Ethan & Mariette Heard The Wedding March On Their First Date
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Several of Mariette's friends had found their spouses on CatholicMatch, including one that Mariette had “pestered” to join the site. But after several years of disappointments, she had given up on the notion that it was going to work for her.
She was ready to give up on CatholicMatch, but decided to try one more time to see if a man she had talked to a year before was back on. He was not, however Ethan, 31-years-old and living in Ohio, was.
Unbeknownst to Mariette, Ethan was thinking about giving up on CatholicMatch too. He had been on and off the site for almost 10 years. He had two serious relationships come from people he met on CatholicMatch, but nothing had panned out and he was getting tired. He decided one night to send a few more final messages to new members, and if nothing worked he would be done forever. This was two days after Mariette had rejoined the site, and he sent her a first message.
“He had been to my parish once while visiting a friend in the area,” Mariette said. It provided the basis for a casual message connection, and once the ice was broken, more messages started pouring forth. “We wrote daily and within a couple weeks we were having weekly conversations on the phone,” she said.
This was in April of 2013, and while the messages and calls were great, Mariette still had a sense that a little something was missing when it came to the chemistry. When Ethan asked to come and visit, she wanted to make sure they had a spark.
“I asked that we Skype before buying plane tickets,” she said. “Seeing each other face-to-face on webcam made communicating so much easier.” It also eased the chemistry concerns and in July, Ethan flew to Seattle, where Mariette drove to meet him.
“We chose a place where Ethan had family and where I didn’t know everyone in town,” Mariette said. “We felt like it would give us equal footing, a fun place neither of us lived, and if it didn’t work out, he would have gotten the chance to visit his brother and sister-in-law in the process.”
There were wedding bells, in a manner of speaking, on that first date. Ethan and Mariette went to church at the base of the famous Seattle Space Needle. As they prayed together, the organist was practicing the wedding march. Ethan found it romantic, and it proved to be prophetic.
They enjoyed a wonderful weekend of doing tourist activities, eating good food, going to Masses, and spending time with Ethan's brother and sister-in-law, too. The connection between the two was apparent to Ethan’s family, who had blunt words for him after meeting Mariette that first weekend—“If you don’t want to marry her, you might as well put on a wig and marry yourself, because you’ll never find someone as perfect for you as her.”
That visit in Seattle set the stage for return visits back and forth between the two. He came to Idaho in August and traveled to Montana to meet Mariette’s immediate family. Ethan was quickly loved by all of them.
In October and November Mariette made trips to Ethan's current town in the Cleveland area. Even with the frequent travel, the time apart still seemed too long. “But Skype, email, text, and phone calls helped us make it through,” Mariette said.
After making multiple trips, they both realized that they needed to be in the same town.
“I decided to take the plunge,” Mariette recalled. “I left my job and sold mostly everything.” Ethan came to see her for Christmas, and they loaded all of her belongings to go to Cleveland.
The relocation paid off. They saw each other every day, even if only for a few minutes and grew closer together. They made a trip to Georgia to meet the rest of Ethan's family. “Everyone agreed that we were a match made in Heaven,” Mariette said.
Earlier this year, Ethan took Mariette to a Latin Mass. After Mass, the priest exposed the Blessed Sacrament and departed. “I was confused, since Ethan had not mentioned a Holy Hour to me,” she recalled. “He seemed just as confused as me, but we settled in to pray.”
But the truth was, Ethan was not confused it all. After 15 minutes of silent prayer, he turned to Mariette, told her he loved her and asked for her hand in marriage.
“I could not believe this was really happening,” Mariette said. “Becoming engaged to Ethan with Jesus right there with us.” The priest returned, blessed them and her new engagement ring.
Ethan and Mariette were married this past July—on the one-year anniversary of praying together to the sound of the wedding march in the church at the base of the Seattle Space Needle. “Ethan is more than I could have ever dreamed for in a spouse,” Mariette said. “He is holy, chaste, funny, hardworking and simply the best man I know.”
All photographs by Orange Photographie.