Catholic singles in search of a Catholic spouse are now finding each other on two unlikely online platforms.

Reddit is a 20-year-old social media forum with a reputation for left-wing and anti-theist activism, while Discord is a platform originally created for gamers. But both have provided space for young Catholics to form online friendships which for some couples has led to marriage. 

The current moderator of the subreddit group r/CatholicDating is a Harvard doctoral student with a love for St. Thomas Aquinas and Kobe Bryant. When Terry Culpepper, nickname Mamba Mentality, volunteered to moderate the Reddit group in 2020, he believed he could successfully employ mathematical algorithms to help single Catholics find their optimal mate.

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By his own admission he got off to a rocky start. Not everyone was appreciative of his clinical approach and Culpepper quickly discovered that handling the 25,000 daily unique users required more than a degree in economics.

“I was a college student who studied economics. I was not a trained theologian, nor a trained psychiatrist,” Culpepper told The Catholic Register. 

As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Culpepper had studied the economics of marriage and online dating, and he thought the subreddit might prove an interesting alternative to other popular dating platforms.

“CatholicMatch is still very much the dominant player in Catholic online dating, and I wanted to create some sort of competition,” he said.

“The problem with platforms like CatholicMatch is if you want to send any message, you have to pay. When you pay for a month, you can message whoever you want, but you don’t know if the other person can pay as well. You might keep messaging a whole lot of people, but you have no clue who is a paid user.”

Since 2012 and the launch of Tinder, dating culture has become dominated by, what Culpepper calls, “swiping behaviour.”

“This generation is really dominated by the instant look, the instant swipe, left or right, based on the first picture you see of the person.”

The r/CatholicDating group had all the pitfalls and drama of any online forum and Culpepper found that he needed to turn to Aquinas for guidance on how to give guidance.

“Young adults on the Catholic Internet will spend hours arguing about a doctrine or some random practice or custom. They spend at most 20 minutes reading about it, and they spend zero minutes a day praying. I think my role was really to try to help people get out of that mindset.”

Culpepper isn’t certain of the exact number of marriages formed since he took over as moderator but can recall at least 11 and he knows more are planned.

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But the story doesn’t end there. In September 2021, one of the redditors suggested to Culpepper that a Discord group branch out from the Reddit group. 

Juliana and David Lemma both live in Germany and met on the Discord server within a month of the new group forming. They married a year later and now have a daughter.

To the Lemmas, the advantage to Discord is that users can use the text and video call functions for group chats. For online dating, it allows for a more relaxed environment in which users can observe each other in a more natural setting before committing to one-to-one messaging.

“It reminds a little bit of the earliest version of online chat forums from the ’90s,” said David. “I think that’s thanks to just the way Discord is set up. I think it corresponds to being out with friends. Maybe there’s someone you like, but you don’t have to get to know them one-on-one immediately. You can get to know them through how they interact with others.”

“That’s very, very valuable,” added Juliana, “because on CatholicMatch or similar platforms, if you’re interested in someone, you have to message them. It’s very direct and straight to the point, whereas Discord is more like, ‘Hey, let’s just talk casually without any commitment; let’s just get to know each other as friends.’ ”

The result of that set-up is that both marriages and deep friendships developed within the Discord group. 

Ivana Zuvic lives in Brampton, Ont., and discovered the Discord shortly after graduating high school. 

“When I initially joined, I wasn’t really sure what the crowd was like,” said Zuvic. “You join an online group and you really don’t know what to expect and I was a little hesitant. But then I got to join stuff, book clubs and rosaries, and we would have these discussions of faith. That’s what I really liked about it, because coming from high school, we were on lockdown, and I couldn’t just go to my local Newman Center and find that young adult community.”

Zuvic recently attended the wedding of two of the first moderators of the group, Ben and Leanne Farrow (disclosure, Ben is my son). Luvic was one of 11 friends from the Discord group who travelled to Dallas for the wedding. Culpepper was there, as was a young woman who travelled from the Philippines. 

Zuvic said that attending the wedding of her two friends was a “beautiful experience.”

“I remember sitting in Mass and looking around, and in my head, I just thought, ‘Yeah, this is like a slice of Heaven celebrating the Eucharist with all your friends and glorifying God.’

“I was thinking about all the little things that led up to that point. A lot of it was just surrendering it to God and saying, ‘Okay, Lord, I don’t know why I am in this thing, but I believe it’s for your glory.’ It was a really big thing for me spiritually, because these people I’d known for four years, we were able to share that special moment together.”

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The story of the evolution of the Catholic dating subreddit, and the subsequent break-off of some users to the Discord platform, is as convoluted as the Internet itself, but it is a story that points to new modes of Catholic matchmaking and community-building that meet the needs of a new generation.  

Juliana Lemma says they have now added a “success board” to the server, a list of the usernames of all the people who met in Discord and went on to get married.