I found love at an Irish matchmaking festival - and I want others to do the same

I found love at an Irish matchmaking festival - and I want others to do the same

Mary Timby had grown tired of dating apps when, last summer, she impulsively decided to book a trip to Ireland from her Colorado couch.

The last-minute plan was out of character for Timby, 39, who describes herself as a "total planner".

Still, she had long wanted to see Ireland, and she was worn out by the local dating scene while going through a career transition. Then she recalled a few offhand lines from a comedy series about a matchmaking festival in Ireland.

She searched for it - and discovered that the Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival was not only real, but also running throughout the whole month of September, when she was due to be there.

Now, just over a year later, Timby is enjoying the rewards of that unusual snap decision: she has become a viral sensation. She has fallen in love with an Irishman she met at a pub called The Matchmaker. And she has launched a new business venture - taking other people to Lisdoonvarna in hopes they will follow her example.

"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, who is seated next to her.

They are talking from the windswept coastal cottage they rented together for the summer in his native County Clare - around 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Lisdoonvarna, where they first met by chance.

From the beginning, Timby's first trip to Ireland seemed to develop a momentum of its own.

Before her flight departed, she recorded a brief video on the plane, telling her roughly 300 TikTok followers that she was heading off on an impromptu trip to an Irish matchmaking festival and did not "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 switched her phone back on, "it was blowing up".

Friends had messaged her. "They said, 'Mary, your video is going viral,'" she says. "I didn't even have notifications on for social media."

She hired a manual transmission car - and was horrified to discover the gear stick was on the left side of the driver's seat - then drove through County Clare to her lodging at an Irish family's house.

After that, she went to Lisdoonvarna, where she saw for herself that the festival is a town-wide, month-long celebration of conversation and dancing, not a queue of singles waiting to be paired off by a wise local matchmaker.

That has changed since the festival began 170 years ago, when bachelor farmers and wealthy visitors would travel to the spa town of Lisdoonvarna to bathe in its mineral-rich waters and socialise. Generations of matchmakers worked to arrange successful marriages, and the reputation spread. Today, although fewer than 1,000 people live there year-round, the population rises to 80,000 each September as revellers arrive in Lisdoonvarna from around the world.

Third-generation matchmaker Willie Daly still presides at his nearby home and at festival events, and Timby even met him during her visit - when he handed her the phone to random men whose accents she struggled to understand.

But the real appeal of modern Lisdoonvarna is in the town's crowded streets and pubs - as Timby soon discovered.

Her first night there was "a little slow," she admits, and Timby was tired and jet-lagged. She went back to her room and spent the following day sightseeing, but the Irish woman who ran her accommodation persuaded her to give Lisdoonvarna another try that evening.

"My AirBnB host said, 'You should go back tonight, because I heard that the younger folks come out at night,'" laughs Timby.

So she returned - and ended up dancing and drinking pints at The Matchmaker Bar in the middle of town. That was when a "handsome Irishman" came up to her.

"I went over and introduced myself, and... conversation just flowed," says Mangan, 38, from Ennis, County Clare, about 22 miles southeast of Lisdoonvarna. He had been to the festival before and understood its cultural importance, remembering his grandparents making the trip decades earlier for the dancing.

"Unfortunately, I didn't have much time on my hands, because I was turning back to Ennis," says Mangan, who was the designated driver that night for a group of friends. "So I got her name, and I said, 'Oh, sure, I might see you around.'

"It was a very short interaction, to be honest with you."

But he did not stop there; Mangan found Timby on Instagram and sent her a message asking her out.

"It was short and sweet, and it was really genuine, too," says Timby - and she accepted.

A whirlwind run of dates followed - lunches, dinners, sightseeing and shopping trips. Timby stayed longer in Ireland and shared much of the experience with her newly gained audience - but she did not disclose anything about her new boyfriend. They wanted to keep the growing romance to themselves.

When Timby eventually had to return home, there were "tears at the airport" - but they chose to continue the relationship.

"It was very tough to say goodbye," Timby says. "It was very tough to start a long-distance relationship, but it ended up being a really good opportunity for us to sort of slow things down a bit."

They spoke every day, with Mangan impatiently waiting for Timby to wake up seven hours behind him in Colorado. She went back to Ireland again, then he made his first trip to America for Thanksgiving 2025. Timby returned to Ireland at Christmas and met his family, and after that they decided to make her boyfriend's big social media reveal.

"We thought, this is something we already know we want to invest in... we were ready to share," Timby says. "So New Year's Eve, we shared a photo of him, and people were just over-the-moon excited."

The couple watched their audience grow, attracting attention from Irish cafes and tourist spots to the local Gaelic sports club in Colorado. Their story also drew interest from Lisdoonvarna locals, who approached Timby - a communications consultant - about becoming an ambassador for the festival.

"So I said: Sign me up," Timby laughs. "I love the festival. It brought me Jay."

Timby has been flooded with messages from hopeful followers wanting to duplicate her matchmaking success.

"I heard from many of my followers... groups of people wanting to go to the festival but not having anyone to go with" or "not knowing what to do," Timby says. "I really listened to that, and I also wanted to be mindful of the fact that I love Ireland.

"I'm so excited to showcase County Clare and all the amazing things that the west coast of Ireland has, but I'm also not a tour operator."

So she teamed up with a company called Met Through Friends, which organises and encourages real-life meetups for people looking for love. They put out an interest form for a trip, expecting "80 to 100 responses." They got 560.

The first group of eight will travel later this month, with Timby's Irish boyfriend helping to plan the itinerary.

"You can go on all these apps, swipe left, swipe right, but it's not actually going out and making a connection with someone and experiencing a small little town in Ireland, experiencing the culture," says Mangan.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience... you never know."

Timby, smiling at her boyfriend of one year, agrees.

"I echo everything Jay just said," she says. "Put your phone down and put yourselves out there, and good things will come."