Bart was living an active life, building up his web development company and doing frequent travel. The 30-year-old originally from Texas was in Seattle and wanting to find a quality group of Catholics to add to his social circle, and ideally to meet his future spouse. CatholicMatch was where he turned. “You pound the Internet pretty good with your advertising,” he told me wryly.
He made a connection with Nikole, a 24-year-old political speechwriter from Alaska. She filled out Bart’s questionnaire and scored the highest. “The quiz was mostly in jest,” he said. “She got all the jokes, and off we were.”
It’s easy to “off we were” in retrospect, but the Texas-Seattle-Anchorage corridor presented it’s shared of geographic challenges. “A lot of long distance sweet-talking was required to pull this off,” Bart told CatholicMatch. “Face time with the iPhone was critical.”
Bart traveled to Anchorage first, and got a first-hand look at Alaskan life. Nikole took him on rides by dogsled, horse-drawn carriage by boat. They got on a plane over Mount McKinley and a scary car ride over ice streets. There were some limits though. “At no point did we ride a polar bear,” Bart jokingly assured CatholicMatch.
He also got to know her father, who works as an auctioneer and one of the trips they made together was to the FBI building to pick up a jaguar and a white rhinoceros. Even though they were at the office of federal law enforcement, Bart again hastened to dispel any notion that Nikole’s father might have strapped him to the lie detector test.
