In the late summer of 2009, Dan was preparing for disappointment.
The 26-year-old from Omaha had received an emotigram from what looked to be a pretty special girl from Iowa. Brittany, 20, had chosen his as the only profile she would send an emote too, and she hoped for the best.
Dan had sent her a reply and even a message, but because Brittany was not a paying subscriber, he didn’t hear back. “It was truly heartbreaking to me that I never get to meet this amazing girl from Bettendorf, Iowa,” he said.
But corresponding with Dan was important to Brittany too, and by late August she was a full member and sent him a reply.
“We soon began to correspond after that and then had our first phone call on Sept. 1,” he recalled. On Nov. 14 he made the trek to meet Brittany. It seemed to be good to true.
“She was gorgeous and I was surprised that she would ever have wanted to say ‘hello’ to me in the first place,” he told CatholicMatch.
It only got better when he pulled into her driveway and found her more beautiful in person than in her pictures.
Dan and Brittany both have old-fashioned values, and he approached her father to ask for his permission to court his daughter. “This was something Brittany and I greatly desired in order to insure a holy and long-lasting traditional relationship,” he said.
If we fast-forward a year and a half to Easter 2011, Dan again had a question for Brittany’s father: this time he asked permission to propose marriage. Brittany’s dad considered it an honor to have Dan as a son-in-law and gave the green light.
Marriage had been a topic of conversation between Dan and Brittany from early on in their courtship, although it tended to revolve around her finishing college first. Brittany also had no idea of when a proposal might come. So on April 30, she was unsuspecting when they had picnic in the park and then went to a cathedral where they would make a personal consecration of their courtship to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Dan took Brittany off guard by telling her how much he loved her and how much she meant to her. Brittany wondered what inspired all the sweetness, and she hugged him and asked him if he wanted to kneel down and say some prayers. Dan did, but he needed to kneel down and do something else first—he pulled the ring from his rosary pouch, got down on one knee and proposed. Brittany was so excited in hugging her new fiancé that he had to ask “Do you want the ring?”
He slid it onto her finger, and they thanked Our Lord and the Blessed Mother with a rosary together.
They concluded the night with a celebratory dinner with her family. They will be married on next April, the weekend after Easter.
“We are so excited and ready for the long distance to end so we can finally be together like God intended us," Dan told CatholicMatch. “God is good!”
