Two years ago, 31-year-old Bryan was fresh out of school in Kentucky with a degree in teaching and a deep faith in the Catholic Church. It was time to start on the next phase of his life and that meant finding a spouse. He’d dated occasionally in college, but nothing serious.
“A couple of them were through a friend, another with someone I met outside the gym. I never really had much guts like that,” he chuckled.
He admitted he didn’t care much about dating while he was focused on school, but that changed after graduation.
“Suddenly I didn’t care about teaching, I wanted to date,” he recalled. He was looking for a spouse who shared his faith and values and he came to CatholicMatch.
“I didn’t come up with any expectations,” he told CatholicMatch. But he didn’t go out to bars and the opportunities at his local parish were limited, so he expanded his pool by going online. After two years, he still hadn’t found anyone.
Then Amy showed up. While he had spent two years searching, she’d been on the site for about week when he first contacted her last December. Thirty years old and working in the corporate office for a local bank in Indiana, she shared Bryan’s values and goals. They spent a couple weeks using the chat feature on CatholicMatch, including a late-night session on Christmas Eve. Bryan decided to make the three-hour drive to meet her in person.
The first date was “kind of rough,” Bryan recalled candidly. It was certainly not a disaster, but nothing that suggested burgeoning romance. But they went on a second date and the sparks that seemed so evident in their chats came through in person. “We were on the same page,” Brian said. “Our families were a lot alike and there was a real spark there.”
That spark continued to grow and eventually reached the point where a leap of faith had to be taken. Bryan was offered the chance to renew his teaching job in Louisville, but he turned it down for the chance to go to Indiana and continue to pursue the relationship with Amy. The risk was real—he was stepping into a situation with no job and where they both agreed there was no commitment if things didn’t work out. These are scary spots, but Bryan and Amy are another lesson that one never gains all unless one is first willing to risk all. And they were willing.
Things worked out for Bryan’s employment and he got a job as a youth minister that’s even more fulfilling than teaching and he found a place only ten minutes from where Amy lived. On October 2 he proposed to her, and the moment was made even more special by the presence of her son.
Today Bryan and Amy are preparing for their new lives together. To others walking their same path on CatholicMatch, they stress the importance of face-to-face time, even if it takes the commitment to get on the road and drive. “Do your best to be safe and meet in a safe, public place,” Bryan advised. “But you gotta be willing to go out and meet.”
