Philip of Ohio tried meeting someone locally but decided to broaden his horizons by joining CatholicMatch.
After three years of persevering on the app, he met Anne.
Before signing up for CatholicMatch, Anne of Wyoming hadn’t met anyone locally either, so she decided to try the app since her parents had met on a Catholic dating site. Six months later, she connected with Philip.
Her mom picked out his profile!
While Anne wasn’t very active on the app at first, her mom asked to have a look at her account.
“She was just scrolling through guys, clicking on different guys,” she recalled. “And I had a checklist, basically, of what I was looking for, and my mom knew my checklist, so she came across Phillip's profile.”
Her mom noticed that, like her, he attended the Traditional Latin Mass, sang in the choir, and shared similar interests.
“She read through his profile, called me over, and said, ‘Hey, look at this guy!’”
Anne was also impressed with his profile and gave her mom permission to give it a “like.” An hour later, she noticed that he had liked her profile back, but she wouldn’t hear from him for nearly six months.
For his part, Philip kept his search limited to his local area and within a day’s drive, so he didn’t see her profile at first. After she “liked” his profile, he was impressed by hers but hesitant about the distance, a whopping 25-hour drive.
“I thought, ‘25-hour drive, it’s never gonna work.’ So I kept looking local for the next six months,” he recalled.
But after not connecting with anyone locally for six months, he decided in December 2022 to take a chance and reach out to her despite the distance. Because he hesitated, when Anne received his message, she was talking to another guy on the app who planned to visit her in Wyoming. But after not hitting it off with him during this visit, she began messaging Philip, and the rest is history.
They had some ice skating struggles during his first visit to Wyoming...
After that initial message exchange, the pair quickly hit it off and moved on to having phone calls.
About a month after Philip first reached out, he flew to Wyoming for a weekend to have their first official date. Anne picked him up at the airport with her parents, allowing him to meet them right away.
During this first visit, they enjoyed visiting the Buffalo Bill Center of the West Museum, briefly stepping out of their car to see a canyon despite the -20 degree weather, and going ice skating (at an indoor ice rink). The couple laughed as she recounted her struggles on the rink, with Philip reminding her that at one point he offered to hold her hand because she looked like she was about to fall on her face.
“I was very, very surprised she didn't fall flat on her face. She was trying to walk and skate… She claimed she could skate,” he recalled.
“I didn’t know,” she chimed in.
“It turns out she really could not at all,” he added.
Funny enough, Philip was the one who fell on the ice because he was moving too fast on the rink. He also met many of her family members during that first weekend visit.
Shortly after Philip returned to Ohio (after several weather-related flight delays), she asked to visit him there. She would make that trip about a month later. After seeing that he acted the same in “his home environment” as he had during his trip to Wyoming, Anne decided Philip was the man she wanted to marry and even began shopping for wedding dresses.
Philip had a longer timeline in mind, but after a few more monthly visits to each other’s states, he was ready to propose.
His proposal was delayed because her Dad slept in!
Philip decided to propose to Anne on her home turf so it would be less awkward for her in the unlikely event she said, “no.” About a month before he would ultimately propose, he had asked Anne for her ring size, which led her to expect him to propose the next week when she visited him in Ohio. But even if he wanted to propose in his home state, it couldn't happen because their ring hadn’t been made yet.
But the following month, since the couple had already discussed visiting Yellowstone National Park during one of his trips to Wyoming, Philip decided it would be the perfect place to propose, so he flew to Wyoming over Memorial Day Weekend to pop the question.
Before proposing, Philip had planned to ask her Dad for her hand in marriage, but didn’t want to have such an important discussion over the phone. So he waited until he arrived in Wyoming and came up with a genius plan: wake up at 5 AM, since Anne’s father, an early riser, typically woke at 4:30 AM, and talk to him before anyone else woke up. This was also after he arrived around 1:30 AM because his flight was delayed.
But, alas, this was not be…
“So I set my alarm for five in the morning, and I get up and… nobody is up,” he said.
“The whole house is just completely dark. I thought, ‘That’s kind of strange; I’ll set it again for six; he should be up by then. Again, nobody's up. The house is just completely dark.”
He kept setting another alarm for each hour, but her father uncharacteristically ended up being the last member of the household to get up that morning. Finally, after he woke up, they sent Anne to take out the trash so they could talk, and he got his blessing.
Off to a late start, the pair finally made it to Yellowstone, where they enjoyed the scenery. Another challenge arose for Philip: he didn’t want to propose in front of crowds, a difficult task at this popular tourist attraction, so he waited until the end of the day, when they were hiking along a trail to see the Grand Prismatic Spring.
As Philp was assessing the crowds throughout the day, Anne, after already being surprised she wasn’t proposed to the previous month in Ohio, recounted thinking, “Surely, he’s going to propose this time. He's just got to propose this weekend...That's the only thing that makes sense.”
While there were still a decent number of people along the trail, once they turned around to leave, perhaps by Divine Providence, there was nobody around, and he took the opportunity to pop the question.
“And for some reason, even though she gave me her ring size, and she knew I was thinking about proposing, and she was more or less expecting it, she still seemed very surprised at the end of the day,” Philip recalled.
They had a beautiful Traditional Latin Mass wedding in a Maronite shrine!
After she said “yes,” the now-engaged couple quickly moved on to wedding planning, which was a complicated ordeal.
The pair wanted Philip’s uncle, Father Joseph Portzer, an Oklahoma-based priest, to marry them, and they also wanted to have Nupital Mass celebrated in the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite (Traditional Latin Mass) in his home state of Ohio.
They also decided that instead of getting married at Philip’s parish, they would have the Mass at the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon, a Maronite Catholic Church (an Eastern Catholic sui iuris church), in North Jackson, Ohio, because of the “really big, fancy” pipe organ that was much nicer than the other parish.
All of these factors meant spending a lot of time obtaining the necessary permissions and a ton of paperwork for all the priests involved. Planning the reception at the Shrine’s hall was also complicated because they could only choose from the church’s list of caterers. Philip handled most of the wedding planning logistics because he was local. He recruited his aunt, a professional photographer, to take the wedding photos, along with two friends who served as bartender and DJ.
“(The planning) was fairly complicated; the best part of the (wedding) day was definitely driving away from the venue and realizing, ‘We don’t have to deal with any of this anymore.’” Anne jokingly recalled.
Anne also noted that while she wasn’t really stressed about all the crazy wedding logistics until the big day arrived, the stress caught up with her, and that morning she drove to the church with the keys to the bridesmaid’s car. At the eleventh hour, they also weren’t sure Fr. Joe could make it because he was sick, but he pushed through to marry them and celebrate Mass.
But ultimately, the big day came and went with just a few minor hitches. The couple was finally married in a beautiful Nuptial Mass that “looked like a royal wedding,” with all the beautiful “smells and bells,” and, of course, the organ, with Fr. Joe presiding in December 2023, the weekend after Christmas, at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon. After the Mass, the couple enjoyed the reception in the Shrine’s hall with family and friends.
Philip and Anne have adjusted well to married life in the Buckeye State and have since welcomed their first child, a daughter named Magdalene.
Advice for CatholicMatch users:
Anne urges all CatholicMatch users to include “everything” in their profiles to help potential matches.
“One thing that I found frustrating on CatholicMatch is when these guys wouldn't put everything they felt strongly about in their profile,” she said.
“I couldn't really figure out where they stood on family matters, or the type of music they listen to, or where they stood on disciplining children. There was a bunch of stuff missing… So you could read their profile, and you wouldn't really know if this was someone you were interested in dating or not,” she added.
She stressed that users should list everything important to them, not just that they “like to play baseball,” so prospective suitors can see whether their values align.
Anne also advised users to read someone’s entire profile before sending a message and make it clear in that message that they read it.
Philip reminded users to upload a profile picture that “shows who you really are,” not just photos of you wearing sunglasses or in bad lighting because that profile photo will be the first thing people see.
