“I had just come out of a long term marriage,” says Amy, “I was looking for a safe place to meet people, and a friend recommended Christian connection. I then proceeded to download all the other apps as well, as a backup. But Ian and I met quite quickly after I downloaded it.”

I also was recommended by friend,” says Ian “and I did a very similar thing. I downloaded everything I had also just come out of a long term marriage, and I was looking for a Christian connection.”

“The difference between my profile and Amy’s profile was that I decided to overemphasise absolutely everything…” says Ian. “Mine was a biography of my life. I thought oversharing was the key. I went for as many posey, cheesy pictures as I could, thinking they were the best ones.”

Amy wasn’t so sure. “I swiped past Ian. I was like, ‘no thanks’. That was just because a couple of the first photos were a little bit too posey for me. What drew me back was the stuff that he’d written about his faith… I really loved that reading through his answers, it felt like what I would say as well.”

Their connection began when Amy sent a wave, and Ian realised she lived in the town he came from, though he was living hundreds of miles away.

“Ian was living in Dublin at the time, and I was in Hull,” remembers Amy. “He said ‘I’m going to be over in England at the end of November… visiting my parents, who live just down the road from you. Would you like to go out?’ It was going to be his birthday that weekend, and so we made plans to meet up on his birthday and go on a first date to Hull City, our local football team. We did what my dad likes to call side by side bonding. Where you don’t have to have that intensity of sitting across from each other and making lots of conversation, but just we went and did something together, and that was really lovely.”

“It was exactly what we both needed. It was such a good first date. That came after weeks of talking all day, every day, online. We just clicked from probably the first conversation. There were some days I went to work the next day after having chatted to Ian till one two in the morning. Every time we talked, I just felt so peaceful and so joyful, and it just felt so right.”

They both felt they had a strong connection.

“I think I knew probably from some of those very early conversations,” says Ian. “I think it’s very clichéd to say I knew from the moment I first set eyes on you, but I think it was the first couple of conversations. Once we started delving into each other’s hearts, I think that was when I really knew… this is the missing piece of the jigsaw that I’ve been looking for.”

Amy says, “I don’t remember ever having the thought ‘when will I know if Ian’s right or not?’ I don’t remember having a time where I felt like I just didn’t know him and choose him. And that sounds bizarre, because obviously there was a beginning, but, very early on it just was right. I remember texting a couple of my really good friends and saying, ‘This is my person’. I feel like I’ve known him forever.”

As their relationship developed, Ian felt the time was right to ask Amy to marry him – and he planned a big proposal.

“I asked a friend to chauffeur Amy to the church that we’d started attending. It’s a big, beautiful minster in the town of Beverley [in Yorkshire, England]. I contacted one of my friends in there and said, ‘Can you open it up on a Friday night when it’s closed?’ So I went in there hours before I was due to meet Amy, and I lined the Minster with candles from the back to the front. Lined both sides, and then I sprinkled rose petals. We had a song that that we’d had very early on – ‘I can’t help falling in love with you’. So I had that lined up… I was at the top of the aisle in the Minster, and the song was playing.”

“It kind of ruined all of our friends future engagements for sure,” laughs Amy.

They planned their wedding in the same beautiful church.

“Both of us have been married before,” says Amy, “and for a long time, I wasn’t sure whether I would want to get married in a church again… but having attended that church for a long time and felt really welcome there, and felt really at home there, it became a place that just naturally was a good fit.

“If you filled the place, you would need 1000s of people. We had just our closest friends and family, which was still a pretty decent number. In the end, it was a very rainy day, but it was really special and very ‘us’. We got an ice cream van. The main thing was that it was just really fun. So as much as possible, we played silly games, we had quizzes, we had food that was really ‘us’. After the service, my favourite food is croissant. So we bought the local bakery’s croissants and served pastries and donuts and Pimms after the service. It was really good.”

Since the wedding, life hasn’t slowed down.

“The year after the wedding has been quite eventful,” says Ian. “We’ve tried to tick all of life’s events off immediately! We have had a baby. His name is Joel. He’s a gorgeous little boy.”

“He’s just the most smiley little boy ever,” says Amy. “He’s so cute. Neither of us thought we would have children. That wasn’t an option in our previous marriages. So it was just a real joy to be on the same page as each other from the beginning… He was always meant to be, and we planned for him forever. So yeah, it’s been wonderful.”

Despite challenges along the way – including a serious road accident in which Ian was badly injured early in their relationship – they continue to find joy in life together.

“We laugh a lot together,” says Ian. “I think that’s one of the best things about life. We laugh a lot. Joel laughs a lot.”

“One of the best things is that this always feels like it’s meant to be,” he says. “This feels like we have always known each other. Like this is where we were destined to be. It feels like I’ve met somebody I’ve always known. It feels like I’ve met my best friend. I just love spending every day with Amy. I don’t get bored of Amy… She’s just a lot of fun to be with.”

Amy says, “I always go back to this Bible verse where it says that God gives you silver instead of bronze and gold instead of silver. Since meeting Ian, it is fun, but it’s the kind of fun that you feel really at the core of yourself, where you’re being fully yourself at last, and you’re free to do that, and you’re encouraged to do that. And then you have a little boy who is like that too. So that’s a real gift.”

They both have encouraging advice for single Christians who want to meet a partner.

Ian says: “Do your very best to be your authentic self. You want to spend your life being with somebody that you you are meant to be with, somebody that knows you for you, somebody that accepts you for you, somebody that loves you for everything that you are. You don’t have to settle. God knows who that person is. God is in your past, God is in your present, and God goes before you, and you can trust in that.”

Amy says: “Be willing to take some risks, because I played it really safe in the early days, and I set my location and distance, really, really tight to home. And I would never have met Ian if I’d have kept it like that. And I just happened to meet a very local lad who happened to live in Dublin, and that would never have happened if I’d have not taken that risk and and I think our relationship has has been like that too.

“We have been encouraging each other at different times to be willing to step out into some difficult spaces that haven’t felt always super comfortable. I love that quote from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, where they’re talking about Aslan as God and the lion, and they say ‘he’s not tame, but he is good’. I always think about that – even with something like dating – that just because it feels scary doesn’t mean it’s not right. So, I would say take the risk.”

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