He Tried CatholicMatch Because There Weren't Many People His Age At His Parish

Some would say Stephen and Deidre met at an inopportune time. In the months immediately preceding their meeting, he’d moved back from Iowa to Missouri and was working roughly 100 hours per week between his job as a home inspector plus two security gigs on the side. Deidre, from Overland Park, Kansas, was recovering from a concussion, suffering such severe light and sound sensitivities that she was unable to work and was “essentially nocturnal” outside of countless trips for speech therapy, vestibular therapy, and more. “My entire life had changed, it was like I was relearning a lot of things.” Her sister jokingly cautioned her, “This is the worst time in the world to try to find someone!” Still, Deidre sensed “I just knew I needed to find my person then.”

So, in early 2021, she created a CatholicMatch profile. 

While he’d hoped to find his spouse at church, Stephen found instead that options in his age range were “sparse.” So in 2018, at the recommendation of a friend who’d met his spouse on the website, he’d reluctantly signed up for CatholicMatch. He’d had little luck since joining, but nevertheless, he persisted. Despite moves to and from Iowa and job changes leading to long, long work hours, once he saw Deidre’s profile Stephen was immediately willing to be “intentional” about finding time for her!

Her profile screamed, “pro-life”!

From the start, he recollected, “Her profile screamed ‘pro-life!’” After their mutual Catholic faith, being pro-life “is [the couple’s] first shared value.” He was so impressed “seeing how she was committed to the protection of the unborn and speaking out for those who couldn’t speak for themselves. Seeing that she walked across the country [as part of Crossroads Pro-Life Walks Across America’s summer program] just confirmed it.” On March 22nd, 2021, he sent her a thoughtful message, asking why she chose to study psychology.

When she looked through his profile pictures after reading his message, Deidre recalls thinking, “He looked sad,” and sensing, “I felt like it was my job to make him happy.” She noted, “To that point, though, in the pictures he’s in with me, he looks way happier!” She repeated, “Yeah, I just remember thinking, ‘I feel like it’s my job to make him smile,’” and jokingly continued, “so I married him!” 

Stephen confirmed Deidre’s observations, commenting “Before I met Deidre, I never had sustained happiness. I had, you know, episodes of joy. But when I met her, every day since has been sustained happiness.” 

Her mom drove her to their first date!

Because Deidre wasn’t able to drive due to her concussion recovery, in May her mom drove her to her first in-person date with Stephen! Stephen laughingly recalled that while they were eating in the restaurant, “being the protective mom she is, she took pictures of my truck in the parking lot.” But his pro-life decal gave her pause, as she recognized “What kind of a dangerous person would have a pro-life decal on his vehicle?” To Deidre’s mortification, and his great amusement, her mom shared that story when Stephen met her extended family over the 4th of July weekend! 

After that successful first date, the couple dated for the next six months, going out to parks, to restaurants, to the arboretum in her town, and more. No matter where they were or what they were up to, Deidre observed, “We’ve always had really good conversations. Stephen and I can have a really deep conversation or a really funny one, but we’re both old souls and we just don’t do surface-level.” Stephen chimed in, “And I think we both have the gift of gab!” In between in-person dates, which they went on as frequently as they could despite the hour distance between them, they exchanged “books” over text. Deidre summarized, “It was like 36 texts per day when it was counted!” 

He did this the night before he proposed...

Nearly six months later, Stephen was ready to propose. While working an overnight security guard shift one Friday night into Saturday morning in October of 2021, “I started writing to get my thoughts out.” He knew that he would see Deidre that evening, and as he wrote he thought about how he wanted to propose. From previous conversations, he knew Deidre didn’t want anything “cheesy” or “overdone,” so he decided to write a poem to propose. 

Knowing that Deidre “wanted that moment to be for us and not for other people,” he chose “a very intimate setting,” proposing when it was just the two of them that evening at his house. The poem expressed “some of the highlights of our dating and how I felt about things and how I felt about her. And I ended it ‘this is the part where I get down on one knee….’” Before the two met up that evening, Stephen had discussed with a buddy when might be the best time to propose, but as soon as he saw her he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. And Deidre rewarded his bold courage with an emphatic “yes!” The couple displayed a canvas with the words of Stephen’s poem at their wedding, and his wedding present to Deidre was a blanket with the poem written on it!

A beautiful October wedding!

Stephen and Deidre were married on October 29th, 2022, in the small chapel attached to her home parish. The little chapel holds great personal significance for Deidre because “my dad refurbished the steeple” of the church and “my uncle restained the doors. It was important to me to be married there because my family was so invested into that space. I even got to do some gardening outside the chapel with my dad beforehand.” 

Stephen joked that while Deidre capably handled most of the wedding planning, he “was primarily there for moral support.” His proud contribution to their big day was having the ring-bearer dress like a hobbit, in the style of Frodo Baggins bearing the ring in the Lord of the Rings. Even more perfectly, Deidre remembered, as she walked up to the church her one-year-old, ring-bearer nephew was dressed in his hobbit costume and sweeping autumn leaves outside the porch, just exactly as a hobbit did in one of the LOTR movies. 

She was almost late to her own wedding!

Deidre shared that she almost didn’t make it to her own wedding on time because the bridesmaid who was driving her to the church hit an electrical box on the way that rendered her car undrivable! But “with brute strength,” the friend unhooked the bumper off the wheel it had been shoved into by the force of impact, and they proceeded, cautiously, to the church! 

But the wedding itself went off without a hitch, and the couple were grateful and thrilled to be surrounded by an extraordinarily supportive group of friends and family. One of the groomsmen even braved a broken Achilles tendon to be present on their big day, albeit riding on a scooter! When the couple left the reception venue that evening to drop off the gifts they’d received, they were shocked to return to the hall less than an hour later to find that their friends had already cleaned everything up!

Words of advice for others considering CatholicMatch...

While both Deidre and Stephen expected to find their spouse at their local church, both are so glad they ultimately “broadened their horizons” and signed up for CatholicMatch. Stephen said, referencing the two years he spent on CM before meeting Deidre, “There’s no instant gratification, we’re all on God’s time.” 

Deidre warned against holding expectations of how the other person should be too closely. She laughed as she remembered that she’d been dead set against dating a man who drove a white truck with Missouri license plates because “ I had been cut off by jerks in white trucks with Missouri plates one too many times.” Stephen does, in fact, drive a white truck with Missouri license plates! She encouraged, “Be smart enough to know when your preconceived notions about relationships are getting in the way of your happiness.” 

Referencing the successful outcome of her willingness to meet someone even when “I was at my worst version,” she urged, “ If you can’t totally give yourself to someone warts and all, then you’ll never know if they really love you. Love yourself enough to know you are worth this love and be open.”