They Handled a Different Time Zone Every Day, Yet They Still Fell in Love!

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While on a layover in Chicago in late 2017, Karen’s fellow flight attendant recommended she join CatholicMatch.

Karen decided to gift herself a six-month subscription for her 46th birthday. Despite her quick sign-up, she was leery about the online dating world, since she’d used a different Catholic dating site without positive results. Hoping for the best, Karen took the online dating course offered through the CatholicMatch Institute.

“The online course helped me improve my profile, as well as to have realistic expectations,” Karen reports. In the first couple days, she met a scammer and was thankful for the notification warning CatholicMatch sent her way! Then, she took a ten-day break and prayed a novena to St. Joseph. Her mother offered some sage advice, to expand her horizons a bit and look outside her normal parameters. After listening to her mother's advice and finishing her novena, John’s profile popped right up!

John also had been using different Catholic dating websites with little success.

He had been on CatholicMatch before in 2002! Fifteen years later, in November of 2017, he decided to give it another go. Little did he know he had joined the site just two days before his future wife did!

Karen read his profile and was struck by how different it was from many others. “What stood out in his profile was his desire to share his Catholic faith with his future spouse,” she says.  So, she reached out and sent him a simple “smile” emoji, assuming she likely wouldn’t hear back. But within 10 minutes, John “smiled” back and sent her a message! They hit off the conversation about John’s hobby of golf, and moved into baseball. They discovered that they shared a favorite team, the Chicago Cubs.

“I was on a layover in Los Angeles when that (first) conversation occurred, and it lasted for 2 hours!” Karen said. “I truly felt I had met my Catholic Match!”

After learning John’s last name, Karen did an extensive background check online. “I wanted to make sure that the man I was speaking to was legitimate!” she explains. Luckily it came back clean! They planned to meet in person in another couple of months. They had to plan that far ahead because Karen was living outside Seattle at the time, and John lived in Indiana. Karen’s work gave her a familiarity with a variety of places, though, and Indiana was on that list.  So on February 1st of 2018, she flew out to Greencastle to meet John for dinner.

In the lobby of the hotel, John met her with a big hug!  They went to their favorite restaurant, Cracker Barrel, and discussed everything from their shared Catholic faith to local Indiana politics.  After dinner, they held hands and took a drive through the unique landscape of Indiana.  Karen could tell how much John loved the Midwest by the way he spoke.

At his apartment, they watched the movie "Brooklyn", where Karen kept pausing it to talk about different scenes that she found important.

The next day, they went to Mass together and out to brunch with some fellow parishioners--five older women who had “adopted” John after his mother had passed away. They were all very excited to meet his new lady friend! 

During their walk at a nearby nature preserve, Karen had a little confession. She told John that she’d already made plans to come back to Indiana the very next weekend . . . and had made those plans a month ago already, before she’d even met him. “He looked a bit surprised, but was excited to be able to see me again in such a short amount of time!” Karen laughs. That next weekend they went to Confession and visited a local jazz club. They both knew they wanted to keep the Sacraments as an integral part of their relationship. 

The distance was one of their biggest challenges since they lived about 1800 miles apart.

Another obstacle was the constant time zone changes Karen faced daily, being in different places all the time after her flights. But technology and twice-monthly visits made their relationship work. 

In October of 2018 Karen moved to Indiana to be near John. They both saw their relationship developing into something serious, so Karen went through a significant job change during the move. Switching flight bases left her unable to see John more than once every few weeks, but every time she came back, they picked up right where they left off.

They prayed daily Rosaries on the phone and made sure the distance didn’t drive them apart. They made time to meet their family members over the summer, and John took a moment to pull Karen’s mother aside and asked for her blessing to marry Karen. Her mother burst into joyful tears and gave a resounding approval.

So, later that year, to Karen’s delight, John took her to see a local covered bridge.

“I’d read about a covered bridge festival in a nearby county,” Karen explains. John drove them a few miles to Dumbar Bridge. Walking toward it and discussing their relationship status, John suddenly dropped to one knee and proposed. Karen answered fast because the country road had an unusual amount of traffic that day and they had to get moving!

They took a few months to do marriage preparation together, and were happy to find the process brought them closer as a couple. Their Nuptial Mass was supposed to have taken place May 9th, 2020 at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Indianapolis. But the Covid19 pandemic hit, so they rescheduled their wedding for May of 2021, which happens to be the feast day of St. Isadore the Farmer. (Remember all the farms John loves in Indiana?)

Karen most appreciates John’s empathy toward others, and John loves Karen’s ability to be a good listener. They are patient about the wedding postponement, and look forward to celebrating their marriage next year!

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