Mary Timby was fed up with dating apps when she booked a trip to Ireland on a whim last summer - from the comfort of her Colorado couch. The spur-of-the-moment trip was unlike her: Timby, 39, is a self-described "total planner". But she'd always wanted to visit Ireland, and she found herself exhausted by the local dating scene while navigating a career transition.
And then she remembered a few throwaway lines from a comedy series about a matchmaking festival in Ireland. So she looked it up - and not only was the Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival real, it was also taking place during the entire month of September, when she was scheduled to visit. Now, a little more than a year later, Timby is reaping the benefits of that uncharacteristic last-minute decision: She's become a viral star.
She's found love with an Irishman she met at a pub called The Matchmaker. And she's even started a new business venture - bringing others to Lisdoonvarna who hope to follow in her footsteps. "It's really about enjoying County Clare, enjoying the festival, and, if you meet someone, you do - and that's what happened with us," says Timby, smiling at her partner, Jason Mangan, sitting beside her.
They're speaking from the windswept coastal cottage they rented together for the summer in his native County Clare - about 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Lisdoonvarna, the site of their first fortuitous meeting. From the outset, Timby's inaugural Ireland trip seemed to take on a life of its own. She filmed a short video on the plane before her flight took off, telling her approximately 300 TikTok followers that she was heading on an off-the-cuff trip to an Irish matchmaking festival - and didn't "know what's going to happen".
Timby then "turned my phone on airplane mode, then spent about eight hours on the flight (and) woke up at Shannon Airport," she says. When she turned on her phone, "it was blowing up". A group of friends had texted her.
"They said, 'Mary, your video is going viral,'" she says. "I didn't even have notifications on for social media." She rented a manual transmission car - horrified to find the gear stick on the left side of the driver's seat - and set off through County Clare to her accommodation at an Irish family's home. Then she headed to Lisdoonvarna, where she saw firsthand that the festival is a whole-town, month-long celebration of conversation and dancing, rather than a line of singles waiting to be set up by a sage local matchmaker.
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