Don't Worry Matthew, I Carry Pepper Spray With Me
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With her subscription set to run out in five days, Nikol, then 33, thought she was done.
“My subscription was up for renewal, I had had no luck really connecting with anyone, and so I just was not going to renew the subscription. I was going to take a step back, reevaluate whether the online dating thing was no longer for me. CatholicMatch was not my first online dating site; I had tried others and had no success there. So I think, on an unconscious level for me, CatholicMatch was going to be my last go; if I wasn’t going to find ‘the one’ there then I think I just knew the online scene was not going to be the place where I would find my forever person,” Nikol said.
Then she received a message that someone named Matthew, 35, had checked out her profile.
I thought “What the heck, I will go on and take a look,” Nikol said.
She did, and he sent her a message.
“I saw Nikol’s profile, thought her beautiful and wanted to discover her as a person beyond the information that intrigued me from her profile,” Matthew said.
They exchanged a few more messages which snowballed into what eventually became a six-hour conversation a few days later. One week after that, they had their first date.
From the beginning, they hit it off in what could otherwise have been a potentially awkward moment. The two—who lived about 40 minutes apart in northern Virginia near Washington, DC—had agreed to meet up at a parking lot in a shopping center. The plan was to take Matthew’s car to dinner then drive back for bowling.
Once in the car, Nikol immediately had her phone out, texting friends and her sisters that she was OK—a necessary precaution, Nikol says, for meeting someone she had previously only known online. After letting him know why she had her phone out, Nikol chose that moment to share another safety precaution she had taken.
“So I just told him, 'They shouldn’t worry too much; I carry pepper spray on me.'”
Matthew immediately responded. “I hope there is no reason for you to have to use said pepper spray,” he said.
“I simply replied with 'I hope so too.’”
The pepper spray comment didn't ruin anything
“From there it was a fun evening followed by Tuesday night dates, late night phone calls, and the occasional weekend meetups during the day when work schedules allowed for us to,” Nikol said.
A key to their compatibility, Nikol says, is their shared faith. But it’s not simply that they are both cradle Catholics who remain committed to their faith. It’s also that the way they practice their faith is somewhat different—and, ultimately, that turned out to be a plus for both Nikol and Matthew.
Nikol says she typically approaches prayer as a conversation with God, rather than saying traditional prayers or engaging in other formal practices. “I converse and I listen with the Lord,” Nikol said. “For lack of a better explanation, I am very much an inner room person, I keep my faith with God very close to my heart. It’s not a secret and I am not ashamed of it...I am just quieter.”
Contrast Matthew: “He does daily Rosary, has multiple prayer books that he reads daily or near daily. Whereas I only had a lonely olive wood cross in my apartment with some other small items and an old Bible, Matthew has a Thomas Kinkade tapestry, crucifixes, a Sacred Heart of Jesus image, and a vast library of religious books. He has more evidence of his faith in the open. As opposed to my quieter way of being a Catholic, I like to think of it as Matthew living our faith out loud and in the open, something I always admired.”
Over time, Nikol has found that their different approaches to their faith and prayer complemented and balanced each other out.
I went from never praying the rosary to praying it multiple times a week
“As time has gone by I will see Matthew try a conversational approach to prayer. He doesn’t always use his prayer book right away. I now try to use prayer books a little more often—it doesn’t happen daily, but it happens way more than before Matthew was in my life. We now are committed to doing adoration once a week at our church; this has led from me having never said a rosary to now doing one once a week. They are small steps, and they have become life-changing,” Nikol said.
Eight months after they first met, Matthew and Nikol became engaged on August 1, 2015 and were married one year later, on October 1, 2016, at Mount St. Mary’s University, which is her alma mater. “It was a dream come true to be married in that chapel to the man God intended for me. We both have said we are a blessing to the other and an answered prayer,” Nikol said.
Looking back, Nikol can see God’s plan at work in her life—even in those moments when it was hardest to discern.
“As my subscription on CatholicMatch was coming to its end I was literally mentally and emotionally preparing myself to be single for the rest of my life—that my vocation was not to be marriage. Or God’s plan was for me to marry much later in life. It was not easy coming to terms with that since I had always wanted children. Marriage and children were always in MY plan for me, but I had to accept that maybe that was not God’s plan for me,” she said.
That moment of decision—of acceptance of God’s plan, she says, was pivotal.
“I just remember that not long at all before Matthew came along and checked out my profile that I had felt a sense of OK-ness with what I thought God’s plan was for me, but then He changed that with one simple inbox message from CatholicMatch saying ‘Matthew H. has viewed your profile,’” Nikol said.