Jim and I are very grateful to ChristianMingle. Jim had been alone since 2008, and I had been single since 1997. Jim had never tried online dating, but I had been on so many different sites with no success that I was burned out of online dating. Yet, despite being in a singles group, at church I was not meeting men I was interested in dating there either.
In June 2013, a neighbor convinced Jim to try online dating, and he only wanted a Christian woman, so he created a profile on ChristianMingle. A former co-worker of mine now Pastor recommended ChristianMingle, I tried it in the fall of 2012 for a few months with no success, but then I decided to return in late June 2013 for one more try. I’m so glad I did!
I remember distinctly sitting on the couch and praying about it trying ChristianMingle again. I also remember committing to being more open and changing the age range of men. At that time I was 50 and previously had the age range for men between 40-60, but I realized since I already had grown children it would be more realistic to have the range for men between 45-65. Thank God I changed that! Jim was 63, but had no idea how to search for women so he just waited for ChristianMingle to send him “matches,” and if I had not changed the age range to include his, we would have never met!
Jim sent me a smile in late June, and I emailed back. I had been looking for a Godly man willing to do mission work, and when I saw Jim’s profile picture with him holding a baby from Kenya on a mission trip, that attracted me right away.
Our first meeting was on June 26, 2013 at Starbucks which then turned into going across the street to lunch. I will never forget the way Jim looked at me when he first saw me, and I hope he always looks at me that way! We started dating from that point forward.
Jim is an emergency room physician, and I am an attorney who was in law school at the time, and we lived 52 miles apart so dating was a challenge, but we made it work.
Being an older divorced couple with grown children has had its challenges, but our common faith has what enabled us to stay together and make a commitment – despite all of those stressors. Every weekend we attended church together and prayed together, and we knew early on we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.
Jim visited my family on the East Coast for Christmas of 2014 — they welcomed him into the family, and Jim asked me to marry him on January 24, 2015. We married on August 1, 2015.