Technology played role in getting pair together
Smartphones have been demonized for diminishing casual human interaction, but Demario Rollins’ iPhone helped him find the woman with whom he most wants to interact.
“When I got my iPhone I was pretty excited about the apps,” says Rollins, who switched from another phone brand in late 2011.
His friend talked about meeting people through sites like e-Harmony and Match. com. Demario wasn’t sold on those but on July 20, 2012, he downloaded a Christian dating app.
“The same day this young lady from Arkansas said hello,” he says.
That young lady was Heather Johns of Searcy.
“I was thumbing through the profiles for people the app had chosen for me,” Heather says. “I hadn’t really found anyone who had the same values that I did. Most of the guys were shirtless and showing off their physiques and I was just not interested in that type of person. I came across Demario and he was in a suit and he had the most beautiful smile.”
She was sad to see that Demario lived 1,000 miles away in Riverview, Fla., but she let him know that she liked his profile, and they started a conversation through the app. Five days later they were exchanging text messages. And then they were talking on the phone.
“We were very cautious with each other because we were both only looking for friendship then, but we also didn’t want anything weird, and we wanted to make sure that each other was who we said we were,” Demario says.
He flew to Arkansas on Aug. 24 to meet Heather.
“This all happened very fast for us,” Heather says.
They had exchanged several photos by then, but when Heather picked Demario up at the airport, she really wanted to get a good look at him, “and he’s wanting to hug me, so we embrace and I step away so I can look at him and he says, ‘Come back,’” she remembers. “He does this about 20 times.”
Demario stayed in a hotel that weekend, and went to Heather’s house each morning to spend time with her and her two daughters, to see how they would all interact as a family.
“We went to soccer tryouts for one of her children, we took the girls to get ice cream, we went to get pizza, we went to her family’s house so I could meet them,” he says. “We knew that a big part of our success would involve the children and her family and how comfortable they were with us being together.”
Demario, a pharmacist, flew home and began researching requirements he would have to meet to work in Arkansas. He knew he would be moving to Arkansas to be near Heather, and decided to unload all of his belongings before he left. A friend volunteered to help him price and sell his things, and find a property manager to handle the rental of his four-bedroom house.
He originally planned to lease an apartment in Arkansas and spend time getting to know Heather before they married. But in October, when he flew to Little Rock to take an exam that would allow him to practice in the state, he and Heather looked at each other and came to the same conclusion.
“Let’s get married!”
They were wed by a justice of the peace a couple of days later, on Oct. 24, 2012, two months after they met.
“It was bittersweet because he was leaving pretty soon,” Heather says. “It was exciting to finally get to be together but it was sad because we knew we were going to be apart for a little time before he would move here.”
Demario wrapped everything up in Florida and headed back to Arkansas a few weeks later. A blown transmission on his car less than two hours outside of Tampa felt like a pebble on the path to his new life. (He had the car towed to his parents’ home in Crawfordville, Fla., rented a new one and was on the road again.)
“We had already been married for a few weeks and I just wanted to be with her,” he says.
Demario is a pharmacist for Target and Heather is director of the education resource center in the College of Education at Harding University in Searcy. They spend most of their free time with Makayela, 11, Maddie, 7, and their newest daughter Micah, 2.
The iPhone may have been the tool that brought them together but Demario and Heather believe there was a much larger force at work.
“We know God did this. Things just continued to manifest themselves to show that there was a plan that was bigger than us,” Demario says. “We have a synergistic relationship where we are better Christians together than we were separately. We make each other better.”