Kelly, age 23, stood inside the Cold Stone Creamery ice cream shop, looking around for Michael, who she’d met on CatholicMatch.
This was to be their first in-person meeting. Several minutes passed. She checked guys coming through the door, but still no sign of him.
Finally, she decided to call Michael. A nearby cell phone rang and a man four feet away answered his phone. But he looked nothing like Michael’s profile picture. “He had a full beard which he did not have in his profile picture,” Kelly remembers.
“So things were starting out... awkwardly.”
Michael, age 26, had contacted Kelly on CatholicMatch several months earlier. He signed up to the site because his brother met his wife there, and Michael hoped to find a similar meaningful relationship. Unbeknownst to Michael, when he sent his message, Kelly had already terminated her subscription to the dating site.
For her part, Kelly had assumed online dating was for desperate people. “But nothing else was working out for me,” she said. She signed up for a one-month subscription. She came across Michael’s profile and was intrigued. He was an an engineer, loved to travel, wasn’t too much older than her, and seemed funny. “He was also handsome, always a bonus,” she says.
“I sent him a smiley face, and after I hadn't heard from him for two weeks and my paid subscription was almost up, I left CatholicMatch.”
Right after Kelly cancelled, Michael responded to her emoticon.
Three months passed. Kelly decided to give CatholicMatch another try. She signed back up. Kelly saw Michael’s message waiting for her. "I see you're a teacher,” it said. “What's your favorite thing to teach? Don't say recess!"
Kelly responded, and she and Michael sent messages back and forth for a week. Then they exchanged phone numbers. There was one caveat. Michael said he loved camping. Kelly told him she was not a fan. “I needed to make sure he knew upfront that I wouldn't be participating in any outdoor activities!” she laughs.
They texted for a few days and planned to meet up. Unfortunately, a huge snowstorm blew in and they had to postpone. A week later, on March 6, 2015, they finally met at Cold Stone.
They got in line for their ice cream. Michael let her go first. Kelly ordered, then Michael ordered. At one point, Kelly thought Michael was behind her, but he wasn’t. When the cashier asked for the total, Kelly paid for both of them. “Michael was so embarrassed and felt so bad!” Kelly remembers.
They chose a table and started talking. “He is much better at conversation than I am, and asked all sorts of good questions,” Kelly says. She shocked and amused him with some stories of her crazy teaching experiences. He wowed her with his explanation of his job as a mechanical engineer.
“I remember thinking ‘He's too smart for me!’,” Kelly says.
Michael cracked some jokes she didn't get, because she didn't completely understand his sense of humor yet.
After a few hours of fun conversation, Michael had to leave because he had out-of-town guests staying at his house that night. They said goodbye and went their separate ways. Kelly honestly didn't know how she felt about him. She refused to talk about the date when she got back to her parents' house that night.
The next morning, Kelly got a text from Michael at 10 a.m.
He told her how much fun he had, and hoped they could see each other again soon. “I remember being so impressed,” Kelly says. “After years of trying so hard to get someone to like me, trying to get guys to even respond to my texts, it was a relief to be pursued instead of being the one doing the pursuing.”
Kelly and Michael saw each other the following weekend, and several weekends after that. Kelly was cautiously optimistic because of previous bad dating experiences. “They were very limited, but bad nonetheless,” she says. “I wouldn't allow myself to fall for him.”
It took weeks before Kelly was ready to admit that she really liked Michael.
Almost a year later, they got engaged on February 26, 2016. They married on October 29 of that year. The following September, they welcomed their baby daughter into the world.
“I prayed for so many years for God to lead me to my future spouse, and gave up hope many times,” Kelly confesses. “I know the Holy Spirit led me to log back in to CatholicMatch that one day to find the three month old message from Michael. I never would have imagined I'd meet my future husband online, but God's plans are always better than our own!”
