During the first few days of my Catholic Match membership, I searched for the profiles of local women figuring it would be my best chance to get a date. The results didn't exactly impress me.
One girl from the nearby city of Peabody said in her profile that she liked bowling so with no romantic expectations in mind, I reached out to her hoping we could just get together and go bowling sometime. I never got a response. Her profile remained on Catholic Match for many years and with an unwillingness to even talk to a guy who sent her a very benign message, it didn't surprise me.
A woman from Boston contacted me but not only was she not that attractive, she listed disagreement with the Church's position on abortion. I decided to talk to her anyway but it didn't take long for her elitism to shine. She wanted to know how “cultured” I was so I mentioned going to museums and taking in a musical every once in a great while. Now the true test of her character: I also mentioned my low-wage job just to see what would happen. She decided to end all communication right then and there. Predictable.
I reached out to another never-married local single with an exotic name but got no response. A couple of years later, her profile was still on Catholic Match but when I checked it out again, she listed herself as being divorced. I wondered what happened during those years to warrant such a drastic change.
Another woman from Boston reached out to me and I thought she was very cute. We were both caregivers and she figured having that one thing in common was a good starting point to a possible relationship. Unfortunately, the more I talked to her, the more she seemed like she had issues. At one point in our conversation, she blocked me from sending her any more messages. I thought, “Oh well. No big loss.” After a while, she lifted the block and reached out to me again. Apparently, she thought I had been talking to other women on the site and got jealous. Now my guard was up and as we continued to message each other, I tried to learn more about her past. She didn't reveal much...except for the fact that she had been pregnant once but never had any kids. Hmmm. What does that mean? A miscarriage? An abortion? Either way, I wasn't looking for someone with that kind of “experience” and decided to part ways with her. I was still open to being just friends but the idea went over her head.
It didn't take long for the pool of eligible local singles on Catholic Match to dry up. Unfortunately, Massachusetts is home to not only some very homely-looking women, but Catholics here tend to be liberal and lukewarm. These “Kennedy Catholics” as I like to call them, pick and choose which of the key Church teachings to embrace and usually discard anything that's an inconvenience. Naturally, the local females of Catholic Match reflected this demographic. A good number of them tended to be flakes as well. (Also, I don't care about the Red Sox or Patriots and I think the Boston accent is annoying. There go my chances!)
Unfortunately, Catholic Match doesn't let you search profiles by state. Rather, it narrows your choices down to a certain radius from your hometown. You can select something as small as a twenty-five mile radius but that seriously limits the amount of profiles you'll see, especially if you come from a sparely-populated suburb. One woman I recognized from church listed Boston and not Beverly as her hometown to protect herself from potential stalkers but doing so skews the search results. Chances are, many of those Catholic Match residents from Boston probably live somewhere else.
The website does let you search a much larger radius but this has its problems too. If you cast a wide net like a 200+ mile radius, that's a lot of unnecessary profiles to go through especially if long distance relationships are off the table. Also, there are big differences between someone living in metropolitan New Jersey and someone living in rural Vermont.
For laughs, I tried to search every single profile on Catholic Match by setting no mile limitations but the site crashed after a while. Why can't the website follow the lead of Ave Maria Singles and simply list the number of members in each state? It would certainly make things simpler and more efficient but I have a feeling it would also expose how few local Catholic Match users there really are. It's very telling when other members from different parts of the country complain in the forums about the lack of local singles. This was not a good sign.
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