It Happened In Brooklyn: How Bill & Sarah Came Together

Dan Flaherty

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Success Stories

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October 17th, 2012

Bill and Sarah were both young and attractive twenty-somethings, who were looking for real depth in a relationship. The kind of depth that comes from shared faith ... but they weren’t finding it.

“I just felt that no matter who I met, I was going to have to be the instigator of all things Catholic,” Sarah said. “I had the sense that I would have to be the constant encourager and reminder, and it sounded like a burden.”

Sarah is middle school religion teacher at an all-girls school in Lower Manhattan, but she didn't want to also instruct her spouse on the faith.

After a few years of joking that she would have to join a Catholic dating site, she stayed up late with a friend one night joining every dating site they could find and doing comparisons. CatholicMatch was the only site to survive to the morning.

Meanwhile, Bill was working his way through the world of online dating, and running into his own walls. “There was no effective way to find people who shared both your faith and your fervor,” he said. “The power of filters is at the heart of online dating and CatholicMatch brings to the fore the most important factor in finding a partner.”

Now that he was on CatholicMatch, Bill had no intention of sitting by idle. Sarah was the first woman he contacted, and three days after first contact they met face-to-face. Bill believed there was a sharp limit on what you could learn about a person without meeting them in person, and Sarah appreciated his boldness.

Bill & Sarah shared a multitude of common interests, including this evening out to the opera.

“He just went for it and asked me in a gentlemanly way,” she recalled. On a snowy Friday night in their hometown of New York City, they were getting together for dinner and drinks.

“I did an extreme double-take,” Sarah told CatholicMatch as she recalled her first online encounter with Bill. “Looks aren’t everything, but he had all the looks!”

Then when his profile answers indicated a traditional faith outlook, and a desire for 5-plus children…well, Sarah was consulting with her sisters to find out if this guy was too good to be true.

Their common grounds of faith gave the developing relationship a strong foundation, but they still allowed things to unfold on God’s timing. “It was a slow, gradual realization for me that she was the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with,” Bill said.

One of the things Bill realized was that their relationship had an exquisite balance of faith, and other common interests, like design, comedy and movies. But at the same time when they disagreed on something, it was usually about an issue they both knew was trivial.

“It was a relief to date someone who took a modest and traditional stance on dating, especially the physical side of it,” Sarah said. “I felt I like I got to know him so much better because I didn’t have to struggle to make him see the light on my views.” Bill also brought a bright optimism about the future that she found both manly and admirable.

Bill proposed to Sarah as a classic movie wrapped up in the background of a rented cafe, and slid a self-designed gold-karat ring on her finger.