Josemine had one request of God when it came to her search for a spouse: Please don’t let me waste time. It wasn’t that she was in a rush to get married, but the 25-year-old didn’t want to use up her valuable time with the wrong people.
The resident of the San Francisco area joined CatholicMatch in April of 2011. She’d been busy in medical school and decided it was time to look into finding her future husband. Josemine did a careful search on CatholicMatch after creating her profile and chose her target carefully.
David, 28, was also in medicine, working as a doctor just across the bay from her. “It seemed that another person in medicine—someone with whom I could share at least a baseline understanding of a career and lifestyle…was a rare find,” Josemine said.
After an exchange of emotigrams, she signed up for a full membership, so “I could communicate with this person, who from his profile, seemed fairly reasonable,” she recalled.
David was originally from New York and his family remains on the East Coast. It turns out that in her travels to the Big Apple she’d frequented a church that he had regularly attended. It was the first of two “coincidences” that smiled upon the couple. The other had more concrete effects. David and Josemine found out they’d both be doing pediatrics rotations at hospitals fairly close to each other, thus making a low-key after-work dinner date very feasible.
It would be a mistake to think the relationship just skyrocketed from there, but the couple was aware of the potential. “While we both initially felt some uncertainties we continued communicating and, on a weekly basis, meeting in person,” Josemine told CatholicMatch.
The couple’s shared faith was certainly the pre-eminent asset in the relationship, as it is in all cases—he had also visited her Bay Area parish where she attends the traditional Latin Mass—but their shared understanding of the challenges in their profession certainly helped. David and Josemine had to work through the burdens imposed by their schedules, including a time where they could not see each other when she did her OB/GYN rotation in another part of the state. And given their young ages, both had busy training schedules on top of everything else.
But David and Josemine persevered, and as the relationship continued to grow, they concluded there was no real barrier to seeing if God was calling them to marriage. They spent time with each other’s families, including seeing his clan out East.
It was under the watchful eye of Our Lady Of Lourdes that David proposed to Josemine.
