In the high-summer of his life, Paul was beginning to grow desperate.
He was forty-four, unmarried, and painfully lonely. To make matters worse, he had lost his mother two years earlier and the pain of that loss was still eating away at his heart. Every night, as he crawled into his cold, empty bed, he would say a prayer for God to deliver him from singlehood, and each day he logged onto CatholicMatch in an increasingly hopeless search effort.
As he logged on yet again one day, Paul noticed that Rose had put up yet another of what he had come to call her “cutesy matchmaking schemes.” Rose (a blooming forty-five going on forty-six) was a lady from Buffalo who was champion of the CatholicMatch forums (“Must like to gab,” Paul thought to himself). Today's post was a secret-admirer service: Rose invited people to send her emotigrams and messages to pass on to someone they secretly admired, anonymity guaranteed.
Paul scoffed at the idea, but curiosity caused him to take a look at the thread. It was a popular one, and the posters were amusing. People were trying to beg, bully, and bribe Rose into revealing the names of their secret admirers, but she stood sweetly immovable. That impressed him, in spite of himself. “This,” he thought, “is a good woman.”
Then one day, Paul got a message from his own secret admirer.
“Huh,” he wondered. “Who, who, who…” Before long he began sending his own entreaties to Rose, via emotigram. “I can sweet-talk her,” Paul thought. “She’s a fellow New Yorker among all these out-of-state infidels. She’ll cough it up!”
She didn’t. But things were in motion now.
Looking for ammunition, Paul checked out her profile, and among other things that caught his eye was that she attended Our Lady of Victory Basilica and had been a teacher at its attached Infant Home. As it happens (call it a coincidence if you must), Paul’s mother had carried on a correspondence with the same organization. When he mentioned this to Rose, after they had been writing back and forth for a bit, she invited him to come up to Buffalo for a tour of the Basilica.
The rest, they say, is history.
This was the first a series of odd ‘coincidences’ that followed their relationship like dolphins after a ship.
Among others:
1. Shortly after becoming engaged, Paul and Rose decided to set the date for Divine Mercy Sunday. Soon after they decided this, they learned that their parish was hosting a lady named Maureen Digan. Mrs. Digan had been the recipient of the first recorded miracle attributed to St. Faustina, authoress of the Divine Mercy chaplet.
2. Long before she had met Paul, Rose had begun to pray that God would use yellow roses to signal the man she was to marry. Meanwhile, Paul, in telling her about his late mother, had already shared that pink was her favorite shade of rose. One day, after Mass, they stayed behind to pray about their relationship.
As they were leaving, they found the threshold of the basilica strewn with yellow rose petals rimmed in pink Roses that had certainly not been there when they had come in.
3. Paul’s final Christmas gift from his mother before she died was a reciprocating saw. Odd, as he was very much not a handy-man. She explained her choice by saying it would come in handy some day. Years later, when Paul came to live in Rose’s (desperately in need of repairs) house, he found there was quite a lot for him and his saw to do. Among other things, it helped him make a bookshelf the newly-wed bibliophile couple.
Our CatholicMatch forum friends at our wedding!
But of course, marriage hasn’t been completely smooth for the couple.
Finances and family issues originating before their marriage have issued their own ‘reality checks’ to the fairy-tale like ending. The lack of money has been an especial challenge. But the compensation, especially after so long a time alone, is ample.
“Rose is a happy and joy-filled person,” Paul says, recalling the long, dreary days of his singlehood. “That helps alleviate any sadness and melancholy in my life. And she’s cute to boot!” Rose, for her part, admires how prayerful and thoughtful Paul is; “I turn to him often when I’m unsure about an answer to something,” she says.
In other words, they find they complement each other, which is a huge help during those hard times. “Just knowing there is someone who loves us unconditionally,” they said. “Who we know ‘has our back,’ who shares and encourages us in our prayer life and love of God…and who keeps us from what otherwise would have been a very lonely life.”
After forty-five years of being single, Paul and Rose can now look back on nearly ten years of marriage. That alone makes it all worthwhile.
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