Early this year, 30-year-old Elsie was logged onto CatholicMatch, her daughter with her as she ran searches. When she came across Markos’ profile, her daughter had some advice—“Mommy you need to meet him because you are going to marry this man.”
A little child may have led Elsie on her search, but a deep sense of loneliness brought Markos to CatholicMatch. He had given up on the entire dating scene. “Every woman I met made my life a million times harder than it really was...I was sick of the heartache, the drama, the selfishness…” Strong words to be sure, but Markos also believed that he didn’t want to stay single and that God had the right woman out there somewhere.
While Elsie’s daughter was leading here down the right path, it was Markos’ mom giving him the nudge in the right direction. She suggested googling Catholic dating sites. He tried it that night and immediately created a CatholicMatch profile.
Markos was “all-in” as soon as he joined CatholicMatch. He got his pictures uploaded and immediately starting sending out emotigrams, and doing online chats. But he wasn’t able to actually get any messages back and dates seemed even further out of reach. But it was only one month and while Markos’ emotions told him to throw in the towel, his head told him to stick it out.
There was one girl whose profile Markos had viewed, but not written. It wasn’t that he didn’t think Elsie was beautiful—in fact, he’d been meaning to message her and she was someone on his list of people he had to at least try and reach out to before he could say this online dating thing wasn’t working. Unbeknownst to Markos at the time, Elsie’s daughter was already laying the groundwork for him and he got a message from her.
“We immediately clicked,” Markos recalled. “Politics, religion, family, morals and values.” After a few days of discerning prayer, he called her up and asked her out. They both live in the western part of New York State, between Syracuse and Buffalo, but that’s still a two-hour distance. But Markos was undeterred and as for Elsie having a child, he saw her daughter as just an added blessing in the package.
Markos knew he had something special immediately. Elsie’s loving and compassionate outlook won him over quickly and they got down to the work of making a long-distance relationship come together. They relied heavily on Skype and Markos recommends that anyone thinking about a long-distance relationship download Skype, which is free.
With the nudges coming from Markos’ mother and Elsie’s daughter, the couple was ahead of the game before they even met this past March. On December 18 they will be married, ready to start a new and exciting period in their lives.
