New Catholic dating app brings matchmaking tradition into the digital world

Emily Wilson Hussem is an internationally recognized Catholic speaker, best-selling author of seven books, and YouTuber who shares her faith both online and at events around the globe. After pioneering social media matchmaking posts and seeing success, she and husband Daniël Hussem co-founded SacredSpark, a new online platform to help single Catholics connect for the goal of sacramental marriage.

Daniël Hussem is a passionate Catholic with over a decade of experience in marketing, product strategy, and technology from the tech-startup world, most notably as the co-founder of Seven Fourteen Media. He holds a Master’s degree in Business & Economics from Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He and Emily live in California with their three children.

They spoke recently with CWR about SacredSpark and online dating for Catholics.

CWR: What’s your assessment of the state of Catholic dating today? What are the top one or two problems single Catholics are facing?

Emily: One of the biggest problems in dating is a real breakdown of communication. Just the ability to ask a woman on a date or talk about how you’re feeling—those skills have been lost over the years, and that has seeped into the dating culture as a whole, both secular and Catholic.

That makes the first step of dating—a man asking a woman on a date—really hard. Many Catholic singles are working on this issue within themselves, but they’re having a hard time dating because they’re meeting people who are still struggling with it.

Daniel: The other issue is, where do they go to connect and find one another? As a young Catholic single, where do you go nowadays? We try to cover both of those grounds with SacredSpark. It’s a place of online connections, for offline relationships. You don’t actually date on an app; you date in real life. It’s a mess out there!

That’s the long and short of it, and we’re just trying to do our part to bring some light and hope into it.

CWR: You recently keynoted at the Fresh Start Conference, a small, application-only conference for single Catholics. What stood out to you about the single people who attended? Were those communication difficulties confirmed?

Emily: I was blown away by how amazing the singles who attended were. What stood out to me most was their vulnerability. Some of them came very openhearted, very openly saying, “I really hope to meet my match here.” The vulnerability it took to apply and invest the ticket price, and show up was amazing. There was a lot of laughter, a lot of joy, and a lot of community at the center.

Daniel: A lot of the guys came up to talk to me, and we did see that lost art of just having a conversation. They’re always thinking ten steps ahead—should I ask her out, what if she says “No”—instead of just making a connection. So it was great to see an initiative like this, to provide a dedicated space for Catholic singles to connect, pray together, go to Mass together, and be in camaraderie together, in a low-pressure setting.

CWR: What did you see lacking in existing online dating platforms for Catholics, and how does SacredSpark supply what’s lacking?

Emily: Over the years, I’ve seen a huge struggle for single Catholics to connect with each other. It’s a well-known problem: if I’m a young woman who goes to a parish in Portland, Maine, where most people are in their eighties, it’s hard to find a Catholic guy.

So I started making matchmaking posts online. Those exploded across the internet, and there are, I think, almost 20 marriages that have come out of those posts. Meeting on social media is a wonderful thing, but it was more of a “band-aid” instead of a real solution.

So we got to thinking, “How can we create that space intentionally for them, a space that’s human, and helpful, and personal, to connect Catholic singles, not so they can date on an app, but so that they can connect in person? Maybe they live three blocks from each other, but just never had the opportunity to meet in person.”

Daniel: The matchmaking posts showed the need and desire for Catholic singles, especially younger adults, to connect. There are other Catholic dating platforms out there as well, but they tend to lean toward an older crowd now. We needed a space that’s modern and new, but also combats some of the pitfalls of online dating.

In general, online dating, especially secular online dating, is extremely superficial: people write somebody off based on a photo or a one-sentence bio, and they skip to the next one. So we wanted to create a space where intentionality is at the forefront, and that is very human. SacredSpark has audio and video prompts, so you can show more of yourself online and spark that connection, so you can then take it offline and travel toward a sacramental marriage.

Emily: For example, let’s say I’m a person who loves plants. In my video introduction on SacredSpark, I can say, “Hi, I’m Emily, and I love tending to my plants. Here are all my houseplants.” Or you can make funny jokes in your audio prompt to attract someone who would like that. We really want you to shine as the person you are, with all your quirks and your joy.

CWR: SacredSpark has a unique matchmaking feature: singles can invite a friend or family member to be their matchmaker. How does that work? And who makes a good matchmaker?

Emily: That was born out of the matchmaking posts. Someone would comment on them, saying, “My brother Justin is 31, he lives in Wisconsin, and he’s looking for a girl who loves the outdoors and wants to eat the steaks he cooks on the grill.” And so many connections happened from that! This is the tradition of setting people up, and we wanted to bring that into the digital era.

So a single can log on and invite a matchmaker, or the matchmaker can sign up first and invite their single friend to SacredSpark. As a matchmaker, I can go through the profiles on SacredSpark and send ‘likes’ on her behalf to men’s profiles. Or, if that man has a matchmaker, I can correspond with his matchmaker and say, “Tell me about your friend, he looks like a great fit for my friend, do you think they would be a good fit for each other? How can we connect the two of them?”

So, we wanted to bring that lost art of supporting singles into the digital space to make more connections.

Daniel: A good matchmaker is someone who knows your heart, someone you know and trust. We don’t want it to be a gimmick; we want it to be intentional. Also, when the single invites the matchmaker, the first thing we have the matchmaker do is review the single’s profile and see how this person is presenting themselves, and consider how they can improve their profile.

So, it creates accountability where the matchmaker can give you feedback and help you out to make a good but accurate first impression.

CWR: Can someone be both a matchmaker and single themselves?

Daniel: Yes, there is the ability to switch between the two roles.

CWR: SacredSpark launched recently, on October 29th. Can you share any success stories you know of so far, either from beta testers or active users?

Daniel: Yes, we ran a beta before launch, and we had one couple in the beta group meet, which was fabulous. Since launch, we’ve had over 13,000 matches—two people expressing mutual interest in each other.

So, it will be interesting to see the data on how many of those turn into dates, relationships, and sacramental marriages. We’ve also had some people delete or pause their accounts, indicating they met someone. We’re working on setting up an internal system that will be able to track these more accurately.

Emily: I have a personal friend who went on her second date from SacredSpark and another personal friend who went on his third date from SacredSpark recently. And we’ll have other people who tag us on social media saying they went on a date, so that is encouraging and very exciting. The good thing is, it will be growing over time, so that’s why it’s important to get the word out.

CWR: Is there anything else you’d like to share that readers should know?

Emily: We created a course called Dating 101 that’s entirely free. It’s one thing to say, “Catholic dating is a mess!” and complain and scream about it; it’s another to fix the mess.

So we very intentionally created this eight-chapter course that people can do on their own or in groups, which brings people through self-reflection and prayer with the Lord to examine the heart before jumping into the dating pool. Because part of the problem is that people don’t really evaluate their heart and consider what God is calling them to before jumping into dating—they just jump in and cause a lot of heartache and mess.

So, we encourage singles to take a step back, breathe, pray, and walk through the practicals of how you date and how you have hard conversations. We found that lots of pieces of the puzzle were missing, and we want to offer that to the Church, alongside offering SacredSpark to help singles connect after they have done this hard work.

Daniel: This course and some of the features, like video prompts, should help with the breakdown of communication we talked about before. It walks people through the practicals, like how to ask a woman out, or how as a woman to be open to pursuit, how to discern, etc.

We have a lot of other formational resources that are in the works to help with other stages of the relationship. With secular dating apps, the goal is to keep people on the app because that’s how they make money, but for us, the end goal is to get people to an actual sacramental marriage: to build up the Church one relationship at a time.

So, we don’t want to say, “Here’s a place to connect and off you go; we’ll see you at the ‘finish line’ of a sacramental marriage.” No, we want to journey with, support, and guide couples to get to that goal.

CWR: Is Dating 101 required to use SacredSpark?

Daniel: No, but it’s encouraged! We send it to everyone when they sign up and promote it. It was professionally recorded in a studio, with a lot of time and effort, so it’s great.

Emily: It’s not that you have to graduate from it in order to use SacredSpark, but we promote it all the time and say, “This is free, this is for you, and we want you to be confident and have that ability to communicate, whether on SacredSpark or out in the world.” We want Dating 101 to help singles all over the world, whether or not they’re on SacredSpark, and the reviews so far have been amazing.

Daniel: The content isn’t just stuff you can apply in dating, it’s for you as a person too, in way more aspects of your life. There are worksheets to help you evaluate past wounds and understand why you perceive people a certain way or why you look for a certain ‘type.’ It reframes things to look at things from a Christ-centered perspective.

CWR: And if two people have gone through the same course, they should have the same understanding of how to proceed with dating, right?

Daniel: Yes, it’s the unofficial playbook of how we interact and communicate on SacredSpark.

Emily: In a healthy, positive, hopeful way.

(Editor’s note: This interview was lightly edited for clarity.)

Read original article