Lisa had some clear ideas about what she would and wouldn’t do on CatholicMatch. One of the things she would not do was get involved in a long-distance relationship. “I did not even entertain the notion of dating someone who lived out of state or more than 50 miles away,” the 41-year-old from Kansas said.
Lisa had been on-and-off when it came to online dating for several years, and while dates were found easily enough, there was never a good match. Finally, within the last year she put things in God’s hands.
“In the last year or so I had offered up my prayer to God to send me a husband in his time, not mine,” she said. When she made that humble surrender, success was right around the corner.
Marc was 43-years-old and living in Oregon—decidedly more than 50 miles out—and he sent Lisa an emotigram, then followed it up with an e-mail.
“In his e-mail he talked about the Ducks playing,” Lisa recalled. She had no idea what he was talking about, until figuring out he was passionate about the University of Oregon’s Rose Bowl-bound football team.
Even though Marc’s interests and geography weren’t on Lisa’s radar she decided to read his profile. “I loved what Marc had to say about joining the Catholic Church and could see he had a very beautiful sense of spirituality and faith,” she said.
Lisa decided to respond to Marc’s message, open correspondence with him, and see where everything went, in spite of her doubts about the whole long-distance thing.
Both Lisa and Marc knew what it was like to go through the collapse of a marriage, and both were ready for a fresh start. They built a friendship through emails, text messages and got to know each other through long phone conversations.
“After weeks and weeks of communication, Marc sent me a ticket to fly out and see him in Oregon,” Lisa told CatholicMatch. Their face-to-face visit gave the relationship a new and healthy fire and they knew it was love.
Marc didn’t waste time, having found what he was looking for, he proposed to Lisa while she was out there. She said yes, fueled by a conviction that the hand of God had marked this relationship from the start.
