Nerves were a flutter on the day of Nick's first date with Michelle. The 30-year-old businessman from Spokane, Washington, was trying his best to contain his high expectations. Even though he and Michelle, a 27-year-old Catholic school teacher from Redwood City, California, had hit it off on the phone and in emails, Nick was anxious it wouldn't be the same in person. Previously, he had met a few women on CatholicMatch and those meetings had fallen flat; “I was hoping and praying that Michelle and I would have that 'spark' in person too.”
Seeing her face to face, he was struck by her classy look. “She reminded me of a blonde Kate Middleton (whom I think very highly of),” Nick recalls. Like the Duchess, Michelle looked beautiful, dressed stylishly yet modestly, and carried herself with class.
She was smart and he liked that
Nick was initially drawn to Michelle’s CatholicMatch profile not only because of her physical beauty, but because she was intelligent and had earned a Masters Degree; she was committed to the Catholic faith and morality, loved traveling, and she grew up in Washington State—his home state.
Although Nick has always been a faithful Catholic, he had never seriously dated anyone who was Catholic before joining CatholicMatch. “As I grew older, I realized how important my faith and religion were to me—including the morality that accompanies being Catholic. I knew deep down I would not be able to be with someone who didn’t share these same feelings.” He says he felt CatholicMatch would be his best opportunity to meet a good spouse because “relationships built around faith have the best chance of succeeding and being the most fruitful.”
Hot date
For a different couple, the scenario of Nick and Michelle's first date might have been a disaster, but it was a bonding experience for them. They had taken a bus into Seattle for dinner and a Mariner’s game when the packed-to-the-gills bus stalled on a drawbridge crossing for 45 minutes. On a sweltering August day, the bus driver turned the engines off, and Nick and Michelle spent the first minutes of their date watching each other melt. Surprisingly, “the date never felt uneasy or forced,” says Nick.
After 10 hours together, the two decided to meet the next day for coffee before Michelle flew back to San Francisco. “It was then that I invited her to my sister’s wedding for our third date and she accepted. Needless to say, my family was a bit shocked and nervous, but I told them they’d understand when they met her, and they did!”
The couple spent several months flying back and forth for visits. “It grew increasingly difficult to go a month at a time without seeing each other, so Michelle moved home to Redmond, WA after the school year was finished in June 2013.” Now they had only a 4.5-hour drive to see one another.
Proposal a year later
On their one-year dating anniversary at a surprise picnic, Nick got down on bended knee and proposed marriage to Michelle. However, he'd known for much longer that he wanted to marry Michelle—way back on their third date when they had attended his sister's wedding. “I knew then that she was the one I had waited my whole life for.”
“I have CatholicMatch to thank for introducing me to Michelle!” Nick recommends that CatholicMatch members “stretch their boundaries, both emotionally and geographically, because you never know what God has in store for you unless you're open to it!”
The couple will profess their wedding vows on July 18, 2014, at St. Aloysius Gonzaga in Spokane, WA.
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