My friends,

Have you ever dated online? Or fell in love with someone you met online? Or married someone that you met online?

According to The Knot’s wedding survey, 29% of millennials who married in 2022 met online, but only 15% of Gen Z.

Are you also surprised to read that the younger generation is more likely to meet their partner in person?

It made me quite curious whether that will be a downward trend, or if it’s just a dip—a confluence of many factors including the pandemic. A related stat is that only 14% of Gen Z couples grew up in different regions of the U.S. (compared to 21% of millennials).

I did not meet my wife online and we often joke that we would have never chosen each other's profiles. For one thing, she probably would have filtered out social-gathering-loving extroverts like me as she usually finds them exhausting to be around. For another, she likely would have flagged my interest in spirituality as “New Age-y” and swiped left (if that had been a thing in 2009!).

When we had brunch with a mutual friend, I could not stop looking at her dimples and wanted to hear her nerd out about US History for hours.

You know when you’re in a conversation and you say something like, “OMG who ever thought of THAT?!” And it’s a rhetorical question to just exclaim how bizarre the world is? Well, I was smitten when this earthy lady with too many history and culture degrees would often have a story/answer about how/when/with whom something happened first. I wanted to hear it all.

No algorithm could have matched my Gemini intellectual arousal with her professor-meets-nature-guide way of conversationally sharing the endless information and cultural perspectives in her head. But that’s what was irresistible to me. We had little music, food, or movie tastes in common (at least not yet—we have introduced each other to so much).

Would we have matched? It seems so unlikely!

On another hand, years ago I photographed a wedding of a couple who had a 100% compatibility match on Match.com—100%! Naturally, they both felt compelled to see what that algorithmic compatibility looked like in real life… I still get goose bumps picturing the deep connection between them, especially when they helped each other high into a tree for their engagement session. And I recently got a Christmas photo of their first baby. 🙂 In fact, dozens of the magical, destined, and beautifully well-suited couples I work with have met online.

But I do offer this warning: filter lightly.

Sometimes you know what you really want, and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you don’t know the significance of a characteristic or fact about someone. For example: if they have a cat.

I offer this excerpt from a 2022 ceremony, with the names changed:

Like any good 21st century love story, the story of Jill and Joe begins on the internet. Joe described the experience of online dating as having cycles of excitement and possibility, then waves when it just totally sucked. He was at the end of one such frustrating wave and was just about to delete Bumble from his phone.

About an hour north Jill was entirely sick of online dating. It seemed like she’d already met every prospect in her radius when her friend Dawn asked to see her filters.

Dawn questioned her about the 'no cats' filter. Jill’s dog Max is cat-aggressive so she thought she was being just practical. She was practicing the idea of being really specific in manifesting a partner. But, Dawn told her—with love—that she was being ridiculous and that Jill wasn’t prioritizing what she really wanted in a potential partner. She was prioritizing her dog.

Huh, Jill thought. She removed the filter.

The next time she opened the app she noticed a new match and swiped right. Right being the direction of approval or interest in the online dating app world. What she didn’t know yet was that this 'new' match wasn’t a man who recently joined, but newly appeared in her search now that the cat filter was lifted.

How different the worlds of Jill and Joe, and everyone who loves them, would be if the filter had not been lifted!

I offer you what I offered Jill and Joe’s guests on their wedding day:

Do you have a cat filter on in your heart or mind? Is there some immediate circumstance that seems permanent and so keeps you from seeing that your heart’s desire might be just on the other side?

Keep this moment, the vision of Jill and Joe standing up here strong in your mind to give you the courage to experiment with changing—perhaps removing—the filters in your life. More is possible than what’s in front of you today.

More is possible, especially when it comes to all the sources and forms of love.

Love courageously + filter lightly,

Maureen

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P.S. The mutual friend who introduced my wife and I officiated our wedding. She did an incredible job and it felt perfect for her to be in the connecting role. She expounded on a ceremony outline that my wife and I created together—which is the exact process I recommend to couples with friend officiants through my Create Your Ceremony 1:1 sessions and course + workbook.

P.P.S. How did you meet your love?? I can't get enough of Love Stories so please hit reply and tell me!​
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