By all accounts, Georgeanne and Dave should have known each other. They had both attended St. John the Evangelist in Carmichael, California, for years and both of them were Eucharistic Ministers.
In the church directory, Dave and his wife, who died in March of 2015, and Georgeanne and her husband, who died in 2012, were pictured on the same page. There was also a photo in the directory of the Eucharistic Ministers—and you guessed it—both Georgeanne and Dave are in the picture.
It doesn’t stop there; the two were also members of a local widows group. One time they even took a bus trip to the Sierras together—along with 46 other seniors—but neither of them recalls seeing one another getting on and off the bus or perusing the gift shops.
“In passing, nothing stood out about each other even to start something up,” Dave surmises. "The fact that we attended different Masses is another reason why we never knew each other."
Frustrated, Georgeanne sent CatholicMatch support an angry email. “My six-month subscription was almost ready to run out in October of 2015, and the reason why I wrote a rather nasty email to CatholicMatch is because I had never received any responses from the site, and so I was not planning on renewing.”
Shortly after she sent the disparaging note, a member named Dave joined and was matched with Georgeanne.
“I wanted to meet a Catholic, mainly because my deceased husband of almost 50 years was not Catholic. I always felt it was a big thing that we weren’t able to share our faith. I wanted to meet someone to go to dinner and the movies with because I had no intention of marrying again,” Georgeanne explains.
That would all change with Dave.
Wedding Picture
She was temporarily unavailable
When Dave sent Georgeanne a message, he learned that she was seeing someone else—though this man was a non-Catholic and lived 60-70 miles away.
Dave wasn’t going to let that deter him because he thought Georgeanne was the best match he’d come across online and in person. He sent her another message. “I must have looked at Dave’s profile again because he emailed me asking if he had a chance since he saw I had looked at his profile.”
He took the next step of calling Georgeanne before she’s even given him her phone number. He had looked it up on a local widowed person's group that she had mentioned in profile—the one he also belonged to.
When the phone rang, Georgeanne saw on her caller ID that someone named Dave was on the other end of the line. She was curious, so she picked up.
One of the first things Dave said to Georgeanne in their phone conversation was that he had no intention of ever getting married again either. After that declaration, he proceeded to talk to her for three hours.
After that phone call, Georgeanne thought that she would like the chance to get to know Dave better. “The gentleman I had been dating was suddenly taken ill and told me he would not be able to come to town the next weekend, thereby leaving the door open for Dave.”
Three days after their first phone call, on October 22, 2016, the two met for dinner at the local Elks Club where they talked for five hours. The two of them were already thinking that they wanted to have more than a dating relationship. “We found each other so fascinating,” Dave tells, with a smile in his voice.
But wait, their date almost never happened!
“On our first planned meeting at the Elks Club was supposed to take place at 3:00 p.m. I waited until 3:20 and was rather irritated that Dave had not shown up. In the process of driving away, I glanced at the building and thought I saw a man with a white beard like Dave’s.”
Luckily, she turned around and came back because Dave was standing at a different door thinking that Georgeanne had stood him up! “I wasn’t going to give up on her, though. I left a message on her phone saying, ‘I don’t know what happened, but I still want to get together. Please call me,” Dave remembers.
Whirlwind romance
They met the next day for another date, and they made plans to meet for four theatre productions. Their relationship progressed quickly, and in November, not long after they met, Dave and Georgeanne decided they wanted to go on an escorted trip to Hawaii.
It was on a balcony in Kawaii, after only having known each other for three weeks, when the two agreed that they wanted to get married—throwing their original resolutions to the wind. When they returned from the trip, Dave took Georgeanne to a jewelry store. “He bought us matching rings.”
Catching seahorse on Hawaii trip
Not knowing Dave and the speed of their relationship made some of Georgeanne’s family understandably concerned.
Background check
Even though one of Georgeanne’s youngest daughter had encouraged her to go online and to become involved with Dave, Georgeanne’s other four children were not on the same page. They were pretty worried that their mom had left town with someone that they had never met. “Only my one daughter had met Dave. The others were very leery of him.”
Georgeanne’s son-in-law is a private investigator, so when he asked her what Dave's birthdate was, she knew he was going to run a check on him."
“I told her to tell him, ‘Make sure you check into my time at Folsom,” laughs Dave.
Dave didn't serve time, though; he had worked at Folsom for years as an educator teaching pre-release skills to prisoners.
“Obviously, Dave came out clean. He has a 22-year retirement from the Air Force and a 20-year retirement from the State of California, owns his own home, has two adult daughters and one adult son. He had been married 57 years and took care of his wife for 12 years after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. They quickly found him to be a very honorable man and welcomed him with open arms for the family Christmas celebration,” she says.
Her sister got to be her matron of honor again
Georgeanne, 74, and David, 79, were joined in Holy Matrimony on April 9, 2016, in a nuptial mass at St. John The Evangelist Catholic Church by a retired priest that has known both of them for many years. “My sister was the matron of honor again, as she was for my first marriage in 1963.”
The two spent four days immediately following the wedding at a bed and breakfast inn in the mountains above Sacramento, and the following Saturday spent a week on a riverboat cruise up the Columbia River in Washington, Oregon, and Lewiston, Idaho.
“We are now enjoying our marriage, sharing half of the week in his house and half in mine,” she says.
Dave adds, “We are so pleasantly surprised how compatible we are in all areas—the physical, mental, and spiritual.”
Kinder Message
Georgeanne ended up writing another letter to CatholicMatch. “I had to take back my mean words. I learned that God knows best, and it only took one to be the right one.”
