Probably One of the Most Creative Marriage Proposals

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Rachel, 20, figured she was done with CatholicMatch; she had a bad experience previously with a guy she had met on the site and she figured online dating just wasn’t for her. Motivated by the newsletter and subscription information in her inbox; she decided to take another look.

She saw Jaret, 21, and liked how family-oriented he seemed; he had posted many pictures with his family. She also appreciated that he answered yes to all of the key questions about Catholic teaching. She sent him an emotigram and he sent one back.

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They first met over Skype. Rachel wasn’t nervous because she assumed that their relationship wouldn’t be more than a friendship because Jaret had put in his profile that he wasn’t interested in being involved in a long-distance relationship. She lived in Boise and Jaret was from New Hampshire.

Jaret says, “I didn’t want or expect to do any dating long distance. I had previously had a bad experience with long distance dating. When I went on the site looking for people, I would discount them if they were an hour or two hours away.”

Shortly before Jaret joined CatholicMatch, he had prayed to God to help him find a good, Catholic girl. “Where I was from, they were nowhere to be found. Then one Sunday, I went to church and came back with a bulletin with the advertisement for CatholicMatch on the back. I joined and found all these profiles of Catholic women who believed like I do and then I met Rachel.”

Because Rachel lived across the country, he also figured the two would only be friends. His tune changed after his first conversation with her over Skype. “I went into thinking that we would be friends. In the two hours we talked, I don’t think there was any silence. I was smiling most of the time. It felt natural. Afterwards, I thought, ‘I could really see myself liking this girl a lot.’”

Rachel recalls the conversation, “Seeing him face to face on Skype really got to me. It was then that I started to feel a lot more attracted to him.”

The two started to talk about how they would like to meet in person. Since they were both in college, they planned to meet during winter break—six month away. “We quickly realized that would be too long to wait. I decided I was going to try to find a way to get out there before school started,” Jaret says.

Their First Meeting

“Driving with my friend to pick up Jaret at the airport felt like a scene from a movie to me,” she says. When she saw him, he hugged her and that eased her nerves. “I was just so happy to see him.”

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It was 11:30 at night, so Rachel and her friend took Jaret out to eat at Denny’s. “Luckily, Rachel’s friend talked a lot and kept the conversation going... By the end of the evening, we were super comfortable with each other,” says Jaret who was also feeling nervous initially.

Before the two parted, they decided that they would date long distance. Over Thanksgiving break, Rachel flew to New Hampshire to visit Jaret. It was a fun time for them. Jaret took her to see New York City and Boston. “I got to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway and meet his family,” Rachel says.

Trying to Put the Breaks On

Beginning with their first meeting, they would exchange hints about the need for one of them to move closer. “We started off with saying one of us should move once we graduate,” Jaret recalls. However, secretly neither of them wanted to wait that long. After Rachel’s visit over Thanksgiving 2013, Jaret transferred to Boise State University and moved to Boise on December 30, 2013.

The plan now was to wait two and a half years until they both graduated to get married—though this wasn’t what either of them really wanted. A lot of teasing and talking about getting engaged ensued. Jaret gave Rachel two fake engagement rings before he proposed for real. “We had the ‘pre pre-engagement ring’ and then the pre-engagement ring.”

Rachel says they were trying to be practical, but it wasn’t working too well. “We really wanted to get engaged, but we didn’t know if we should because we weren’t done with school.”

“We kept throwing each other hints that we wanted to get engaged now. We wanted to be married already. We agreed even before I proposed for real that we would get engaged,” Jaret explains.

Proposal

Jaret planned out the proposal; asked Rachel’s mom for her blessing and discussed the finances with her.

His proposal, on July 5, 2014, was an elaborate one. “The goal was to take all the memorable moments in the past year and recreate them in one day, but there were too many things. It ended up being two days,” he says. “She really liked the Phantom of the Opera; it was difficult to recreate that, so we went to Barnes and Noble and I searched for a picture of Times Square. I found one and we took a picture of us with the picture.”

He also created an album of pictures featuring those times. “I took all of those pictures and organized them by date and put them in an album. Each of those pictures would go on the left side of the page. On the opposite side of the album would be a picture I took of the recreated event.” 

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While Rachel was with a friend, Jaret drove home and organized all of these pictures and rushed over to Walgreens to have them printed. The very last picture was a picture of the engagement ring. Later that night, he took Rachel to see fireworks in Placerville, Idaho.

“While she was turning to that page, that’s when I got down on one knee and proposed with fireworks going off in the background.”

On January 3, 2015, at St Mark’s Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho, Rachel and Jaret will be joined in holy matrimony.

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