Editor’s note: Away We Go is an occasional feature that highlights unusual aspects of newlywed couples, how they met or how they married.
ROGERS - Taking verbal abuse in public is one thing. Taking it in the West Wing of the White House - well, that could be considered a national embarrassment.
Yet Beau Walker had strong enough feelings for Amanda Foster that he didn’t let a little political humiliation stand in his way. So more than a year after the spat, there stood Beau on the steps in front of the Jefferson Memorial, confessing his true feelings for Amanda.
“How did it take us this long to get to this point?” Beau said on that rainy night in February 2009.
Amanda played it coy, asking him, “What do you mean, ‘Get to this point?’” She was holding her cards close to the vest until she heard the words she had been hoping he’d say - the words seemingly everyone had wanted him to say: He loved her.
At last convinced, she let down her guard and admitted she felt the same way. A year and three months later, on June 19, they married in South Boston, Va.
“She was forcing me to be more vulnerable, and as a guy, that’s not always the easiest thing to do,” Beau says.“You guard yourself as much as possible, and she forced my hand. It was a very easy transition.”
Beau and Amanda met in October 2004 at a presidential debate watch party in Arlington, Va. Beau was immediately taken with her appearance; she felt that his nonstop talking made it hard to watch the debate.
Still, they quickly becamegood friends. So good, in fact, that their friends and family started to wonder: Why aren’t the two of you dating?
It seemed a reasonable enough question; on paper, Beau and Amanda were an ideal match. Both devoted Republicans, they worked in the same building and even went to the same church.
“We thought maybe from time to time, ‘Oh, maybethere’s something here,’ but it never progressed,” Beau says. “All of our friends would always ask us, separately, and we’d say, ‘We’re just friends.’”
“We never saw each other as more than friends,” Amanda says.
So, despite the questioning, they remained friends, until the incident at the White House. Beau had begun dating someone else, and despite hiscloseness with Amanda, he didn’t inform her of this new development until they were in the West Wing.
At the same time, he had recently given out Amanda’s personal information to a woman at the White House looking to set her up, which had led to an unexpected phone call from a prospective date. Amanda was furious - on both accounts.
After the September 2007 blowup, she realized that the main source of her anger was that she had romantic feelings for Beau. He simply thought he had made some serious errors in judgment.
“I was furious,” Amanda says. “The moment at the White House was when I realized, ‘I have more feelings for him than I thought I did,’” Amanda says. “I thought we were best friends who told each other everything, so that caught me off-guard. [Then I thought] ‘Why am I getting so upset?’”
Beau recalls, “If I didn’t have feelings for her, then why didn’t I tell her [before]? Well, it was reciprocal. It took six to seven months for things to progress.”
For a few months there was no communication between the two. Things picked up after Beau made a peace offering at a Christmas party, but they continued dating other peoplefor all of 2008.
“Those were less than stellar relationships, which we think were the Lord’s way of saying, ‘You had something good; you need to recognize that,’” Beau says. “We’re both a little bit hard-headed and stubborn.”
Luckily for them, Beau wasn’t so stubborn as to hide his true feelings forever - and once he expressed them, she didn’t leave him hanging.
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Northwest Profile, Pages 43 on 07/25/2010