Every time Peggy opened up her CatholicMatch, she’d see Jerry’s profile picture peering back at her. She was beginning to feel annoyed by him.
“So I said to myself, ‘I'm just going to click “like” on his profile and maybe he’ll go away. He's in Iowa; he’ll never talk to me,’” recalls Peggy, 69, who resided in Texas at the time.
A few seconds later, she was startled when she received a message from Jerry, 70, saying, “Hi.”
Peggy thought, “Oh, no! What do I do now?”
From hesitancy to head over heels...
Peggy found Jerry attractive but still felt hesitant to talk to him. Despite Jerry being a former policeman, she wanted assurance that he was on the up and up. So Peggy contacted CatholicMatch Customer Service, who told her that Jerry had been a member for five years without any incidents. They recommended that she video chat with him on the CatholicMatch App before she gave him her phone number.
CatholicMatch’s reassurances made Peggy confident enough to message Jerry back that same day.
Meanwhile, Jerry also doubted whether it was a good idea to begin talking to someone who lived so far away.
“But I couldn’t stop looking at her face,” he recalls. “She’s got a smile that would melt anything.”
When Peggy messaged Jerry back on June 21, 2024, she mentioned doing a video chat.
He eagerly said, ”Okay, how about right now?”
“I answered, ‘No, no! I have to fix my face,’” she recalls.
Jerry interrupted, “She probably needed time to run a 1029 on me [Police code checking to see if a person for any outstanding warrants.]”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Peggy shot back.
The two made plans to video chat later in the evening.
Instant chemistry!
During their two-hour conversation, the couple felt the giddiness of chemistry but also a sense of camaraderie. They claim that it was love at first sight for them.
Besides attraction, Peggy and Jerry were tickled by how much they shared in common. Besides the loss of their spouses, they also shared many small coincidences.
“Everything we talked about showed how similar our lives were, such as Jerry getting married at Christ the King Parish in Des Moines, and my first husband and I getting married at Christ the King in Lubbock. When I came to Iowa, he was going to St. Joseph's, and that's where I was going in Lubbock, St. Joseph's.”
Peggy felt lucky to have met someone interested in marriage because many men she encountered only wanted friendship. She wanted more. Peggy had been her first husband’s caretaker for the last six years of his life because he had dementia. Having a husband who didn’t recognize her took its toll on Peggy. After he died, she was ready to share her life with someone.
Peggy felt too nervous to get off the plane!
The couple met online at the end of June 2024, and in September 2024, Peggy was on a plane flying to Iowa to see Jerry in person. She felt excited to meet him, but also nervous at the prospect.
“I knew I loved him and I knew he was a good guy.”
It helped that her son interviewed Jerry over Zoom.
“Yeah, he told me that he was trying to get me to say something wrong,” jokes Jerry. “But I passed the test.”
During the flight, Peggy was talking to her sister on the phone. She confessed that she didn’t know if she had enough courage to get off the plane to meet Jerry.
“I said, ‘I'm so nervous. I'm just going to stay on the plane, okay?’ And she goes, ‘No, you can't stay on the plane!’ I said, ‘I'm not getting off,’” Peggy recalls.
Meanwhile, Peggy didn’t know that Jerry was also talking to her sister, who informed him of what was happening.
When Peggy told Jerry over the phone that she couldn’t get off the plane, he didn’t mince words.
He told her, "Just get off the damn plane."
Once Peggy saw Jerry in baggage claim, all of her worries melted away.
Three visits and then a surprise wedding.
Due to Jerry’s bad back, Peggy traveled to Iowa three times to visit him. By the third trip in June of 2025, they were already engaged but hadn’t set the wedding date. Peggy knew that they would be getting married sometime that summer, so she ordered several wedding dresses to choose from, hoping one would work for her.
When they heard that their favorite priest, Fr. Haugen, was retiring on July 6th, they realized they would get married sooner than they had anticipated. Fr. Haugen told the couple he could marry them on July 4th. The couple had only five days to plan their wedding!
It was an intimate wedding, with Jerry’s brother and sister and Peggy’s brother in attendance. Peggy’s brother walked her down the aisle.
“Father got everything ready. He had music. He had a person to do a live video for us. One of our friends from church took pictures for us,” shares the couple.
The parish also had a program, music, and flowers ready for Peggy and Jerry at no charge, though the couple gave the parish a donation.
“It was so beautiful and Father made it so personal and special for us,” she says. “He even had the police chief waiting to turn on the sirens as we walked down the aisle as husband and wife.”
After the wedding, they celebrated with Mexican food and a small wedding cake. Some sparks were flying at the end of the evening as the couple waved their Fourth of July sparklers to mark the holiday and their wedding.
“Father told us that we’d never forget our wedding date,” laughs Jerry.
The couple feels grateful to CatholicMatch for providing a second chance at love.
