On January 1st, 2020, after praying for his future spouse while on pilgrimage to Knock, Ireland, Joe sent a message to Meghan. Impressed by Meghan’s good looks and intrigued that she had graduated from the same Pennsylvania college where he was currently a senior, Joe sent her a message about their mutual college connection. Unfortunately for him, at that time Meghan was seeing someone else she had met through CatholicMatch. Fully 10 months passed before she found his message in November while scanning through her inbox.
It was a Novena prayer answered!
She messaged him a rather vague response explaining the delay, “I’m so sorry I didn’t respond before. I was really busy at that time!” Providentially, Joe received her response 9 days after finishing a novena to the Holy Infant of Prague….for a spouse! Joe jokes that though Meghan waited 10 months to message him, while they were dating she always expected him to respond within a day!
They shut down the restaurant on their first date.
About a week after Meghan’s response, the couple met at a restaurant for their first date. Meghan insisted on FaceTiming before their in-person meeting for safety, and was surprised that they ended up talking for three and a half hours! When they did get together in person, they chatted for five hours until the restaurant closed for the evening! Joe noted that they made a habit out of “closing down the place” those first few dates, as the same thing happened on their four-hour-long second date too. Meghan recalled that while she would normally have felt very nervous before a first date when she arrived “I felt totally calm.”
Dating during COVID wasn't easy...
Due to pandemic restrictions, Meghan and Joe spent much of their dating relationship….in Barnes & Noble! Meghan recalled ruefully that “we played lots of Chinese checkers (which I taught him) as well as a card game that I knew, walked around Barnes & Noble, and visited the Marian chapel on campus” at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. They met in person about once a week while dating, with him heading to Pittsburgh to see her one week and her heading to Latrobe to visit him the next.
They knew they wanted to get married after just 2 months!
Both Joe and Meghan agreed that, in Joe’s words, “In each of our previous relationships, something felt forced or weird. But this was different. This time, things clicked.” Just 2 months after Meghan messaged him back, and one month after Joe asked her to be his girlfriend on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, he took her hand one night in January of 2021 and said casually, “Something’s missing on that left hand of yours. How ‘bout we change that last name of yours sometime?” While the couple acknowledged that night that they were headed for marriage, they dated for several more months before the official proposal at the end of May 2021.
No sweatpants were allowed at the proposal.
Meghan knew ahead of time the proposal was coming that day. After Joe’s college graduation several days previous, he had not-so-subtly asked, “Are you busy Wednesday?” and followed up by saying, “You might want to not wear sweatpants.”
Meghan said, “We went to a restaurant in downtown Pittsburgh called Joe's Crab Shack. After that we took the Pittsburgh Incline up to Mount Washington and he proposed on one of the overlooks. Instead of saying ‘will you marry me’ he said [once again] ‘how about we change that last name of yours?’”
The ring Joe gave Meghan holds deep significance. She had picked out the band, but the diamond was from a ring Joe’s dad had given his mom after Joe was born. Joe’s wedding band belonged to his dad, who died when Joe was 5.
The couple chose to have a betrothal ceremony, attended by just the two of them and the priest who served as a witness. A betrothal ceremony is a formal commitment, recognized by canon law as legally binding, to marry another person at some point in the future. Entering into a betrothal appealed to Joe’s “chivalric tendencies” and represented to Meghan “a sign of deep commitment, like an outward sign foreshadowing marriage.”
The military influenced their wedding date!
As they prepared for marriage, Joe and Meghan had to contend with his being gone for military training for the Army National Guard from August 2021-January 2022. He received a two-week leave in December, and they were married on Monday, December 27th, 2021, at St. Vincent Basilica in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. The couple explained, “[The wedding] had to be a Monday because he went to infantry officer training from the middle of August last year to January this year and he was allowed to come back on leave for Christmas for two weeks. The first Saturday he was back was Christmas and the second Saturday he was here was New Year's Day and he had to go back to training on Jan. 2, which would've left us with no time together as a married couple. So we picked that Monday after Christmas so we could have a few days together.”
The couple made every effort to convey the beauty of the Catholic faith during their marriage ceremony, knowing that it would serve as a “witness” to many guests who would never attend a Mass or even step foot in a Catholic church otherwise. A friend of Joe’s chanted several songs in Latin, and no less than 3 priests concelebrated the Mass. A Benedictine monk from St. Vincent College also served, along with two novices. Multiple guests told the couple afterward that they’d been struck by the beauty and reverence of the Mass.
They did this instead of a garter toss...
Instead of a garter toss, the couple chose to wash each other’s feet at their wedding reception. The foot-washing was patterned after Christ washed the apostles’ feet during the Last Supper, and signified “an act of respect and of service, which are huge parts of what marriage is about!” Joe got the idea from a video he watched during his senior year in high school, during which chastity speaker Jason Evert described washing his wife Crystalina’s feet at their own wedding reception. As at Joe and Meghan’s wedding Mass, many guests were also touched by the washing of the feet.
Their advice for those considering joining CatholicMatch!
Joe offered words of advice taken from a pamphlet on discernment that he found in the back of a church during his pilgrimage to Ireland. The pamphlet listed three steps for those discerning their vocation: 1) Build virtue. 2) Pray for your future spouse. 3) Wait on God’s time.
Meghan chimed in that their experience was a testament to God’s good timing. Both Meghan and Joe were on CatholicMatch for about a year before Meghan sent her delayed response to his message. Joe had been on and off during that time and even deactivated his account altogether at one point before reactivating it and redoing his profile completely. The new profile was the version she saw and connected with. She observed, “We both learned a lot during those ten months between his message and my response. Maybe 10 months before we weren’t ready.” Her words of encouragement were, “pray if you feel hesitant about joining the site. But if you decide to, God can definitely make things happen!”
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