“Our friends, naturally, thought we were crazy and going too fast. Rightfully so, because we were like two teenagers in love!”
Linda’s relationship with John started through CatholicMatch on August 7, 2019, and they were married on October 26th of the same year! These are not two people who normally leap that quickly.
Having been married for 56 wonderful years, John was quite content to be single and didn’t really have marriage in mind.
About a year after the loss of his wife, he joined CatholicMatch simply to meet a possible friend and companion. Linda had enjoyed a 35-year marriage, and after being widowed as well, she joined CatholicMatch to meet someone who shared her faith and could attend Mass with her.
She was apprehensive at first and then frustrated with the lack of a suitable match. She was ready to discontinue her subscription when John spotted her profile. He was drawn to her picture and intrigued by her introduction.
And, “Bingo! We found each other. Although the mileage between us was considerable, our profiles matched beautifully--we had so much in common,” Linda reports. After that first message, they started talking for hours on the phone and messaged each other three times a day. “We definitely fell in love during these many communications and were able to tell each other of our love before we even met,” John recalls.
They felt a deep, spiritual connection that continued to grow.
A month later, they met face to face when John drove three hours from Newark, California to Grass Valley. As soon as they met, they knew that marriage was more than just a possibility; it was God’s will. They hugged and kissed, and John proposed to Linda that very same weekend. “We both had experienced marriage and knew the utter importance of marital vows. Love is so different when you’re a senior citizen versus a younger person in love. We didn’t want to waste a moment,” Linda explains.
So did their friends come to accept the lightning speed courtship? “They were won over when they saw us together,” Linda laughs. They were also nervous about what the pastor would tell them. “His first statement was, ‘There’s nothing I can do to talk you out of getting married. You two are so much in love,” Linda adds. This was very meaningful to her, as she happens to be the pastor’s secretary at the parish.
Their family (both have two adult children) were also delighted with their late-in-life marriage.
After a simple ceremony, John and Linda left for their honeymoon in Monterey, where their marriage vows of “in sickness and in health” came to the forefront when John suffered a serious stroke. After weeks in the Monterey hospital, he was transferred to a rehab facility near their home where he spent another month. “This was a nightmare for us, but we never lost the joy of our salvation. The medical personnel around us were amazed at the joy we had. The rehab facility folks even put up a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the curtain so that we could spend some time alone,” Linda remembers.
John was healthy and almost completely back to normal by the time they celebrated a second wedding reception in February 2020 with family and friends who missed the wedding.
“We would like to encourage the older folks not to give up on the chance of meeting a special person and spending the rest of their lives together. We would recommend the professional assistance of CatholicMatch in such matters,” Linda advises.
