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Two people sit across a candlelit table after talking for only a few weeks. They are in love. They are sure of it. And of the one thing that matters most, they have never once spoken a serious word.

What is marriage? Not what it feels like, nor what the world says of it, but what it is. It is a question men think they have answered long before they ask it. They mistake their enthusiasm for wisdom and their hope for knowledge. Yet the question waits. It will be answered in the years that follow, whether it was answered before walking down the aisle or not.

There is something strange about how we live in society today. We treat trivial things with gravity and the most serious matters with a shrug. Simply put, we’re in an age of misplaced priorities. A man will study a contractual agreement for hours to understand every word before penning down his name to buy a house. He will weigh the purchase, compare a hundred small advantages, and guard his money as though it were his soul, to ensure he is getting good value for his money. However, when it comes to the union that will shape his whole life, and the lives of his children, and the temper of his old age, he enters upon it with a feeling, often without sufficient reason. He calls this romantic connection. I think it would be better named “neglect.”

For marriage, rightly understood, is no private arrangement struck for comfort. It is a vocation. It is a sacrament. It is a faithful, lifelong, and procreative union, and it asks of those who would enter it an honesty most couples never reach. The questions that decide a marriage are not the questions lovers delight to ask; not in today’s dating culture. They are harder. They are deep. They are intentional questions: How does this person stand toward their parents, toward siblings? What values have guided and shaped this person’s life? What does this person believe about God, about the faith, about children, about the small daily sacrifices that fill this temporal life?

These are not pleasant questions for courtship. They are avoided precisely because they are weighty. And they are weighty precisely because everything later turns upon them. The conflicts that break a home are seldom strangers. They were present at the beginning, unnamed and unasked, sitting quietly at that candlelit table.

Consider for a moment that courting someone is a kind of interview: One is interviewing another for the office of spouse. The phrase offends the ear of those who often say that going on a date should not feel like “attending an interview”. When a date feels like an interview, it reveals a lack of good social and communication skills, not that the questions are not important.  Yet it offends only because we have forgotten what is at stake. Every courtship ends in one of two ways: in marriage or in parting.

The virtue of prudence lies in discerning – with both intellect and reason – before feelings cloud the judgment. And here is a truth most overlook. A breakup, when it comes from honest discernment, is not a failure. It is a success. The failure is to marry without ever having asked the right questions.

It is this honest asking that Thomas L. McFadden, Jr. sets out to teach in A Catholic’s Guide to Finding the Perfect Spouse: With 101 Simple Questions. The book does not ride on mere sentiments. It offers a roadmap. It lays before the reader the very questions that need asking before one steps up to the altar, beginning with the foundation on which all the rest are built: what marriage is, and what its purpose is.

From that foundation, it moves outward, into faith and family, into habit and finances, into the openness to children that the Church names at the heart of the married vocation. These are the substantial, life-altering questions, as Patrick Madrid calls them in the foreword, the ones whose absence so many wedded people later mourn with the same quiet regret: if only we had spoken of these things before. McFadden has written the book so that fewer couples ever need to speak that sentence. What the questions are, how they search the heart, and what they reveal about a person before it is too late to learn, are generously treated in the book itself.

This is the very conviction on which we at the CatholicCourtship were built. We hold that a good marriage begins long before the wedding, and that it begins by beginning rightly. The world calls this dating, and it bids the young to follow their feelings and let reason trail behind. We do not. We are made for courtship, which is the slow and reverent work of two souls discerning together whether God has called them to marriage as a couple. Our matchmakers help our members be introduced to matches based on profound statements of values and a compatible outlook on faith and family life, so that the courtship process may be both joyful and intentional.

Marriage is sacred. It cannot be approached as a mood is approached. It asks not for sentiment but for honesty, and not for chemistry of feelings but for truth. And so, the art our members must learn is the art of asking the right questions during courtship, while there is still light enough to see by, and time enough to choose well.

For this reason, we have added McFadden’s book as a resource guide on our platform. We refer our members to it as help and a companion, so that the conversations by which they come to know one another might run deeper than the pleasant shallows where most courtships linger. A good question, asked early and answered truly, is worth more than a hundred easy evenings. We would have our members ask such questions, and ask them unafraid.

If you would prepare for marriage as seriously as marriage deserves, do not leave the great question unasked. Read A Catholic’s Guide to Finding the Perfect Spouse: With 101 Simple Questions, and learn the questions before love makes you afraid to ask them.

The post What Is Marriage? What Is It For? Asking the Right Questions During Courtship appeared first on CatholicCourtship Blog.

A car was waiting for her before she ever set foot in the country.

It’s the kind of detail that sounds like the end of a love story, not the middle of one. But for Juliana — a 24-year-old from New Zealand — it was simply the moment she understood that the Canadian man she’d been introduced to a few months earlier was serious, thoughtful, and entirely unlike anyone she’d met before. He had bought a car for her to use, arranged a place for her to live, and quietly prepared a soft landing for a woman moving to the other side of the world to see where God might be leading.

But to understand how a young woman in New Zealand ended up with a car waiting for her in Canada, you have to go back to where it began — with an introduction, and a saint.

Juliana joined CatholicCourtship in early 2024, back when the platform started personal matchmaking introductions between members. By her own account, the odds were not in her favor. She was, as far as she could tell, the only person from New Zealand on the entire platform, with only a handful of Australians scattered nearby. Left to ordinary browsing, it seemed almost impossible that anyone would notice a young woman tucked away at the bottom of the world.

Then, just a couple of days before the feast of St. Joseph in 2024, the introduction came: a young man named Dominic, all the way from Canada.

What few people knew was how close that introduction never came to happening. The matchmaker who paired them later admitted it had been a hard call to make. The sheer distance between New Zealand and Canada gave him pause — on paper, it seemed almost impractical. But after bringing the decision to prayer and asking for God’s will, he felt moved to introduce them anyway. The two were simply too compatible in their values, too clearly suited to one another, to keep apart over a matter of geography. If it was God’s will, he reasoned, distance would prove no barrier at all.

They began texting through the CatholicCourtship app, and within about a week moved their conversation over to Facebook Messenger. Two weeks after their introduction, they had their first video call — and then another, and another. The distance between them was almost comical: a literal hemisphere apart, on opposite sides of the globe. And yet, after only a handful of those calls, Dominic did something that made the thousands of miles between them suddenly feel surmountable.

He asked to come visit her in New Zealand.

That visit happened in September 2024. Whatever expectations either of them carried across the Pacific, the reality exceeded them. The two got along so well in person that, after Dominic flew home, Juliana made a decision that surprised even herself: she applied for a visa to Canada so the two could explore their relationship within actual reach of each other. This is an essential part of courtship – spending time in person to discern whether the man or the woman has sufficient virtues to be a spouse!

It was here that Dominic’s character showed itself most clearly. While Juliana sorted out paperwork and prepared to leave behind everything familiar, he was busy preparing for her arrival. He bought a car for her to use during her stay. He arranged a place for her to live. None of it was asked for; all of it was simply done — the quiet, practical kind of commitment that doesn’t announce itself but builds a foundation a person can actually stand on.

Juliana moved to Canada in December 2024, arriving in time for a white Christmas — a fitting beginning for a New Zealander used to summer in December. With the distance finally closed, the relationship deepened in the way only daily, in-person life allows. And when the time came for Dominic to ask the question, he chose his moment with intention.

He proposed on the feast of St. Joseph in 2025 — exactly one year, almost to the day, from the introduction that first brought them together just before that very feast. For a couple whose story had been quietly threaded with the foster father of Our Lord from the beginning, the symmetry was unmistakable. What had started under St. Joseph’s patronage was now sealed under it.

With the help of both their families, Dominic and Juliana planned a beautiful wedding in Canada, and on September 6, 2025, they were married.

Looking back, Juliana is quick to credit the introduction itself for making any of it possible. “It’s just so hard to find the right person nowadays,” she reflects, “and here we are, thrown right into each other’s path.” She’s candid that without that arranged introduction, the two would almost certainly never have found one another. Dominic told her as much himself — that if it weren’t for the introduction, he would never have thought to reach out to a woman all the way across the world.

In her words, those introductions did more than connect two people. They gave a real chance to those living in the remote corners of the world, and added “a beautiful touch of divine Providence” to every meeting and outcome — a phrase that captures her whole story rather neatly.

Today, Dominic and Juliana have settled into married life in Canada — and as of this summer, they’re preparing for something new. The couple is expecting their first child in July 2026.

“We thank God, St. Joseph, and CatholicCourtship for bringing us together,” Juliana says. “We are blessed and happy in our married life.”

From a single introduction just before the feast of St. Joseph, to a marriage and a child barely two years later — half a world bridged by a little providence and a great deal of intention.
And we at CatholicCourtship couldn’t be happier for them.

The post Dominic and Juliana’s Story appeared first on CatholicCourtship Blog.