It Only Took Him Two Hours to Find Her!
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Max had been on CatholicMatch for just two hours when he met Elizabeth.
After seeing the site mentioned in some articles he had read, he decided to take a chance. “I have to admit that I never expected I would join an online dating site. Mostly, in my mind, that was something other people did. How wrong I was! It was the best $30 I ever spent!” Elizabeth had also had misgivings about dating online.
She thought online dating was for desperate people, and she would only meet weirdos. But when she attended her brother’s wedding in June of 2019, a friend told Elizabeth she had met her fiance on CatholicMatch. “I had just graduated from college with a degree in Classical Piano Performance and had neither met nor dated anyone. As a devout Catholic and conservative, it isn’t easy to find someone like-minded in a School of Music.” The clinching argument in favor of joining came from Elizabeth’s mother. “She said, ‘what have you got to lose?’” Elizabeth was on CatholicMatch a week later.
Elizabeth chatted with a few people for the next nine months.
Then in March 2020, she received Max’s message. “What struck me most was that he looked like such a happy, cheerful person. He came to the U.S. from Slovenia for college at Harvard, and I’m in northern Alabama. Imagine the odds of our ever meeting in a pre-online world!”
“Our first date was actually over the phone,” Max says. “I was very excited to talk, as texts only go so far. Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, I had an inner ear ailment which caused terrible vertigo. Now I like to tell people that when I met Elizabeth, the room was quite literally spinning for me,” Max laughs. “I knew that however long our first call lasted, it wouldn’t be enough, so a second date, or rather, call, happened very naturally.”
Elizabeth adds, “When we talked, I immediately felt completely at ease with him, like I could be wholly myself. I am still struck by how kind Max is! He is very devoted to the Faith; we pray together a lot, and he is such a spiritual inspiration. I am also impressed by his sheer brilliance. He loves learning, we share so many interests, and he and I laugh all the time.”
When her father noticed that their one hour phone dates had progressed to five hours, he asked Elizabeth about this young man. “I said, he is simply so...sweet. My father responded, ‘Sweetness is paramount.’”
Max was just as taken with Elizabeth.
“What attracted me at first was how committed to the Faith she is. She struck me as someone much holier than I, which immediately caught my attention. After all, what better way to grow in holiness than to be with someone whose example you can emulate daily? I found her terrifically talented, charming, patient, and beautiful. Also, I was instantly enamored with her sense of humor, and the simple fact that we could talk for hours on end without ever running out of topics.”
Distance was an issue at the beginning of their relationship.
Max was able to fly down in June 2020 from Massachusetts to Alabama to meet Elizabeth for the first time, and once more in July. But when Max’s Ph.D. courses went online for the 2020-2021 academic year due to Covid, he was able to relocate to an apartment in Elizabeth’s hometown. “God brings light out of darkness,” Elizabeth states.
“We could now date in person. Max has gotten to know my family as a result, and he fits right in! It’s amazing how much we all have in common given how far apart we grew up!” Max adds, “I cherish Elizabeth’s family just as much as my own, which is not exactly the kind of future in-law story one usually hears. They accepted me with open arms, to the point where Elizabeth’s father actually gave me permission to marry her before I had even gotten around to asking!” He did get around to it, using ice cream as the bait. “Max told me someone had left ice cream on the back porch and it had melted,” Elizabeth smiles. “I followed him to the deck, and there it was: a pint of my favorite kind...left for dead. I opened it, and there was a little red box sitting in an empty ice cream container. I gasped, and asked, ‘Is this the thing?!’” Max then got on one knee and Elizabeth wholeheartedly agreed to marry him.
The happy couple have set a date of July 3, 2021 for their wedding at St. Mary of the Visitation in Huntsville.
With Elizabeth’s background in music, they have enjoyed choosing hymns and processional music together. Max comments, “If there was any doubt in Elizabeth’s mind about my musical tastes, she can now rest easy in the knowledge that I am completely partial to music that is English, grandiose, and features the organ prominently. She still seems to want to marry me!” Their engagement has been a time to get to know each other extremely well and grow spiritually together. They plan to reside in Boston so Max can continue his academic career, and Elizabeth is learning the difficult language of Slovenian. “I’ve always wanted to become fluent in a foreign language, so I’ve been taking lessons. We want to raise our children to be bilingual. Max has been patient enough to speak it with me, and his family is also happy I am learning the language. They are the sweetest people!”
Max is still amazed at how things turned out.
“I remember wishing for a spouse that would also be my best friend, and lo and behold, the same day I signed up for a CatholicMatch account, there she appeared. We have never had a dull moment!”