They Were Already Facebook Friends, But They Met On CatholicMatch

Jon, 29, from Troutdale, Oregon, joined

scene—he wanted to find someone who shared his faith. “I knew that online would be a better option than my local parish because the congregation was much older,” says Jon.

However, Jon didn’t have success immediately. “There didn’t seem to be many single females in my area and the ones that were on the site never replied.” Jon gave up on CatholicMatch, but after his priest suggested he give it another shot, Jon signed up again.

“I was noticing the same issues as the first time, but one night while I was casually going through my matches, I saw a new match—a person that looked very familiar! This person was Adrienne, a former classmate from Catholic grade school that I had not seen since she left the school in the fifth grade.”

Even though Adrienne and Jon hadn’t had any contact since grade school, they were “friends” on Facebook, but they had never talked to each other there. The next day, Jon ended up reaching out via a message on CatholicMatch. “It was an easy decision to reach out to Adrienne and strike up a conversation about catching up on the past to see where it might go,” says Jon.

Adrienne, 28, was also struggling to find someone who understood her faith. “I had gotten frustrated with the typical dating websites. I kept meeting guys who were nice, but I felt wouldn’t understand my faith. I had tried CatholicMatch once before when I was just out of college, but there weren’t many men in Oregon on the site.”

Crushing Since Kindergarten

In early 2014, Adrienne decided to give it another go and creating a profile on CatholicMatch, but she didn’t feel ready to pay for a subscription. “A few weeks later, I was looking around CatholicMatch, and a voice said to me ‘Just pay for a month.’ Jon messaged me the next day,” shares Adrienne.

Adrienne immediately recognized Jon. "We had been Facebook friends for the past couple years, and I saw things pop up about him every now and then on Facebook. So I definitely knew who he was once I saw his photo.”

“She later confessed to me that she had had a crush on me since kindergarten,” adds Jon.

They exchanged many messages on CatholicMatch and immediately hit off. Jon says that when the messages got longer, he knew it was time to ask if she would like to meet and get a drink sometime. She accepted, but things kept getting in the way of them meeting up.

“We planned on having a date within the first week, but Jon had to go unexpectedly out of town the day we had planned on meeting. So we rescheduled only to have a snowstorm hit the area, and there was no way for us to meet up the day we planned,” Adrienne adds.

On February 11th, about three weeks after Jon first contacted Adrienne, they finally went on their first date. “We met at a local brew house, and before we knew it, we had been there for about 3 hours, and it was time to part ways,” says Jon. They decided to get together again that week, and that date lasted twice as long as the first. On their 3rd date, the couple toured the local wine country and spent a whole day together. “I knew by about the 2nd date that she was the one for me, and by our 4th date I finally had enough courage to finally ask her to be my girlfriend, and we had our first kiss,” says Jon.

Hell Yes!

“Things felt so natural for the both of us,” says Adrienne. Jon adds that things progressed so well that he was ready to propose only a couple of months into their relationship.

On August 11th, they went on a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate their six-month anniversary. At this point, Jon had already had the ring for a while, but Adrienne had no idea that the proposal was coming.

“After a nice dinner, Jon mentioned wanting to watch the water show at the Bellagio hotel,” says Adrienne. “When we got there, a show was in progress, so we waited for the next. All of a sudden one of Jon’s favorite songs, l'estasi dell'oro, came on and was going to be the theme for the water show.”

Jon says he knew this was the moment to propose. “Once the show ended, I dropped down to a knee and asked Adrienne to be my wife. Adrienne replied, ‘Hell yes!’”

Suffering During Engagement

“We had quite the time during our engagement,” shares Jon. During the less than a year they were engaged, Adrienne had a couple of deaths in the family, and they both lost their jobs for reasons out of their control.

“Things got really tough for each of us personally, and there was a lot of outside pressures, but we

stayed strong together, and our relationship and connection only grew stronger. By the time we got to marriage prep, it was a breeze because we felt like we had already been through a boot camp!” exclaims Jon.

Our Song Is Everywhere!

Fortunately, they were able to get married on the original date, and they had both gotten great jobs. So on June 20th, 2015, a year and four months after they connected on CatholicMatch, they were married in a Nuptial Mass co-celebrated by both of their childhood priests.

“Many described our wedding as one of the most joyful weddings that they have ever attended,” shares Adrienne. “Everything flowed perfectly; it was a gorgeous June day, and our reception was at a historical hotel in Portland. It was honestly our dream wedding and the perfect celebration of our love.”

“The wedding was amazing and everything we could have asked for,” adds Jon.

Since the song l'estasi dell'oro played before Jon’s proposal, they also included it during their wedding ceremony. While on what Jon called a “storybook honeymoon” to the Maldives and a Mediterranean Cruise, they visited Rome, and they were surprised to hear their song. “We did a tour of the Vatican. On the tour, we walked into a courtyard where a band was preparing for a concert that night. They started to play a song, and it was l'estasi dell'oro. The song gave us both chills. It had to be a sign from above for this to happen at the engagement and the honeymoon. It was a very surreal moment,” says Adrienne.

Life has been good since their wedding.  The couple, who have a recently bought a house and are expecting their first baby, say that being married is amazing.

“Just as many have told us before, marriage isn’t easy. But our biggest advice is to remain strong

and focus on communication. We continue to make faith a big part of our relationship. In our vows, we made a commitment to get each other to Heaven. We take this vow very seriously and know that our marriage is the vocation that God has planned for us.”

“We have been truly blessed by God to reconnect through CatholicMatch—so blessed with our families support as well as our priests. We feel that everything came together just like God planned,” adds Jon.

“We have now been very happily married for almost a year. We have heard that the first year of marriage is the hardest, but it has been so easy for us, and we feel it was due to our situation during the engagement, staying faithful and strong, that we bonded more together and in God to become a very strong couple,” shares John.