In early 1976, Morten asked me out, and our first date was to IKEA! By this time, Morten was living in Sweden. He lived with his relatives – his uncle worked at the Norwegian embassy in Stockholm. I showed him around. I started to see him lots on Swedish television as we sometimes had Norwegian commercials with Swedish captions (though since the languages are so similar I could never understand why they thought captions were necessary) and I started falling for him. He was on ads, TV shows, and did some singing on those too.
One of our next dates was seeing the movie "Freaky Friday" starring Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris.
I always felt closer to God when I listened to ABBA. I would always dance as I loved to dance.
Morten liked them too, though he mostly loved the songs the boys would sing. He even had the boys' "Lycka" album. I still love to this day how we communicate. He'd speak to me in Norwegian and I'd speak to him Swedish but we can understand each other. That's how we did from day we met, and we always loved hearing the little differences in our languages.
Another thing though, was that Morten is color-blind – he has troubles with red & green, and I'm just glad he was upfront with it. I obviously am not color-blind, and no one in my family were, at least not to my knowledge. But I did my best to help Morten out, and I told him he could ask me as many times as he needed to ask what color something was. I never got tired of it, and still I never do. I'm always happy to help.
One night, shortly ABBA's "Dancing Queen" was released, we were dancing to their song "Honey Honey" and as the song drew to a close we shared our first kiss. We then declared our love for each other. We knew that we were going to marry soon, and grow old together.
We always sang along with ABBA, he the male parts, me the female parts & we'd sing together when ABBA did! We would also have ABBA film tapes, which we'd sing & dance along too. I remember one time we were doing that while our parents were chatting and we heard them comment that we make lovely harmonies together! We know that we will never be as good as ABBA music-wise in my opinion, though.
We attended as one of our dates, ABBA-Dabba-Doo which was a Swedish TV special. We both got to talk to them prior to their performance. It was always exciting. Meanwhile the other girls and I were having some hot hits with our band.
One night, I met Morten's parents, and I was glad also, because his parents loved me – they've seen me on television, and liked the way I was modest for one thing. They apparently saw me as a sweet girl, and my parents loved Morten just as much as they loved me which was sweet.
Another night, my parents invited his parents, and my father suddenly said "If you two kids ever wish to marry, you have my full blessing!" "Mine too" said my mother, "And ours!" Said his parents. It was a surprise, because we weren't even thinking about marriage then, but it certainly got us thinking! My father even gave Morten my grandmother's engagement ring! He said to him, "Now you just wait for the time you feel is right to pop the question."
Morten met his two Norwegian friends shortly after who'd later form the band A-ha. The very first thing that made me & Morten "click" if you will, was the fact that we were both Christians, and then we found out that we were both ABBA fans! & that we both played guitar! I played the guitar since I was 7 and I'd play Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game" while singing and playing my guitar along with it to unwind. And lot of times when I stayed somewhere that had the Northern Lights, I would play my guitar under and sometimes I'd even sing to God, praising Him for the beauty.
