With Ibn Zaydun
Wallada met Ibn Zaydun during a poetry competition, a Cordoban custom of the time. Ibn Zaydun was also a poet and a nobleman who had been making measured political strides in Cordoba.[17] Because of this and Ibn Zaydun's ties with the Banu Yahwar — rivals of her own Umayyad clan — their relationship was controversial and had to remain a secret.

Most of Wallada's surviving poems are those that were written about this relationship.[18][19] Some of these depict Wallada in a relationship role traditionally held by men; for example, she wrote about undertaking "perilous journeys" to visit Ibn Zaydun, a conventional type of relationship instigation normally made by men.[7]

Written as letters, Wallada's poems express jealousy, nostalgia, but also a desire to reunite. Another expresses deception, sorrow and reproach. Five are sharp satires directed against Ibn Zaydun,[20] whom she accuses of infidelity with men, among other things. Surviving poems about this relationship suggest that it was not a happy one; in addition to poetic criticism from both parties, Ibn Zaydun also likely beat Wallada, and was not faithful to her. In one writing, it was implied that the relationship ended because of an affair between Ibn Zaydun and a "Black lover". Wallada suggests that the lover was a slave girl purchased and educated as a poet by Wallada herself, though others speculate that this person could have been a man. However, infidelity with Black lovers was a common theme in Arabic poetry, and so it is also possible that this detail was a literary invention.[21]

Ibn Zaydun continued to dedicate poems to Wallada, and write extensively about her, for years after their separation.[7]