CALIFORNIA (KSBW) -- Months after making national headlines for advertising her search for a husband on Bay Area billboards, a Salinas native says her story has reached a happy new chapter: she has found love.
Lisa Catalano, a Salinas High School graduate who drew attention in the fall for promoting her dating website, marrylisa.com, on billboards from San Francisco to Santa Clara, recently shared that the effort ultimately helped lead her to the relationship she had been hoping to find.
While she did not meet her boyfriend directly through the billboard campaign or through an application on her website, Catalano said the entire experience played an important role in getting her there.
“I don’t feel like any of it was a waste of time or effort or resources,” Catalano said in an interview with KSBW 8. “All paths led me to where I am now.”
Catalano, 42, launched the campaign after growing frustrated with dating apps and wanting a more intentional path toward marriage and family.
Her website laid out her values, goals and non-negotiables, serving as a deeper filter for compatibility than traditional dating profiles.
Catalano said she received roughly 4,000 applications between September 2025 and May 2026, with 3,221 deemed genuine.
She said many of the responses came from men outside her area or from people who did not meet the basic qualities she was seeking in a partner.
She contacted 20 local men and went on first dates with five of them.
At the same time, Catalano continued using dating apps, often directing matches to her website to help assess compatibility early on.
In January, she matched with a man on a dating app who had also seen one of her billboards. That connection eventually turned into a relationship.
Catalano said the two went on 19 dates over three and a half months before becoming exclusive.
In June she announced on her website that she is now in a relationship with a Bay Area man she described as kind, intelligent, and aligned with the values most important to her.
She said he meets the standards she had been seeking all along, including shared views on marriage, family, lifestyle, religion and politics.
Catalano also revealed more details about the cost of her widely discussed campaign. She said the billboards themselves cost about US$967, while the website and taxi-top ads in San Francisco brought the subtotal to about $1,980.
After adding follow-up expenses tied to the attention the campaign received — including wardrobe, makeup and increased security — her total spending came to $4,746.
Despite public speculation that the campaign may have cost tens of thousands of dollars, Catalano said she was strategic in choosing billboard locations and ad timing to stay within budget.
She said she started the process without ever imagining the amount of attention it would receive. Some people speculated that she was doing it for attention or fame, while others supported her. She also faced nasty and hateful comments directed at her efforts. Some even accused her of being AI.
She said she had tried all the traditional approaches, including meeting people in public and using dating apps, but none of them were working, and she was not finding dates.
She even said she turned down offers for Bachelorette-type shows in an effort not to muddy her real goal of finding love.
“I wasn’t getting dates, and I really wanted to find love, get married and have all of that,” she said. “I was like, ‘Okay, my current trajectory on things is not working. How am I going to make this work?’ I had to change something, so I decided to go big on it. And, you know, I didn’t meet my boyfriend off of the website or billboards, but I think the whole combination of everything that happened led me to where I am now.”
She also said she would not necessarily recommend billboards as the answer for everyone, but she does believe in finding creative solutions when something in life is not working.
“I don’t know if I would necessarily recommend going the billboard route per se, but I think that with anything in life, if you have a problem, it can be beneficial to try to think about creative solutions to the problem,” she said. “And that’s essentially what I did in this situation.”
Now, Catalano says she is simply grateful the story ended the way it did.
For a woman who once put her love life on Highway 101, the road appears to have led exactly where she hoped.
She said that despite the costs and effort, she does not regret what she did because it led her to where she is today.
She said she is very optimistic about her future with her new boyfriend and that they are both very happy right now. She would not disclose much about him other than to say he is a 35-year-old Bay Area man who is not bothered by her website or the media attention she has garnered.
She said she is trying to keep details about her relationship private, but added that they have spoken about a future together.
“He’s just way better than I thought I could even find in one person,” she said. “So I’m very lucky. I’m very happy. And he feels the same way about me.”
By Ricardo Tovar.
