SAN JOSE, Calif. — After years of always being the perpetual bridesmaid, Lisa Catalano laid down her soft-pink bouquet, hung up her strappy blue satin maid of honor dress and drafted a text to her friends:
“I’m officially announcing my retirement from being a bridesmaid,” she wrote. “The next wedding I’m going to be in will be with my own groom, TBD.”
Two years earlier, her fiancé had died of a terminal illness. After failed attempts at dating apps, set-ups and matchmaking databases, Catalano, now 42, transformed her quest with gusto.
Creating a personal dating campaign, she rented space on a dozen digital billboards along Highway 101 between Santa Clara and South San Francisco, adorning each with her smiling face, cascading brunette curls and a simple message: “MarryLisa.com.” She’s running the same images on the tops of taxis in San Francisco as well.
With the boost from a local TV station and the New York Post, which shared her story last week, the traffic to her “Marry Lisa” website has soared. By Tuesday, nearly 2,000 men — some from as far as India and the Middle East — had applied to be Mr. Right.
“I keep joking with my friends and family, because this has felt to me like the beginning of a romcom, except so far, it’s been all com and no rom,” she said. “I hope that that changes soon.”
Catalano’s story is equal parts “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “The Bachelorette,” but her journey also reveals yet again the struggles to find love in the post-COVID age of remote work, isolating social media and the frenetic pace of Silicon Valley.
Bay Area dating coach Marie Thouin sympathizes with Catalano’s struggles to find the one, as women, especially, search for traditional relationships in a region that often questions conventions, and where eligible men who want a wife and children are often putting it off until after their careers are established.
Catalano, she said, is “fearless.”
“She’s breaking a lot of the shame that a lot of women have about wanting partnership. A lot of people don’t want to seem too desperate and so they’re downplaying their desire for a relationship. And she is boldly doing the opposite,” Thouin said. “She’s saying, ‘Hey, this is so important to me that I’m willing to put myself out there on a billboard. I’m willing to create a website for this. I’m willing to go the distance to show the world I want this.’”
Catalano’s studio apartment, decorated with a patchwork quilt, a sheepskin rug and light blue love seat, has become her makeshift command center. On Tuesday morning, her phone kept pinging with every new dating application submitted to her website. People Magazine interviewed her that day, and she’s heading to a TV interview in Oakland Thursday. She’s fielded calls from producers for “Jimmy Kimmel Live! “and CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”
She’s had so much interest from so many that she’s barely had a chance to study the applications or go on a single date.
“I’m reviewing the applications myself. I’m not using AI or any tools like that,” she said. “I’m doing it the old-fashioned way, but this is not an old-fashioned approach at all.”
Catalano is remarkably revealing on her MarryLisa.com website. Height, weight, bra size? All spelled out in black and white. Does she kiss on a first date? Sex and intimacy? Her flaws and imperfections? She talks about all that in a string of videos.
A Santa Clara University alumna who worked in tech and the cosmetics industry and is now freelancing, she enjoys wine “and the occasional cocktail.” She’s a Giants fan, owns a convertible and loves cats. “Has never had any cosmetic procedures,” she wrote, is “high energy, healthy active.”
Her prospective suitor must be college-educated, drug-free, aligned with her left-leaning politics and be ready for marriage and children within three years.
Catalano is buying a new printer so she can sort the prospective suitors into piles and will likely enlist some friends to help.
Longtime friend Jamie Bainum says she met her boyfriend on Tinder two years ago and hoped the dating apps would work for Catalano. The billboard campaign instead, she said, is “so smart.”
“She’s very outgoing to do it, because it’s definitely serious putting yourself out there for the whole world to see,” said Bainum, 42, of Florida. “But she’s a very good person. She doesn’t have anything to hide, so you’re not going to find any bad things about her. She’s very honest. She’s very fun. She’s just a really good person who deserves a really good guy.”
Along with those who may be the good ones, however, Catalano has received numerous bad ones.
“I’m getting phony applications that are just saying the most horrific things about me,” she said. “I’m putting myself out there and my love life out there. It’s a very vulnerable thing and so I expected some criticism, but this? I’m just trying to roll with it.”
She has increased her personal security, she said, and plans to conduct her “due diligence” before she agrees to a date. But for every negative applicant, there are more positive ones encouraging her search.
Catalano declined to say how much her campaign is costing her so far. (She’ll calculate that later, she said, ) And for all her openness, she didn’t want to talk too much about her late fiancé out of respect, except to say that their relationship was “easy-going” and they had “great communication.”
“I think he would be cheering me on and laughing at this whole thing,” she said. “He would want me to be happy.”
Whether her future husband is somewhere in her growing database remains to be seen. But for those interested in her progress, she’s planning on documenting her journey on her “marrylisaofficial” page on TikTok.
“I do plan on shooting a little content for social media like getting ready for the date, what I’m wearing, that sort of thing, and giving a quick little brief recap of the dates,” she said.
But she’ll keep the men’s names and faces private.
“As unconventional as all of this is, I want to try as hard as possible to make the actual dates themselves feel normal,” she said.
When the publicity dies down, she said, she’s anxious to delve into the applications.
After all, she said, “I’m not doing this for fame. I’m doing this for love.”
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