How long did it take for God to bring you a spouse?

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Married my wife at 28.
I was not well disposed to marriage. Keep in mind that marriage is not something you “get”. Wives and the many blessings of marriage are not possessions. Marriage is a matter of sacrificial giving.

There are virtues required for marriage. Since marriage is a vocation for you, develop the virtues necessary to be a good marriage partner, and start that now. You need to provide for a wife, and that provision includes friendships. Get involved in activities. You can start around the parish. You don’t have to be an extrovert to serve others. Just get involved. If you have hobbies join that club.

Serving others is good virtue practice for marriage.
 
It took a good solid decade of prayers, including countless novenas, and frequent outpouring of tears. I am painfully shy and my hope was very similar to yours. I wanted God to drop a kind man on my doorstep to be my husband. Anything else seemed far too scary.

In the end, that is not how it worked out. It took the powerful intercession of St. Joseph and a gentle push from my brother/ late sister-in-law. I had to be the one to approach the man who would become my husband (who for the record, is probably twice as shy as I am).

I will include you in my prayers today, @Billy76, that God fill you with the necessary courage to approach your future wife if your vocation is to marriage.
 
Billy76 said:
It is hard because I am shy. I certainly would love if a girl came to my doorstep lol. But hopefully an extroverted girl will like me because it is hard for me to make friends.
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There’s nothing wrong with being a quieter person, but I would encourage you to get out and meet people, even just on a friendly level. If you have social anxiety, there are people who can help you address this.

Your soulmate is probably not going to just fall out of the sky one day. You need to put yourself in situations where meeting people is likely.
 
I think I’m near that point too, but praying and open to the will of God.
 
Yes, I agree, you could try this site, I heard a few people say they found their spouses there.
 
I first married at 23 and it was a mistake that ended at 36, though I was blessed with a great son. I’ve been married 21 years to my loving wife and became Catholic along the way. 😀
 
Don’t give up so easily. You’re only 41. You could meet the woman you’re going to marry tomorrow for all you know…
 
I married my wife at 34 years old after one year of friendship and two years of dating.

I am not shy but I am also a introvert. I highly recommend that you work on overcoming your shyness and not wait around for a extroverted woman to “find you”. But I am sure that you know this. Women wont give you a “pass” just because you are a introvert. You gotta make the moves.

I married a extroverted girl. She lived 50 miles away and I had to drive out to see her every weekend when we were dating. I would never do that under normal circumstances. I would rather be howme every single weekend then have to go drive 50 miles anywhere pretty much. My wife is always wanting to “Go out and do something” when we were dating she had a lot of parties she wanted to go to. And she wanted me to go with her, and she wanted to introduce me to everyone she know. When I went to her home country (Mexico) with her last month we did nothing for a few days but go to peoples houses and hang out talking for days. This is almost like hell for a introvert like me lol. No offense to my wife’s family at all, I loved them all. But I do not like doing things like that. A woman does not want to hear “I do not want to meet your relative right now, im shy” or “I do not want to spend all day at your aunts house, dont you know im a introvert?”

You will have to make a lot of compromises and sacrifices if you were to marry a extroverted girl. Yes, you two can compliment each other too but a extroverted wife will put you in situations that make you feel uncomfortable and will drain your energy. Just be mentally prepared to make that sacrifice.

Totally wort it in my case.
 
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on_the_hill said:
The engineer pulled away and said, “I’ll get close enough.”
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🤣
That reminds me of my late husband the engineer’s joke about “Good enough for government work”.

To answer the OP’s question:
I did not “pray and seek marriage”. I mostly wanted to just date and have fun - long backstory there.
I only had a few dates in high school for various reasons (one being I attended an all-girls’ school so even meeting guys was a challenge).
Things picked up in college and I had a pretty good number of dates and boyfriends including a couple who proposed and I said no because they weren’t marriage material.
When I was 21, God shoved some guy into my life who I ended up marrying although it took us 10 years to get hitched. I met him at my work. My work had a male-female ratio of 3 guys for every woman working there, which (I cannot tell a lie) is one reason I chose that line of work. Any woman who wanted a boyfriend or a spouse and worked in that industry had no trouble finding a guy at work. Besides my future husband, I went out with 3 other guys I met at work.

I agree with Irishmom and Roland that if you want to actually get married you need to go out there and make an effort to meet and talk to women, preferably as many women as you possibly can. It’s like salesmen making sales calls. If the salesman can make a sale on 10 percent of his calls, that means in order to get 10 sales he has to make 100 sales calls and get 90 rejections. If you stand around waitng for some extroverted woman to come seeking after you, it’s far less likely to happen.

Western culture has an expectation that the guys will be seeking after the women and not vice versa, so unless a man happens to be super-handsome or super-rich or the star of the football team or the lead singer of the popular band, women probably aren’t going to be knocking themselves out to make contact with him.
 
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Thanks for sharing your story! I found it very encouraging, although you seem extroverted enough to go on multiple dates which seems very scary. I am hoping only to go on two or three dates and have a girlfriend then eventually wife. It is just hard to talk to women. I do not want to bother them or impose on them. Plus I oftentimes get intimidated by their beauty. It just seems impossible to talk to women.
 
Billy76 said:
I am hoping only to go on two or three dates and have a girlfriend then eventually wife.
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I will be very honest. Unless you are seeking some kind of arranged marriage/ mail order bride, it’s rare for people to make a lifelong connection within 3 dates. It could happen but it’s not the norm at all.

When it does happen, it’s often between people who each have a lot of dating experience and therefore are able to cut to the chase and realize pretty quickly that the other person is different from their past dates and is just what they are looking for.
Billy76 said:
I do not want to bother them or impose on them. Plus I oftentimes get intimidated by their beauty. It just seems impossible to talk to women.
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You’re not going to get anywhere with this kind of an attitude. Women prefer men who are comfortable around women, not some guy who’s afraid to talk to a girl.

I would urge you to start getting involved in some social arenas where you can talk to women in a friendly way, not like you’re looking to see if every one is the wife you’re looking for, but just like a normal person talking to normal people who happen to be females.
 
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I met my husband at 29 and married at 31. We met through work (which I’m extremely grateful for, as I’m also shy and hated meeting people).
I’d encourage you to go out and try and meet new people, even on a friendship level.
But also keep in mind if you do meet someone, don’t marry the first person you meet, just for the sake of being married. My first boyfriend would have been a terrible spouse for me (not that he was a bad person). He wasn’t catholic and we wanted different things at different times, but I was desperate to be married and have a family, that if he had proposed I may have said yes. Thank God we broke up 😂
My husband is Catholic and knew how much I wanted a family as soon as we could have one. Our daughter died shortly after birth a couple of months ago and my husband has been a constant support for me. When we were getting counseling following her death, we were constantly told 70% of marriages end after the death of a child and I truly believe if I had married my first boyfriend, that would have happened. I know my husband and I will live through this.
So make sure you don’t rush into anything! Marriage is a huge commitment and you deserve someone who will love, respect you and make you grow in your faith.

Good luck!!
 
My youngest brother joined Toastmasters to help him develop his public speaking skills.
It really helped him feel comfortable meeting new people, striking up conversations, and engaging in public speaking.
Having seen what a difference it made for him, and having heard similar stories from others, I’m a fan.
I wonder if you might find this opportunity appealing?
https://www.toastmasters.org/
It might help you become more comfortable engaging in conversations with others.
May God bless you and guide you as you pursue your vocation.
jt
 
I was 29. I met my husband on a blind date. We’re coming up on 26 years soon. I think the most difficult lesson we have to learn is to be open to what God wants, not what we want. I think that’s how we truly live as ‘Christ centered’. So my advice to you is, pray for the grace to stop worrying about it. Give it all to God and let Him figure it out. Find peace there. Sometimes when we want something too much, God doesn’t give it to us because He wants to be first in our hearts. Then, once you have that peace, God can bring people into your life, make changes in your life and know that you’ll keep it all in proper perspective. Hope that makes sense.
 
Billy76 said:
Thanks for sharing your story! I found it very encouraging, although you seem extroverted enough to go on multiple dates which seems very scary. I am hoping only to go on two or three dates and have a girlfriend then eventually wife. It is just hard to talk to women. I do not want to bother them or impose on them. Plus I oftentimes get intimidated by their beauty. It just seems impossible to talk to women.
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Me and my wife became a official couple on our 4th date but dates do not stop once you have a girlfriend. They do not even stop once you are married.

If you really are so intimidated by women you had better start working on it if you want to get married. God is not going to miracle a woman in on your doorstep. It just does not work that way. Nobody is coming to save you. Fact of life. Men who do not go after what they want spend their lives sad that nothing seemed to go their way.

Try catholic match at the least. Its how I met my wife.
 
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Billy76 said:
Thanks for sharing your story! I found it very encouraging, although you seem extroverted enough to go on multiple dates which seems very scary. I am hoping only to go on two or three dates and have a girlfriend then eventually wife. It is just hard to talk to women. I do not want to bother them or impose on them. Plus I oftentimes get intimidated by their beauty. It just seems impossible to talk to women.
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@Tis_Bearself is right. The fantasy you seem to have of a beautiful woman approaching you out of the blue and then two or three dates later, you’ve found Mrs. Billy76 is probably not going to happen.

If you’re unable to talk to women and have normal conversations, that’s a massive problem for trying to date. It’s like saying you want to run a 5k with two broken legs. Obviously, people who tend to be quieter/introverted find spouses, but if you’re shy to the point that you can’t even talk to women, you have to work on that first. There are people who are trained to help you manage social anxiety.

And finally, as @Tis_Bearself also mentioned, you need to get used to talking to women just as human beings, not potential wives. Don’t approach every interaction as if this could be your soulmate. Just get used to normal, friendly chatting.
 
I am rather skeptical about the “God bringing you a spouse” assumption. It that really how marriages originate? Reminds me of the whole “soul mate” stuff.
And to the extent that God does bring us our spouses, I suspect its on par with the old joke about the guy in the flood who kept turning down because God was going to save him.
 
tafan2 said:
And to the extent that God does bring us our spouses, I suspect its on par with the old joke about the guy in the flood who kept turning down because God was going to save him.
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Yeah, God had to send me the same boat about 5 times before I finally threw up my hands and got in it.
 
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