How I met my partner: Wedding bells to follow these long-distance podcast fans

Cork chef Seán O’Keeffe and American Colleen Quigley bonded over a podcast during the pandemic, and now the couple are preparing to get married in less than two weeks time.

The podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk sees comedian Al Murray and the historian James Holland discuss the Second World War — and the couple have found they also share a love for the Irish and American wars of independence from Britain.

Colleen, who works as a transaction manager in corporate aviation finance, explained: “Seán and I both started to listen to the podcast during lockdown in 2020, and a lot of followers of the podcast were starting to connect with each other on Twitter.

“That prompted Seán to reach out to me because of my name, I had to tell him that I’m not from Ireland originally but we started to chat over Twitter.

“The chatting would go on for hours, and then as Christmas approached it had been a few months of us texting and I asked if he might like to talk on the phone, I thought it would be nice to hear his voice, so he suggested a video chat on Christmas night.

“The conversation went really well, we spoke for an hour. Then the next day I sent a message thanking him for the wonderful conversation and we were texting away and Seán said ‘hey, why don’t we get back on the video call?’ It was seven hours later we hung up!”

The couple first met in September 2021, having been unable to meet earlier due to travel restrictions.

The podcast they had bonded over was having a festival in Silverstone, UK, so they decided to attend a few days earlier and meet in Oxford Town, so they weren’t meeting for the first time in front of lots of people, and their relationship grew from there.

Seán explained: “In March of 2023, I proposed to Colleen. It was a case of these long distance things tend to peter out over time, so I wanted to make a move and do something about it and this seemed the most logical thing. Very romantically, I did it over the phone.”

Colleen added: 

“He said he wanted us to be together, and the question was how do we go about it?”

She had applied for Irish citizenship as she had family roots in Longford, but the couple decided due to both of their jobs, it would make more sense for Seán to move to the US, so the couple started the visa approval process, which took 19 months.

He moved to Rhode Island just over a month ago, and the couple are planning to get married on January 24, as the visa gives them 90 days to get married from the moment Seán arrived in the US.

Colleen explained that their wedding will have some links to their shared love of history, saying: “We didn’t have much time to plan it, only a few weeks to put everything together, and the challenge of a World War Two themed wedding is that there aren’t any battlegrounds or anything over here, there are museums but they have a lot of swastikas in them and we didn’t want our wedding photos to be full of swastikas.”

They decided instead to get married at a historic home linked to the American War of Independence, where they can bond over something Irish and Americans have in common. Colleen explained: “We both like the idea of the symbolism of independence from the British empire.”

On living together, Seán said: “I think it’s been great, it’s been fairly seamless. We’re culturally not that different at all and I’m fairly easygoing anyways, so I’ve just slotted in.”

Colleen added: “He’s a wonderful cook and I’m not someone who cares to cook, so he’s been preparing wonderful meals while he’s waiting for his green card so he can work.

“It’s just been better than I could have imagined, my family and friends really embraced Seán and my cat has adjusted to him, so it’s been absolutely wonderful.”

The couple’s podcast community are all big fans of their love story, with Seán saying: “We have a lot of well wishers, we’ve met so many friends through the podcast and we’re all likeminded souls.”

Colleen said: “A lot of people have been reaching out to us, obviously we have quite a unique situation but we’re part of a larger group of wonderful people who all connected — you hear so many negative things about social media but this is a really lovely community.”