Clara loves surprises, so David kept their honeymoon destination a secret from everyone, so no one would slip and tell her. At the airport, he stopped a gate short of their secret destination and asked a stranger to take a picture of his big reveal.
He reached into his carry-on, pulled out a lei, and placed it over Clara’s neck while saying, “humuhumunukunukuapua'a," the name of the official state fish of Hawaii. "She heard me mention the fish before, so she was jumping up and down for joy, and she was kissing me as passers-by were looking on.” David had booked a trip to Maui! It would be Clara’s first time visiting the island.
Widowed after 41 years and starting over
After losing his wife in 2010, David couldn’t even think of dating. Having been married for 41 years, he couldn’t imagine another woman taking his wife’s place. However, after three years of being alone, and once he worked through the stages of grief, his feelings started to change. “In the summer of 2013, I started being interested in finding another lady,” explains David, a 71-year-old, retired meteorologist.
But love didn't start so easily the second time...
Thinking he was ready to get his feet wet again, an acquaintance of David’s set him up on a blind date, but the date did not go well. “So my daughter-in-law told me, ‘You need to get on a dating website and find another woman.' I said, ‘I don’t feel like it, but it may be what I need.’ She set me up a profile on CatholicMatch, and I added my commentary. Within two weeks, there were two ladies in San Antonio.”
David thought that San Antonio was a long way to drive for an uncertain outcome, but since there were two possibilities, he made two dates—one for Friday evening and the other for a Saturday lunch. The Saturday date never responded, but the Friday one did, and it went very well. They dated for almost two months. But over time, the relationship began to falter.
“I got to be quite emotionally involved with that lady, but she, little by little, had less to do with me. Unfortunately, I had already booked flights to Spain with her—where I have a house and spend my summer—and on a cruise to England and Norway in August of 2014. The cruise was wonderful, but she kept roaming off in different parts of the ship wanting to be away from me. By the time we went on the travels, the relationship was pretty sour,” he recalls.
“After we got back from the trip, she let me know via email that she didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I had a hard time with that. I thought the best thing I could do was to get back on CatholicMatch.”
She didn't speak English—but he spoke Spanish!
Once he was back on CatholicMatch, David met Clara, now 66, who is from Columbia, and at the time, was visiting Texas. Even though he found her profile right away, he approached their relationship with a little more caution. On the first date, they went to lunch at a cafe in Katy, a suburb of Houston. “I mentioned to Clara that I wasn’t interested in a long-term relationship. I just wanted to get this previous woman out of my heart.”
But Clara had other plans! “She pointed at me with her finger and jabbed it into my chest and said, 'I’ll get her out of your heart! You’ll see.'”
Clara didn’t speak English, but this wasn’t a problem for David because he already spoke Spanish. In the 1960s, the Navy had sent David to Spain where became fluent. It was also where he met his late wife, who also knew very little English. The language barrier was no match for Clara and David's connection.
Laughter is the best medicine
For Clara, who was visiting Texas on a tourist’s visa, it was love at first sight, and she was sure that she could make David forget his past hurts. She was right because a month and a half into the relationship, David proposed!
He knew that he wanted to be married to Clara because she made him laugh. “I liked that she had a terrific sense of humor and that she approached life in a joyful manner. She’s always upbeat, smiling, and happy. Her sense of humor is so good that it’s caused my sense of humor to improve.”
Clara, whose first marriage was annulled, remembers liking everything about David. She particularly enjoyed that he sprung surprises on her, like their honeymoon trip. And he says, she did make him forget that other woman.
At the end of December 2014, after just three months of dating, Clara went back to Columbia but soon returned to be with David. David and Clara were married on February 11th, 2017, at St. Angela Merici, in Missouri City, TX with many family and friends in attendance. The couple happily resides in Missouri City.
Continue Reading
