Susan and John – Another friends1st marriage

Our congratulations to two of our members who were married on 19th April 2022. They’ve asked to remain anonymous but are happy for their story to be shared. We’ll call them Susan and John for the sake of this story.

Susan, by her own admission is an introverted type of person – a loner even – and when she received her first set of profiles from us she was rather overwhelmed at the numbers of profiles she had to wade through. Decision fatigue was the phrase she used!

It’s an interesting point as we’ve always believed that potentially ‘less is more’. When you receive ‘masses of profiles’ you are more likely to flick through each one giving it less attention as you rush on to the next one to see if it’s ‘better’. However when you get less profiles, you spend more time on each one – and are more likely to pull out something that is a reason to contact that person – however tenuous that might be. And it’s the actual contacting of the other person that is important – whatever the outcome. Don’t you find the same thing in restaurants (like Indian restaurants particularly) – the more choice you have the harder it is to decide and the
more likely you are to feel you may have made a bad choice and there might have been a better option to choose.

Anyway in conversation with Sarah our membership manager, Susan agreed to contact 75% of the profiles we’d sent her. This was true commitment but that was Susan for you – she knew if she wanted to get married then she had to “put the effort in” and that wasn’t just financially but in effort as well. I’m a firm believer that the Lord honoured this
commitment and effort especially as Susan said she wrote to some people “hoping they wouldn’t write back!”.

She felt like she’d climbed a mountain after working her way through the first batch of profiles, and had pretty much forgotten we were mailing her again, so when the second batch of profiles arrived, “it was a lovely ‘surprise” when she opened the post and found the profiles there. She decided that this time round she was only going to write to people that she wanted to have a conversation with!

She was attracted to John’s picture initially as he was wearing a poppy and she thought “life with him would be very interesting!”. The Lord was definitely in this match because at the time John had his photoshoot done he’d told the photographer that he was a motorbike courier and the photographer had suggested he had some pictures in all his bike kit o on his bike. John had declined – which was lucky since Susan said she’d have never contacted him if he’d looked like that! It just goes to show that you definitely should not judge people by their pictures! You never know what’s behind a photograph.

Moreover John’s profile was fairly short and it led her to be interested to find out more. Initially Susan felt she wouldn’t have been attracted to someone who was a different denomination to her – but she’d felt moved by one of our coaching videos which talked about not judging others based on a denomination or rather your perception of a denomination is like.

It was a whirlwind romance and they were married 4 months after Susan had received John’s profile. They had a civil ceremony in a beautiful part of the world not far from where Susan lives – on a day that was forecast to be poor weather but which turned out lovely!

John took her away on a surprise honeymoon to near Whitby – one of Susan’s favourite places.

“We know it’s of the Lord and we are very happy” said Susan as she ended telling me her story. “Our story is all of the Lord.” Lastly it’s interesting to note that at the time they were first contacting each other Susan and John lived 4 hours apart! Another story of two people getting together who didn’t live in their local vicinity.