On a cold March day as I was shoveling the driveway my neighbor came over to tell me he had met Victoria, a wonderful woman from Spain whom he would soon be marrying.
"Congratulations, Mike!" I said, genuinely happy for him since his wife had passed away from cancer a few years back.
Later that evening I told my wife the news. The first thing she asked me was: "She's from Spain, well how did they meet?"
Obviously, I had forgotten to get that tiny detail. In fact, the thought never even crossed my mind. Perhaps it is because men and women are wired differently or simply because I tend not to pay much attention to such details. Either way I had dropped the ball.
"Maybe they met on CatholicMatch," my wife said. Now I knew my neighbor was a fairly devout Catholic, as he regularly attended daily Mass. However, as far as I knew, Mike did not know that I was involved with CatholicMatch.
"No way!" I responded to my wife. Seriously, what would be the odds that my next-door neighbor had met his fiancée on the website I helped to start and run?
At this point my wife had piqued my interest enough that I opened up the laptop and did a search just to prove her wrong. Shock: Mike had a profile on CatholicMatch! Double shock: Mike was in a relationship with a woman named Victoria and she was from Spain!
The next day I ran across the street and knocked on his door. "Mike, I have to ask you – where did you meet Victoria?" He then proceeded to tell me that he met her on a Catholic dating website.
"CatholicMatch?" I asked.
"Yes, that's the site!" he responded.
"I run that site!" I answered. At that point Mike was in tears, hugging me in his front yard and telling me how I had changed his life.
Obviously the credit must first and foremost go to God, then to Mike and Victoria who each took the chance of going online. With that said, words cannot express the joy and satisfaction I felt knowing that the work we do here at CatholicMatch is changing the lives of people all over the world – and even our neighbor next door.
