Real love story: Persistence pays off

Heather brushed off Mike's advances for an entire year before she agreed to a date. It turns out that he was the love of her life.

When Heather met Mike, she filed him away into the dreaded “friend zone.” Undeterred, he pursued her for a whole year before she gave in and went out with him. Good things come to those who wait, and they are very good together indeed.

When Heather met Mike, he was a friend of a group of friends she rented a house with, so his presence was common at her home. She was definitely not attracted to him in the beginning and thought of him simply as a friend, but he certainly didn't feel that way. “I knew he had a thing for me from pretty early on in our friendship — he didn't hide it at all, but it took him about a year to actually ask me out,” she remembered.

She turned him down when he first asked her out, but he didn't give up. All in all, he tried to win her heart for most of a year, and she kept shooting him down. That didn't stop him, because he knew that she was important and worth fighting for. He didn't have any special romantic tricks up his sleeve?— in fact, sometimes it seemed like he had given up. “He's super practical and not really a romantic,” she confided when asked if he'd done anything special to try to win her heart. “That's what I like about him though.”

"Not a day goes by where I am not completely thankful for all that we have."

Heather decided to go ahead and accept a date with him?— not because she was romantically interested, but because she was bored and was looking for something to do. “I never imagined in a million years we'd get married,” she said. She had warmed up to him some after a year of being asked out by him, but she still had her doubts and was not interested in a serious relationship.

It turns out that they had more in common than she thought and after four or five months of dating, they really started to click. A simple gesture of kindness when she was ill was the turning point, and she began to fall in love with him. “I was not feeling well and had gotten out of the shower, and he dried my hair for me,” she told us. “It seems silly and small, but really stands out as a special moment.”

Heather admits that neither she nor Mike is terribly romantic, but that's what makes them such a terrific couple. They are very compatible that way, and that is how they decided to get married?— no fancy proposal, no surprises. Just a rational discussion. “After a year, we decided to get married,” she explained. “We were living together and it seemed practical and made sense.”

They decided to get married in Las Vegas with a handful of friends in attendance, and have been happily married ever since.

They have recently relocated to Indiana from San Diego, California, and are the parents of two young boys?— Archer and Cohen. Heather is a work-at-home mom, sewing cloth diapers for her small business Archeree as she takes care of her boys. Archer is clever, very energetic and has a very outgoing personality, and Cohen loves to sleep, is cuddly and is super laid back.

“He's still my best friend... even in our hardest moments that's true,” she reflected. “We have two amazing kids?— I know all moms say this, but mine are truly spectacular. We recently made a big move from California to Indiana and are working on making a home here. Not a day goes by where I am not completely thankful for all that we have.”

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Love is pain. That's the message of the Richard Burton–Elizabeth Taylor story | Jonathan Jones

Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter as Richard Burton and Liz Taylor. Photograph: Gustavo Papaleo/BBC/PA

The modern world has a problem with love. How do we even imagine it, let alone live it? In Shakespeare's time people knew what love looked like. It meant a young man playing a lute or a lady listening to her lover's honeyed words from her balcony. Marriage was something else, a property arrangement. But in modern times, love and relationships, long-term partnerships versus short-term joy, are hopelessly confused as is witnessed by the tangled tale of those two famous 20th-century lovers, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

In this photograph just released by the BBC, Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter impersonate the great unhappy ones in a drama about the last time they ever worked together, in 1983, in a critically trashed stage tour of Noel Coward's Private Lives. The fact that this image feels like an event is proof that Burton and Taylor have now become a modern equivalent of the romantic couples of history and legend who Shakespeare celebrated. Perhaps for generations to come actors will compete to recreate the looks and emotional turbulence of Richard and Liz.

Love is pain. That's the message of the Taylor and Burton story. In this picture, the face of the actor personified by West is set in passion, a dangerous and unwieldy promise of pain to come, even as Bonham Carter looks happy and trusting beside him. At the moment the actual Burton and Taylor met in the early 1960s on the set of Cleopatra, the silkscreen paintings of Andy Warhol were entering their prime and "Liz" became one of Warhol's favourite icons to portray. His images of her, at the beginning of her relationship with Burton, are both sensual and painful – Warhol, poet of car crashes, sees disaster coming.

And so it was to be. The burden of the tale of Elizabeth and her Welsh Romeo is that love cannot survive in the modern world. Intense passion on the set of Cleopatra, divorce from their partners, a failed marriage, then another attempt – it's harrowing.

In all this, a suspicion of false coinage haunts the grand passion played out in public. They were both actors, after all. In this picture, seeing West and Bonham Carter playing these consummate performers, we are pointed towards the histrionic quality of the way Burton and Taylor played themselves.

From passionate pictures of them happy, so happy, together to their nightmarish evisceration of a rotten relationship in the film of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Burton and Taylor acted out the extremes of modern love in public.

Their relationship was diamond and it was ash. The joy and bitterness were real, and also provided artistic material. Of course their love was not fake. Like any artist – like Picasso – they had to use their lives.

But love is an act as well as a reality. In Romeo and Juliet, young Romeo goes around brooding and waxing lyrical about love even before he sees Juliet – he fancies himself a lover, then becomes a lover.

In this picture, two actors who are not in love play two actors who were – and in doing so draw attention to the complex relationship of image and reality, acting and truth, in the art of love itself.

Modern times make that art more difficult, as Burton and Taylor found. Both famous when they met, they loved and fell apart in public. Perhaps it's a lesson for the social media age. Now (as Warhol prophesied) we are all celebrities to some extent. Everything can be shared. But look into the eyes of Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth Taylor. She so wants to be happy. Would a private love with no media and no fame and no pictures online have given her that dream?

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