His Relatives Were Threatening to Make a Profile for Him
5
Nick's sister, Mary, and his brother-in-law, Sean, threatened to create a CatholicMatch profile for him if he didn't make one first!
Sean was fed up meeting women who didn't share his values, and Mary and Sean were pretty convincing since they had met one another on CatholicMatch. The military lifestyle also made it difficult to find someone so, in 2011, he gave in and signed up for a membership.
Sarah was studying at a Catholic college, but she was finding it difficult to find Mr. Right. "[At] Franciscan
where the male to female ratio was 1:4, I was getting nowhere with the slim pickings, so I decided to widen my net," she explains. She joined in 2008, but it wasn't until 2012 that the tide changed for her.
We met in the chatrooms
One night, Nick and Sarah started chatting in one of CatholicMatch's chatrooms. Since they were both night shifters, they ended up chatting all night.
"There was one other man in the chat room who just wouldn't leave, so we ended up in a private chat after a while," she recalls. "We shared interests and conversations were easy, so it just felt natural."
After a few months talking on CatholicMatch, they moved to Facebook, and then to phone and text. Getting to know one another, they found that they both had similar tastes and senses of humor, which was a big deal to both them.
Another characteristic that Nick, who was naturally quiet, found attractive about Sarah was her talkativeness and how easily she could keep their conversations going. He was also enamored by her smile—especially the gap between her two front teeth.
In turn, Sarah thought Nick was handsome, plus he passed all of her requirements. "He's in the military, he has a large family, and he was stationed in my hometown in Virginia."
Ugh, we blew it
In May of 2013, the couple met for a casual lunch squeezed in between Sarah's job interview and Nick's deployment. They had randomly chosen the place to eat because it was equidistant.
"The restaurant we chose was awful!" Sarah remembers.
"But that didn't stop us from sitting and chatting for four hours," Nick adds.
Despite the long conversation, both of them left the date thinking they had blown it. "I felt like I had been too boring," Nick, 30, explains.
Sarah, 30, laughs, "And I thought I had talked too much!"
The "fall party" was just an excuse
The day after their iffy first date, Nick left for a five-month deployment to Japan. They kept in contact while he was away, and when he returned in October, Nick started hanging out with Sarah because of some cleverly devised events and group functions planned by Sarah.
"One of our favorite memories is from that November before we made our relationship official," she shares. "I had planned a 'fall party' with a friend of mine at my parents' house. One of my motives was to have an excuse to have Nick over casually so he could meet my friends."
She continues, "I agreed to an open invite because the more the merrier! Little did I know that my friend has this amazing power to attract guests to any event she hosts, so our little fun evening ended up with around 50 people! It was the most fun party I have ever hosted. We had food and drinks galore, billiards, board games, casual chatting, a fire pit, and Ceili dancing accompanied by a couple of fiddles that guests had brought. We absolutely destroyed my dad's grass, and he'll never let us live that down, but it was absolutely worth it."
And 4 months later...
After around four months of dating, on March 2, 2014, Nick had plans to propose. As usual, he and Sarah went to Mass, and then they went to the grocery store to get some things to make brunch at his house.
"Walking into the store, Nick was holding my left hand and said that my Claddagh ring was hurting him so he took it off and put it in his pocket. I thought nothing of it because that's the sort of thing he did," she recalls.
While making brunch, Sarah went to give Nick a hug, and she noticed that he didn't hug her back. "I feigned I was upset and said something like, 'You don't even want me!' He said, 'That's not true!' and told me to hug him again."
When Sarah went to hug Nick, he said, "I want you forever!"
Sarah, knowing that something was up, pulled away, to see Nick was holding an engagement ring. "It was the one I loved but had never talked to him about!"
How did you know this is what I wanted?!
Apparently, Sarah's friend unbeknownst to her had texted Nick a picture of the ring that Sarah wanted—though she hadn't realized Nick had already been browsing rings. "I had enlisted my mother and sister, Mary, who helped search for the ring at local jewelers," he shares. "I bought it that week, and carried it around for two weeks, waiting to get up the nerve to ask her."
When Nick asked Sarah to marry him, she was shocked by the situation bewildered by how he could have happened to choose the ring of her dreams. "The first words out of my mouth were, 'Are you serious?'"
For a moment, Nick was afraid that Sarah's answer would be no. "Fortunately I remembered that he needed an answer and stammered out, 'Yes.'
In all the excitement, I managed to leave one of his plastic measuring spoons on the hot stove and it partially melted, which became a running joke whenever we went to use it after."
Happily ever after
On May 2, 2015, Nick and Sarah were married at Sarah's childhood parish, St. Paul Catholic Church in Portsmouth, Virginia. "When I went there for the first time at 10, I was in awe and swore I'd get married there one day," she says.
Since their wedding, Nick and Sarah have welcomed two adorable little boys into their family: Nathaniel, who is one-and-a-half, and William, who's three months old.