They Both Joined CatholicMatch Because They Didn't Want Dating To Be "Awkward"!

Back in 2013, Dan Piaskowski was very much involved in the small, tight-knit Catholic campus ministry at his college, but decided to create a CatholicMatch profile because he “didn’t find what I was looking for (in a potential spouse) in that group.” In the years following, Dan would get on and off CatholicMatch several times. When he signed back on in 2017, he was meeting and forming friendships with plenty of people in young adult groups in his local area but again found that “there was nobody who fit what I was looking for.” Additionally, “I wanted to avoid the awkwardness of dating within a tight-knit friend group.” 

For her part, Catherine first signed into CatholicMatch in 2015 during grad school for dentistry. Like Dan, she became very active in the young adult group in her church. She ultimately turned to CatholicMatch because “I was looking for somebody pretty specific, who was practicing their faith not only in their church but in the place that they worked, and had an idea of what ‘mission’ was for their life.” 

Both Catherine and Dan felt some initial reservations about online dating.

For Dan’s part, he didn’t know anyone who had met their significant other online. Since everyone he knew, including his own siblings, had met their spouses in person, “it felt kind of like a knock on me, of ‘what’s wrong with me, that I need to go to this website to meet people?’” Catherine met resistance amongst her friends and family who were surprised that she wasn’t interested in any of the men on her local grad school campus. But, she related, “I had gone on plenty of dates with people, and nothing was like what I was looking for.” 

Fortunately, when she started looking at profiles on CatholicMatch she was reassured to see that “I’m going in the right direction.” Rather than wasting time messaging back and forth with men with very different values than her own, she found that “the majority of your non-negotiables you could get out of the way quickly.”

While she initially received an almost overwhelming number of messages expressing interest, she eventually revised her profile to be a little less “flirty, fun, and humorous” and shifted to include “a lot more detail on my ideal match and the kind of life I wanted to be living.” She found that the messages she received after the profile change were fewer but far more likely to be sent by men she was actually interested in. 

That's when Dan came into the picture...

When Dan first saw Catherine’s profile in December of 2019, he was working for an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based non-profit leading medical and dental mission trips. Catherine was working at an urban dental clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. Each of them was surprised and excited to see that the other person shared their passion for service and mission. While Dan asked to make the 12-hour drive to Memphis to meet Catherine in person one month later, their first date was delayed until late February when Catherine returned from a month-long dental mission trip to Kenya, during which time they were intentional about sending long emails and even having a few video chats “with terrible wifi and at odd hours.” Their first date lasted the entire weekend and involved multiple social activities that Dan had planned in Catherine’s town. At the weekend’s end, Dan asked Catherine to be his girlfriend. 

She responded by asking him for a week to pray and discern. That week Dan himself led a mission trip, this time to Guatemala. After a 4-hour phone call that week, they decided to move forward as a dating couple. 

Dan and Catherine were in complete agreement that the single biggest obstacle in their relationship to date was dating long-distance in the time of COVID.

While they had planned to meet halfway between their respective towns in Cincinnati at the end of March in 2020, those plans were abruptly curtailed just days later. In all, three months passed between their first and second in-person visits. Dan said that ultimately they grew through the challenge because “we were very intentional in writing emails, more letters, not texting.” Catherine chimed in, “We were very specific about ‘let’s not text. Let’s be sending one email a day.’” By being all online during those first months, Dan said “It created the space to really get to know each other before developing a lot of emotional, and obviously physical, intimacy.” He added, “Both of us felt much more confident when we did finally see each other again, like ‘this is someone who I really love,’ and I can mean that because this is not just like an infatuation talking” 

Catherine laughingly recalled telling her dental patients that she was going to see her boyfriend for the second time and had only really touched him once, holding his hand during the Our Father at Mass during that first weekend. She remembered “I was initially hesitant to date, partially because I was interested to see if physical attraction would come later. And it definitely did, though the amount of time that we had spent through conversations. So, at the end of three months, I was like, ‘this is great! He’s the most handsome man I’ve ever seen!’ And that’s not gone away at all. I’m very thankful (for the initial time apart), God definitely knew what He was doing.” 

By December of 2020, Dan knew that he wanted to marry Catherine, and over the next few months, he crafted a proposal plan and asked Catherine’s parents for their blessing. Catherine was, by that time, “making subtle hints and blunt statements about wanting to get engaged,” but Dan put her off the scent by telling her “Let’s not rush anything” and “All in God’s timing.” 

After spending Lent of 2021 apart, Dan invited Catherine to join him on a pilgrimage of sorts on Good Friday, beginning at 4 am.

After driving several hours to a state park, they hiked on a beach and watched the sunrise together over Lake Huron. They then drove two more hours to a waterfall, praying and reading the Passion narratives from the Gospels on the way. A 6-mile hike to and from the waterfall was followed by one more drive to their last stop, a shrine. They attended the Good Friday service there and afterward walked to an outdoor statue of the Holy Family, where Dan asked the intercession of St. Joseph and the Blessed Mother before getting down on one knee to ask Catherine to be his wife. A truly shocked and surprised Catherine responded with a resounding ‘yes!’

In mid-October, Catherine completed her three-year commitment to the dental clinic in Memphis and made the move to a new city and new job in the Detroit area. On the Marian feast of Mary, the Mother of God on January 1st, they were united in marriage at Holy Name Cathedral in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

They chose to be married during a public Mass, where the whole congregation witnessed their vows.

They processed in at the beginning of the Mass after the priest, walking together. They chose this unconventional route in recognition that the sacrament of marriage “isn’t about us. It’s us making our marriage part of the general liturgical life of the Church...It creates an atmosphere of like ‘okay, how can we be part of something bigger than ourselves?’” 

Both Dan and Catherine expressed gratitude for the irreplaceable role CatholicMatch played in their meeting and story, and each had a few words of wisdom for fellow CatholicMatch members.

Catherine offered words of encouragement for women who “feel like there are no good Catholic men” and are afraid of ending up all alone. She acknowledged that “that fear is real for many people” before sharing “God has so much good in store for you in your single vocation, and He needs people, as single men and women, who are following Him. Your life can be so fruitful, like, ridiculously fruitful, in that state in life. You’re not wasting your time in your single life. He is using it. Live on a mission as a single person.”

Dan urged men to consider that “If you feel called to marriage, you need to be actively pursuing that. That means asking people out, going on dates. And if you’re like me and it’s not happening locally, you need to do something active like going online.” He concluded, “Trust that God is going to bring someone into your life, but you have to do the work and you have to be intentional about seeking that out.”