The App Built to Help Catholic Couples Avoid a Divorce

Deacon Ryan Sales has watched the same scene play out for years: a couple gets engaged, books
the hall, announces it to both families — and only then, six to nine months out in marriage prep,
do they have their first real conversation about issues like finances, intimacy or in-laws.
“It’s the wrong time to start working through them,” he said.

Sales, a permanent deacon and campus minister at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas, built
an app last spring to move those conversations earlier — long before the ring, and long before
marriage prep. He named it Avila, for St. Teresa of Ávila, whose seminal work, Interior Castle,
describes the Christian life as the soul’s journey through progressive “mansions” toward union
with God. Dating couples undertake a parallel journey, Sales said, moving stage by stage into
unity with one another and, ideally, closer to the Lord along the way.

His hunch: that one of the most quietly devastating problems in society — the high rate of
divorce and annulment even among practicing Catholics — is downstream of something far
earlier than marriage or even the engagement. It’s poor formation, he says, in how to date and
how to discern marriage well.

“If you fully explore all the aspects of marriage that you can as a dating couple,” Sales said,
“then it becomes very clear whether or not you’re called to marriage. If you don’t know if it’s
time to get engaged yet, it’s because you don’t have enough data to make that decision.”

Finding ‘the One,’ with structure
When Tess Plaisted and Kevin Farris matched on a dating app last fall, they were both 27 and
ready to be more intentional about dating. Within five months they were doing something almost
no Catholic couple in their generation has had the chance to do: working through a structured,
spiritually grounded discernment of marriage — together, on their phones — before ever
considering engagement.

Avila is, as far as its creator knows, the first mobile app built specifically to help Catholic
couples date and discern marriage well, long before entering marriage prep.

Diagnosing dating today
After years of working with young couples in marriage preparation, Sales saw a pattern emerging
that pointed to a deeper problem. Couples would date for a year or two, get engaged, and enter
marriage prep just months before the wedding — and only then discover they had never
seriously talked about the issues that matter most.

The lack of marriage readiness, Sales noted, is a symptom of a deeper issue: poor formation in
how to date and how to discern marriage.

He blames the culture more than the couples. A generation raised on ‘situationships’ and
ill-defined dating stages has inherited no template — their parents dated in a different era,
mentorship networks have thinned, and many have grown up without seeing a healthy marriage
modeled at home. “So many of these young couples are just faking it till they make it,” he said.

Avila is designed for the period most marriage prep programs ignore: the months and years
between “we're officially dating” and “we’re engaged.” It’s meant to be used about once a week,
and it’s intentionally designed to move couples toward conversations and activities “in real life,”
not more time on their phones. Even the muted color palette, Sales said, is engineered to
discourage compulsive checking. “It’s not designed to lure them into the app and have them date
through the app — it’s designed to equip them with ideas and then send them out to date.”

Creating a ‘relationship roadmap’
The app draws from a library of 150 proprietary relationship questions, drawn from eight
industry-standard personality and character inventories that identify each person’s attachment or
conflict style, even how they approach finances. Couples get one to five questions a week,
starting at surface level and deepening over time.

“Instead of just simply providing you with the results, you get a spiritual reflection through the
lens of Catholic teaching and a roadmap for ways to address that area,” Sales said. From there,
the app generates a weekly “relationship roadmap” — a spiritual reflection grounded in
Scripture, the Catechism, or a conciliar document, paired with five concrete steps for the week.

“I’ve trained it exclusively on well-vetted Catholic sources that will only advise you to do things
consistent with the Church’s teachings,” said Sales, who holds a master’s degree in divinity and
is pursuing a doctorate in ministry leadership. Avila uses AI to generate its reflections, but he
chose what he calls an "expensive and slow" engine, prized for its fidelity to its training data.

Avila in action
For Tess and Kevin — among roughly 25 couples in Avila’s test cohort — the impact has been
less about uncovering hidden incompatibilities than about giving language and structure to things
they already half-knew. Kevin, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Dallas,
scored very low on conscientiousness; Tess scored very high.

“It was really good for us to figure that out early on,” Tess said, “because it was something we
kind of lightly knew, but that brought it to the forefront, and it was good for us to talk about in
the context of the app that is giving you prayer and thoughtful, spiritual discernment.”

“I knew I tended to avoid conflict, but reading about that through Avila with these beautiful
pairings of saint quotes and scripture made me realize, wow, this is who I am and I want to give
the best version of myself,” she said. “It gave me very detailed structure on how to take that into
prayer and present that to the Lord.”

“It was something that me and Tess had literally talked about the day before,” Kevin said, struck
by how often the app surfaced things they had just been wrestling with.

“In Catholicism, or even Christianity in general, there isn’t a guidebook on dating,” he said. “We
have the Catechism, theology of the body. We have an understanding of what is good and proper
in a Catholic marriage. But Catholic dating ... It's all kind of word of mouth. A lot of young
people in the faith want that structure.”

Toward a deeper union
Sales’ vision is bold, yet straightforward: if Catholic couples arrive at marriage prep having
already worked through the hardest conversations, they’ll have decided to marry on the basis of
real shared experience, not just warm feelings.

For Tess, the case for Avila is simpler than that. She has a close friend slogging through marriage
prep, struggling with conversations the couple should have had years earlier. “I keep telling
people,” Tess said. “Download the app. Download the app. Download the app.”

Learn more: https://www.avila-catholic.app/