“If you had to go on 100 dates, and on the 100th one, you were going to meet your husband, would you do it?”

The question stopped Christie Sheridan in her tracks.

Thirty-four, Catholic and single at the time, Sheridan had been through the dating wringer. Six years of looking for lasting love in Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati had proven fruitless. She was disappointed with where her life had led her and had just moved back to Steubenville, Ohio, where she’d been an undergraduate at Franciscan University, looking for a fresh start and a break from dating.

Nonetheless, Sheridan still knew that she wanted to be married. In fact, the Christian single-life coach she was working with at the time, Angie Woods, told Sheridan she thought she had a “strong calling” to the married life.

So when Woods posed the question about going on 100 dates if that’s what it took, Sheridan gave a big sigh and responded with a single word.

“Yeah.”

“I feel called to this enough that I’ll do it, even though I hated it when I did it before,” Sheridan, now 36, recalled her thought process at the time.

And so, with Wood’s help, Sheridan got to work, embarking on a 15-month dating journey that she says was blessed by God and that she hopes can inspire other Catholics who are discouraged by present difficulties of dating.

Less Talk, More Action

To help Sheridan prepare for the journey ahead, Woods gave her a “hundreds chart,” a tool used by salespeople that has a few “yeses” alongside a whole bunch of “noes.”

Wood, a non-Catholic Christian, said the idea was simple: helping Sheridan shift from a pressure-laden mindset of scarcity to one of discovery and hope.

“If you could mentally let go of the pressure of ‘this could be the one,’ it turns dating into something you learn from,” she told the Register.

But the new approach wasn’t just focused on quantity. It was also aimed at improving the way Sheridan dated altogether.

Previously, Sheridan had gotten overly invested in a potential relationship during the “talking phase,” which was usually taking place on a dating app. If these online chats ever did lead to an in-person date, she often found herself disappointed, in part because of the high expectations she had already set.

So Sheridan and Woods came up with a solution.

“Quit the chatter and just meet people,” Sheridan recalled.

Her new dating strategy was aimed at getting off the dating apps or chat screen and on to a phone or video call as quickly as possible. From there, Sheridan would decide whether or not she wanted to meet up for an in-person date.

“I was like, ‘Okay, I know what I’m looking for. Let’s just keep going. What’s next? Who’s next? There’s got to be somebody out there,’” recounted Sheridan.

46 Dates in 15 Months

Rather than dehumanizing her potential suitors, Sheridan says the approach was prompted by her desire to meet the real person and not just a user on a chat screen.

And meet people she did. From March 2022 to June 2023, Sheridan went on 46 first dates.

Some had been setups made by friends, but most of them were with men she’d matched with on dating platforms, after filtering for Christians only.

More often than not, the men she was chatting with would go silent when she asked to start talking over the phone. One of them even took a first-date video call from her while watching a baseball game. And although Sheridan went on multiple dates with nine different men during that 15-month stretch, no connection went beyond three dates.

But she found that, unlike before, she didn’t feel as emotionally drained by the process.

“I think this just allowed me to be really in touch with the reality of ‘who is this person?’” Sheridan shared. “You’re actually able to see who the other person is, and you’re not constructing something in your mind, or running away with something, like, ‘Oh, he’s in the town that I like, or he has a cool job! Okay, but what else is there?’”

She also added that not talking with her close friends about a guy until she’d actually met him helped her keep an even keel.

Sheridan acknowledges there were moments of disappointment along the way. But she kept going, trusting that the process would be fruitful in one way or another, even though all that she had to show for it after 15 months was a chart with 46 “noes” X’d out.

And then, in June 2023, she went on first date No. 47.

Noticing the Difference

What was different about Mike, Sheridan said, was how comfortable the two felt around each other right off the bat. It also helped that the two had family connections: Mike had been the football coach of one of Sheridan family friends at the Cleveland high school where she herself had graduated from.

The Catholic couple matched on Hinge, right before Sheridan was set to go to Europe for a few weeks for work. After a bit of chatting, she told him she’d call him when she got back, and she did.

For Christie, the process she took to find her husband might have been unorthodox. But rather than drain the experience of romance, she says it allowed her to more easily recognize that she and Mike had something special.

“After talking to so many guys before him, it was super clear that he was different and the perfect fit for what I was looking for in a partner and person to share life with,” she told the Register.

Sheridan recognizes that her “100 dates” approach might not be for everyone. Still, there are some principles that she encourages anyone else to adopt. Take things one date at a time. Connect in person as quickly as possible. And stay rooted in prayer throughout the process.

The last one was big for her during her own dating odyssey. Daily prayer allowed her to be true to not only who she was, but “whose she was” — a beloved daughter of God, who would be provided for by him no matter what happened.

“I don’t deserve anything,” she said of her attitude at the time. “It’s all a gift of God’s goodness and love. I don’t know. I just feel like I felt that way the whole time.”

Woods added that the approach wasn’t about turning Sheridan’s fate over to some kind of algorithm, but helping her to discern God’s will by being open to reality.

“She understood that, just as God made her with specific desires, the only way to truly know what she wanted in a partner was to experience different possibilities,” said Woods.

‘A Pretty Cool Idea’

From Mike’s point of view, he was surprised when he found out about his now-wife’s dating approach, but thought it was “a pretty cool idea.” The 37-year-old also admits that Sheridan’s push to get to know each other over the phone and then in person helped establish a connection more quickly than he might’ve taken things — for which he’s grateful.

Plus, there’s the added bonus that of all the men she went on dates with over those 15 months, he’s the one she picked.

“It’s a little bit of an ego booster,” he jokingly acknowledged.

As for that “hundreds chart” Sheridan received at the start of her dating adventure?

It’s hanging on the married couple’s fridge, a reminder of the lengths she was willing to go — and the trust she placed in God — to find her groom.