They Only Met Because of A Dare!

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Crystal – who is now 24 – joined Catholic Match on a dare. A male friend of hers was setting up an account, and he challenged her that, if he was going to be on the site, she needed to be as well. So, somewhat reluctantly, she set up an account, but she wasn’t going to pay for it.

“I honestly didn’t think it would ever work,” she said.

And, for about a year, it didn’t. She made the effort and reached out to a few people, but nothing panned out. It was the familiar story; either they would ghost her or the conversations would just slowly die out after a while.

Then, one day, she happened across the profile of a young man named Thomas.

Thomas, who is 28, had joined CatholicMatch at about the same time she did, having had no luck finding Catholic girls in his area. She liked the silly pictures on his profile and decided to shoot him a wink emoticon: the best she could do as far as communication was concerned since she still only had a free account.

Thomas in his turn took a look at her profile and liked what he saw.

So much so that he decided that they needed to start a real conversation. So, he sent her a message, unsure about what would happen next.

“I decided to give it a shot,” he recalled. “If she replied, great! If not, then that was okay.”

Crystal – a science major still in college at the time – was in class when she got the notice of his message. “I couldn’t wait for class to end so I could respond back to him. It literally gave me the biggest smile!”

Thus kicked off nearly two years of back-and-forth, on-and-off messaging. Crystal wanted to take it slow, though Thomas told her he liked her a lot early on. This scared her a little especially because they lived so far apart, him being in Minnesota while she was in Texas, and it seemed all-too-likely that the distance might cripple any serious relationship. So, for a long while, they kept it strictly digital. 

Then tragedy struck: Crystal had a hard family loss fall on her.

For months she stopped talking with Thomas. He sent her messages, along with flowers and gifts, but she was too depressed, too tangled up in darkness and grief to reply most of the time. 

“Thomas never gave up on me even after I pushed him away,” she recalled. 

Despite his continued efforts to connect with her, he did eventually try another dating app and even met another girl. Crystal, emerging from her grief, did the same. But, it didn’t feel right to either of them.

Something was missing...

Finally, they reached out to each other again, and in so doing they each realized that the other was what they had been missing! Turned out that they truly liked one another more than either had thought and distance or no distance, this had been the right relationship all along.

Once they worked this out, they began making plans to meet in person.

March 2019 saw Thomas flying down to Texas. Both were nervous at the prospect of a real face-to-face meeting. The date consisted of a stroll along the riverwalk and dinner at a restaurant. They used this time to steadily get to know one another, experiencing one another’s mannerisms in person and see if they had chemistry in "real life". Luckily, they had nothing to fear...because they definitely did!

“We had FaceTimed before,” Crystal said. “But now it was real.” 

The in-person meeting confirmed what they had thought in their digital encounters: that they really enjoyed one another’s company.

After he went home, they continued to talk and message each other on a regular basis. Before long, Thomas decided to fly down for a second date. 

Their relationship, they realized, had a future. But that raised a question: how would they solve the distance issue? 

At the point, they firmly decided to commit one way or the other, they discussed the challenges and advantages of either of them moving. In the end, though, Thomas was the one who made the change. He had, in fact, been born in Texas before moving to the Midwest as a child, he’d fallen in love with the area on his visits, and his employer even had an office not far away that he could transfer to. Besides this, Crystal was still in college finishing her degree, and he didn’t want to wait until after she graduated to get married. So, he made the long move for her.

Then, on a beautiful November day, he surprised her with a proposal!

A year later, in early December, they tied the knot in a small, intimate ceremony with their closest friends and family. Thomas cried upon seeing her walk down the aisle. 

With coming onto a year of marriage under their belts, they say that the best part is simply enjoying each other’s company after work, even if it simply sitting and doing nothing in a room together, appreciating the mere fact of one another’s company. 

“It’s just nice to have someone to do life with,” Crystal concluded. “A forever friend.”

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