoming, which is about three and half hours from where I grew up.
As a child, the drive felt just long enough and full of enough cowboy billboards and wildlife to make going on trips to their home feel like a real adventure to the wild west. They gave their grandchildren the ideal “grandma and grandpa’s house” experience: there were always waffles in the morning, hot dogs roasted over a fire for dinner, and ice cream pretty much any time you wanted. My huge hoard of cousins and I loved it.
Growing up, I never thought much about Grandma and Grandpa’s relationship. They were just always together and always there. It wasn’t until Grandpa’s health started declining when I was in my early 20s that I began to watch in awe at what a love built up over 65 years is able to endure.
As Grandpa neared the end of his life, he became very difficult to care for. He was picky about his food and often refused to eat. He didn’t sleep well, and was sometimes short-tempered, probably because of the physical pain and the mental confusion he lived in.
While my mom and her six older brothers were valiant in their efforts to step in and help care for Grandpa, Grandma most certainly gave the most of herself.
I remember being at their house and watching in amazement as Grandma gently coaxed Grandpa out of bed or slyly convinced him to eat something. I would see him get frustrated at her for trying to help him get dressed and Grandma would stay calm and collected. In Grandpa’s confusion, he would brush off Grandma’s efforts to help or curtly refuse food she’d carefully made just to try and get calories into him.
There were many moments Grandma could have walked away in a huff or snapped back at him. But I never saw her get angry. And not only that, her care for him seemed to grow even more tender the worse off Grandpa became. His ever growing list of needs and irritable moods seemed to intensify, not diminish, her love for him. She knew that this version of her John wasn’t really who he was. This was her John trapped in an aging body that was dictating his moods and actions. In what I believe is absolutely true love, Grandma stayed true and faithful to the John she knew her husband really was and treated him with kindness and respect, even when it may have been very difficult to.
A few years after Grandpa died, I was visiting Grandma in Afton and we were making banana bread together in the kitchen. She was trying to pull out a drawer Grandpa had built her inside a cabinet, but the drawer wouldn’t come out because something wasn't working right. We tried for a few minutes to figure it out, and then Grandma stopped, sighed, and said, “My John would have fixed this for me in a second. He was always so helpful, building all sorts of things to make my life easier.”
I watched helplessly as grief crossed her face for a moment and then we carried on with our bread making.
That moment became significant to me because even after all those difficult last few years caring for him, my grandma seemed to remember more the goodness of my grandpa’s life.
Why?
I think because over the past 65 years their love had grown into something so precious that she knew it was worth respecting and protecting, even if Grandpa’s aging state caused him to forget and become confused. Grandma never let Grandpa bully her around; she held her ground and still expected respect from him. But the love she’d cultivated for this man over so many years seemed to manifest itself now in patience, endurance, and a tenderness beyond what I think any newlywed could exhibit.
My Grandma Haws teaches me that love is treating the one you love with the utmost respect and kindness, through all of life’s ups and downs. Soon after that visit to grandma, I came across a general conference talk from April 2003 by Elder F. Burton Howard called, “Eternal Marriage,” and I could barely read the last paragraph because my eyes were so full of tears thinking about my grandparents.
In the talk, Elder Howard talks about how his wife carefully collected a set of real silverware over the course of their marriage, buying pieces here and there when they had a little extra money. She was very protective of that silver, keeping it wrapped and hidden under their bed, not taking it anywhere so that it didn’t get lost, only using it on very special occasions, and even insisting on renting a safety deposit box when the Howards were called on a mission. Then Elder Howard ends his talk with this paragraph:
“For years I thought she was just a little bit eccentric, and then one day I realized that she had known for a long time something that I was just beginning to understand. If you want something to last forever, you treat it differently. You shield it and protect it. You never abuse it. You don’t expose it to the elements. You don’t make it common or ordinary. If it ever becomes tarnished, you lovingly polish it until it gleams like new. It becomes special because you have made it so, and it grows more beautiful and precious as time goes by.
“Eternal marriage is just like that. We need to treat it just that way. I pray that we may see it for the priceless gift that it is.”
Thank you Grandma for showing me in a very real way that love is to treat a relationship as something very precious and worth fighting for. That love is making your John an easy-over egg morning after morning, just in case today is the day he’ll actually eat it.
Thank you for reading! Find other thoughts on love and dating here. Next week we will talk about my three tips to make everything about dating easier :) Subscribe to not miss!
Bonus Blossoms
Hi! This is where I share a few random things I love, hopefully to add a little extra pink to swirl around your day.
I wrote this other piece about Grandpa’s passing on an old blog and it’s pretty sweet: Welcome Home, Grandpa
I thought this article by Brooke Walker was delightful: “The word that stood out to me from Sister Tamara Runia’s conference talk.” I mean the first line of the article is, “I debated calling 911, but I called my mom instead.” So we know this is going to be relatable.
If you need a perfect snack please try the following: plain Chobani Greek yogurt (stay with me), peanut butter, sweetened coconut flakes, unsalted peanuts, semi-sweet chocolate chips. Mix it all up and hate your afternoon workload less.