← All confessions · Vacation Flingvia Lonely Planet 2026-10-12

Ireland to Indiana for a Holiday Match

A family visit, a dating app just for fun, and a whole new life in Fort Wayne.

How it started

Writing for Lonely Planet, Irish writer Rosemary McCabe describes boarding a plane in May 2019 to visit her sister's family in Indiana with no idea her life was about to change. While there, she met a Fort Wayne man named Brandin on a dating app. What might have been a holiday fling became a long-distance relationship. She flew back twice that year, once for six weeks in October and again at Christmas, partly to see him and partly to get a feel for the city. By summer they'd made it official. She found herself falling for him, for the idea of living near her sister for the first time in over a decade, and for Indiana itself, despite her worries about culture shock.

Then it happened

The pandemic made the decision for her: if she flew home, she couldn't come back. She moved in with Brandin in July 2020. Six months later he got down on one knee while she was doing a jigsaw, and she thought at first he'd found a missing piece. Two weeks later she found out she was pregnant, and they bought a house overlooking a pond.

The morning after

Two weeks after the jigsaw proposal she found out she was pregnant. Then came the house: four bedrooms, a two-car garage and a pond out back. She realised she was never going back to Dublin only when she signed the mortgage, which her sister finds hilarious.

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