I was dating Tony; we got engaged to be married. And I just thought this was wonderful. Except he still would sneak a cigarette, and he still wanted to drink a bit. And this was a struggle. And then I learned about temple marriage: you go to the temple, and you marry that the man that you’ll spend eternity with. But it’s all based on your worthiness. And he just struggled. And he showed me his patriarchal blessing that told him that Satan would sit on his shoulder for the rest of his life, and he needed to be careful and to be good. And—excuse me while I closed the door. And I thought, “I want eternal marriage.” I wanted everything that the church taught. For eternity. I was looking at the long picture, and I thought, “I’m not going to get that with him.” And I talked with him about it, and it just was clear. And I really was smitten by him, I was. But then comes another difficult thing that I did, and that was to say, “I can’t marry you.” So, I broke off the engagement and that was difficult, but I knew that that was the right thing to do.
And by then I already knew the man that I did marry, who was really a leader in the church. He was young, but he was from a long line of church…he was fourth generation.
And I know for the Americans who came, to hear that a Maori person, a New Zealander, could be a fourth generation Latter-day Saint was really surprising to them. But anyway, his whole life had been the church and he loved the church, and he was very faithful. And I knew that he could take me to the temple and provide what I sought, which is what the church taught the role of women and, you know, all of that. So, we married and had two lovely children. And that was really good. And then he announced that he wanted to get an MBA, and it was not offered at that time in New Zealand. He had studied… what were they called… technical drawing and drafting and things like that—kind of pre-engineering. And he had taken all those courses and was pretty well-certified or close to it, that’s what he’d been studying, and working at the same time. So, we were going to have to go overseas to school, and we could go to Australia, which I wasn’t very enthusiastic about, or we could go to the U.S., and we could go to what’s now called BYU Hawaii, but in those days was called the Church College of Hawaii, a church university, four-year university at that time. And I did not want to come to America, you know, our family was a very British, English, and I wasn’t keen on going to the United States where I thought people were very materialistic. It was all based on what you had, rather than who you were, and so forth.