Who knew sliding into Instagram DMs could lead to love? Maybe it’s the luck of the Irish.

DALLAS — Theresa Rowley’s mom was not on board. At least not at first. 

The actress and online comedienne was — admittedly — about to take a leap of faith and fly from Dallas to Dublin, Ireland, to spend a week with a man she’d never met who slid into her DMs a few months before. 

“I thought, ‘You know what? I’ve got some time, I’ve got a little bit of money, I’ll head over to Ireland and see what this guy is about,'” she said. 

That guy is Seán Rooney, who lives about an hour and a half west of Dublin, and in fairness to Rowley, it’s not like she didn’t know him. They’d spent hours texting and talking on FaceTime. 

“Theresa wrote back to me, but she kept me at arm’s length for a little bit,” Rooney recounted. “We just started chatting more and more frequently and started FaceTiming, and then it became like ‘What if we do want to meet up?'” 

After all, they seemed to click. 

“We have the same anxious sense of humor,” she said. “He seems to understand my idiosyncrasies in a way that people haven’t in the past, and so it’s just a very nice, comforting, safe relationship for me.” 

Rooney put her mom’s worries at ease with a three-way FaceTime call (his Irish brogue may have helped) — and Rowley hopped on a flight across the ocean for a week-long first date. 


“I don’t know that I should be recommending this to people,” she said. “But it worked out for me.” 

The whirlwind week went well, and Rowley visited again after the videos she made, chronicling their cross-continental love story on social media, caught the attention of the Irish tourism officials. 

“He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s fun to talk to. We just mesh,” she said.

Rooney feels the same; he came to visit Texas over Thanksgiving, spent the holiday with Rowley’s family and accompanied her to her cousin’s wedding. 


“I think once we open ourselves up a little bit to that, then the universe rewards us,” Rowley said. “It feels extraordinary to me.”