Carly, 25, from Minnesota, was sick of trying to find someone the conventional way.
"I wanted to meet someone, but it's just hard to 'happen upon' good single guys. After college, you really only run into people you work with, and I work in a mostly female profession, so I wasn't going to meet someone there," Carly explains. "I was involved at church, but there I was just meeting families and parents. CatholicMatch seemed like it might be worth a try.
Still, she wasn’t sure how she felt about meeting someone online, so she delayed purchasing a full membership.
In June of 2016, Jason, 29, also from Minnesota, joined because he wanted to date a Catholic. “I wanted this to be a foundation of our relationship,” he shares."
When Jason’s parents found out that he had joined a dating site, they thought it was kind of weird to meet someone online, but they took comfort in that the fact that CatholicMatch was a Catholic dating site. His friends and younger family member, on the other hand, didn't think it was that odd because they know lots of people who have met online.
"I thought she was pretty, so I clicked."
Jason clicked on Carly’s profile picture initially because he thought she was pretty. Reading through her profile, she seemed like someone he’d like to get to know better, so he messaged her.
Seeing Jason’s waiting message and looking at his profile, Carly thought there was enough compatibility on paper. She thought it would be worth the risk to buy a full membership to view Jason’s message. After all, most of her friends and family had at least one story of someone else who had met their spouse online.
A week after that first message, they met up for ice cream. “We ate our ice cream as we walked around the lake. After one lap, we were still enjoying the conversation, and walked around again,” Carly shares. “After that, we decided to walk to another nearby lake and walk around that twice. I think we walked at least seven miles that day and the conversation never grew dull!”
Jason adds, “Talking to each other felt really natural. I felt very connected to Carly starting from the first time that I met her.”
A small problem: we worked different hours
One challenge for the couple was that they worked different hours, so they had to find time to see one another. An added
inconvenience was that they lived forty minutes apart when traffic was light.
These things could be reasons for some couples to break it off, but Carly and Jason knew they had something special. “We both knew that relationships take work, so, like any other issues that arose over time, we found ways to make it work,” they say.
On July 9th, 2017, a little over a year after their first day, Carly and Jason went on a road trip across Wisconsin to see family and go camping. “The first night we were kayaking on the Black River, and I brought Carly up a creek into a gorge where there was a waterfall. That's where I proposed,” he says.
Unfortunately, the ring Jason ordered got delayed. He didn’t want to wait to propose, so he asked her without a ring. “Luckily, she still said, ‘Yes!”
“I was hoping that he would propose on that trip," Carly remembers. “The whole first day had been so romantic and perfect; I was actually expecting it, but between kayaking all day and the hike up the creek, I couldn't figure out how he'd have the ring with him, so I assumed he wouldn't be proposing that day."
So when Jason asked Carly to marry him, she was surprised. “I loved that he didn't have the ring because it threw me off, and I still got to be surprised!”
Thankfully everything turned out alright after all that planning
Both Carly and Jason felt loved by their families on their wedding day. They were joined in Holy Matrimony on June 16th, 2018, at St. Thomas Beckett Catholic Church in Eagan, Minnesota, which is Carly's childhood church
“We had a beautiful ceremony and reception. The day went by so fast, and I enjoyed everything,” Jason says.
Carly adds, “Planning a wedding is a lot of work, and you hear all these stories about what goes wrong at a wedding. I loved that everything that could have gone wrong at our wedding went right! I love that our families and friends were there and that the ceremony was amazing! Our reception was equally enjoyable and the dance floor was full all night!”
