How I met my partner: Mutual friends in venn diagram of Cork people led to marriage

FRANK Prendergast and Marci Cornett live together and work together, having met while she was on a one-year visa and tried long distance for a while before deciding that they wanted to make a life together.

Marci is from Kentucky, and met Frank while she was in Cork on a year’s visa to do an internship at Paradiso, she explained, telling The Echo: “I made some friends in the restaurant, and I quickly found out that if you know one group of friends in Cork, before you know it, you feel like you know everyone”.

“Frank and I have mutual friends, and I ended up sharing a house with Virgina Thomas the photographer, who is a childhood friend of Frank’s — we just kept bumping into each other, and eventually we both expressed mutual interest.”

Frank says “because of the Venn diagrams of Cork people, Marci was actually seeing a friend of mine at the time, but it all worked out”.

“We got together, then Marci’s year’s visa was up, so we did some long distance, we did some trips to each other, and we realised that actually we want to be together, so the best way to do that was to get married,” he continued.

“It was a mutual discussion, but I then did actually propose as well,” he said. “I proposed with a ring that’s been in my family for generations that my mum gave to me.”

Marci said: “There was a little bit of surprise when he did propose, because it was one of those things we’d been talking about so long but hadn’t made a decision.”

Romance

Frank explained: “For us, the romance centred around the fact that we wanted to be together and how we live our lives together, but neither of us were traditional in being caught up in any of the trappings of a marriage and the traditions.”

They married in 2015 in Lexington, Kentucky, a small wedding at the courthouse which Marci’s parents and younger sister and a friend of Frank’s from Cork who lived in Canada attended.

“She flew down and spent the weekend with us, it was a lovely wedding day — very relaxed, we got married, then went for coffee and went for dinner that night,” Marci said.

Frank added: “We’re both off coffee now, but at the time, we were massive coffee snobs — it was a very important part of our lives so it was perfect for us to go get married then have a coffee.”

When Marci returned to Cork in April 2016, they had a big party with all of their friends and family there.

Now, the couple split their time between Cork and Kentucky.

“We were mostly living in Cork and making trips to Kentucky, then the lockdown happened and it caused a big shift — it was quite scary in the very early days, we were so used to popping over and back.

“Suddenly that was taken away and it made us very conscious of not just wanting to go back and forth, so since lockdown, we’re focusing a lot more on splitting our time between the two locations.”

Marketing business

The couple not only live together, but work together, and explained how they came to set up their marketing business.

Frank was working for himself as a marketer, primarily as a web designer, and Marci was in the food industry, but they liked to find projects they could do together, then they decided to make it full-time.

He said: “Marci will tell you that she had the brilliant idea of coupling my marketing business with her writing, I’ll tell you that I had the idea of inviting Marci’s brilliant writing skills into the business — one of us had the genius idea of teaming up.”

They do primarily do digital marketing, with Frank on the brand strategy and design side and Marci copywriting, for primarily Irish clients but some of their clients are US-based.

“I think during lockdown, we’d be chatting to clients and they’d realise that we work together and live together and people would be like ‘wow, how do you not kill each other?’ but it just never crossed our minds that it might be an issue — we live in each other’s pockets and that suits us,” he said, adding that equally, they might do months apart when Marci might take a trip home without him.

Marci added, “I know what life is like without Frank, so the time apart really makes me appreciate the time we have together.”