Blog Series: Building Game of Love — An AI-Powered Catholic Dating & Marriage Discernment Platform

A 3-part series by Michael Palitto, CTO & Co-Founder, Finding Adam Finding Eve Ministry

Blog Post 1: “From Kitchen Table Ministry to AI-Powered Platform — How a Husband-Wife Team Built the Future of Catholic Dating with Vibe Coding”

Target audience: Tech-curious founders, Catholic entrepreneurs, AI enthusiasts, ministry leaders Hook: A husband-wife team with zero venture funding built a full-stack AI platform — a next-generation remote marriage preparation system — that bridges online tools with in-person community, giving singles and couples 24/7 Catholic dating coaching. And the codebase itself was built with AI.

Draft

There’s a moment every ministry leader dreads. My wife Katie — M.A. in psychology from Divine Mercy University, certified life coach, certified prayer companion, over ten years mentoring young adults through the chaos of modern dating — was staring at a whiteboard covered in her frameworks. Temperament pairings. Attachment wound patterns. The virtues she kept circling back to in every pre-engagement session. “I can only meet with so many people,” she said. “And they need this at 11 PM on a Tuesday, not at our next appointment.”

That’s the sentence that launched Game of Love.

The Problem We Couldn’t Ignore

Katie had spent years sitting across from couples and singles, walking them through the hard questions: Do you know yourself well enough to give yourself to another person? Can you name your wounds? Have you confused emotional intensity for authentic love? She’d built her own synthesis — a rigorous framework called the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (CCMMP) — that integrates three disciplines most people treat as separate worlds: empirical psychology, Christian philosophy, and Catholic theology. It sees the human person through eleven dimensions — from our created goodness to our fallen wounds to our redeemed potential, from our emotional and rational capacities to our vocation and freedom.

This isn’t pop psychology with a prayer tacked on. The CCMMP is the intellectual backbone of everything we build. When Katie assesses someone’s attachment style, she’s not just applying Bowlby. She’s reading that attachment pattern through the lens of our fallen and redeemed nature — seeing the wound and the path to healing simultaneously. When she evaluates a couple’s readiness for marriage, she’s not running a compatibility quiz. She’s examining whether two people have the virtue, freedom, and self-possession to make a total gift of self.

It worked. Couples who went through her process went into engagement with eyes open. But ministry doesn’t scale the way a SaaS product does. Katie could see maybe 10-15 people a week. The waitlist grew. The need was massive.

Enter Vibe Coding

I’m not a software engineer by training. I’m a technologist in particular a cybersecurity architect who can learn fast and build faster. When Claude and other AI coding assistants matured in 2024, I saw the opportunity: What if I could build a production-grade platform — not a prototype, not a toy — using AI as my pair programmer?

That’s exactly what we did. The entire Game of Love codebase — a Next.js frontend, a FastAPI backend deployed on Railway, a Weaviate vector database holding nearly 12,000 chunks of Catholic teaching — was built through what’s now called “vibe coding.” AI didn’t replace engineering judgment. It amplified it. I architected the systems, made the design decisions, debugged the hairy problems. Claude wrote the code at the speed of conversation.

The numbers tell the story:

• 410+ assessment questions across five comprehensive assessments, each grounded in CCMMP dimensions with Church teaching citations
• 500+ AI-generated quiz questions spanning 11 Catholic knowledge categories at 5 difficulty tiers
• ~1,600 lines of prompt engineering that give our AI coach “Katie” her voice, her judgment, her pastoral sensitivity
• A RAG knowledge base with 11,918 indexed chunks from the Catechism, Theology of the Body, the Summa Theologiae, Canon Law, papal encyclicals, the CCMMP itself, and Katie’s own ministry content
• 358 metro areas covered by our Sunday Group Date meetup system
• A dating discernment toolkit (Post-Date Assessment + My Date) that walks users from first dates through relationship decisions

The whole stack — frontend, backend, AI orchestration, vector database, payment system, gamification engine — is managed by one person. Me. With AI.

Why Vibe Coding Works for Ministry

Here’s what the tech world doesn’t always understand about building for a mission-driven audience: your users need to trust you deeply, and your content needs to be theologically precise. One sloppy prompt, one poorly framed assessment question, one off-hand AI response that contradicts Church teaching — and you’ve lost credibility you can never get back.

This is exactly why the CCMMP matters so much to what we’ve built. Public AI models — ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever comes next — will happily give dating advice. But they have no anthropological framework. They don’t know that the human person is a body-soul unity ordered toward self-gift. They can’t distinguish between emotional attachment and authentic love. They’ll optimize for your feelings when what you need is virtue.

Katie’s CCMMP gives our AI something no public model has: a coherent, integrated vision of who the human person is and what they’re made for. Every prompt, every assessment, every coaching response flows from that vision. That’s what makes Game of Love fundamentally different from asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.

Vibe coding gave me the velocity to build fast and the oversight to build carefully. Every AI-generated code block got reviewed through the lens of: Does this serve Katie’s pastoral vision? Does this respect the dignity of the person? Is this theologically sound?

More Than an App: A Next-Generation Remote Marriage Preparation Platform

Game of Love isn’t a dating app. It’s not one feature. It’s a next-generation remote marriage preparation platform that bridges the digital and the physical — because the mystery of love ultimately unfolds in person.

Here’s what’s inside:

• KNOW — A flagship self-discovery assessment combining four psychological frameworks (temperament, love languages, attachment style, cardinal virtues) into a unified “Catholic Relationship Profile” synthesized by AI through the CCMMP lens
• READY — A 115+ question readiness assessment for singles that surfaces hidden blockers — unresolved wounds, spiritual immaturity, impediments to freedom — with Katie AI providing personalized growth guidance
• GIFT — A 140-question couples pre-engagement assessment with real-time red flag detection, formation opportunity flagging, and a generated PDF workbook for facilitated conversations with your priest or mentor couple
• Post-Date Assessment (PDA) — A structured reflection tool for evaluating individual dates: Were virtues present? Did you feel safe? Was faith evident? Were boundaries respected? Katie AI analyzes each date and detects patterns across multiple dates with the same person — tracking whether curiosity deepens, red flags persist, or green flags grow
• My Date — For exclusive relationships, an ongoing discernment dashboard with periodic check-ins that track trust, communication, faith life, and safety over time. The system maintains full relationship history and — when you’re ready — connects your PDA history to your ongoing relationship analysis
• GROW — An AI-powered Catholic learning platform with 500+ questions across 11 knowledge categories, from Scripture to Sacraments, using Bloom’s taxonomy for cognitive difficulty progression
• Katie AI — A 24/7 AI dating coach grounded in the CCMMP and Catholic wisdom, drawing from the RAG knowledge base to give real-time guidance
• Sunday Group Date — Free post-Mass meetups for Catholic singles in 358 metro areas across the United States, with a featured parish in each metro selected for young adult friendliness. Enter your zip code, find your parish, RSVP, show up after Mass on the first Sunday. That simple.
• Live Coaching — Because AI extends ministry but doesn’t replace it. Users can book a complimentary 30-minute consultation with Katie directly — a real, certified Catholic dating coach. Dating coaching, life coaching, couples coaching, or deep-dive sessions on assessment results. In person in Kansas City or virtual anywhere.

That last point matters more than any technology we’ve built. Game of Love gives users access to a real certified dating coach anytime they need one. The platform isn’t a replacement for human relationship — it’s the bridge that connects the digital tools to the physical encounter where grace actually moves.

What Comes Next

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll go deep into how we built Katie AI — the coaching engine at the heart of Game of Love — and how the CCMMP framework makes her responses categorically different from any public AI model. And in Part 3, we’ll talk about our ThinkTank content system, the GROW learning platform, and how two people and an AI power workshops, a blog, and a nationwide community of Catholic singles.

But the headline is this: a husband-wife team built a platform that gives the Catholic dating world something it’s never had — an always-available, theologically grounded, psychologically rigorous companion for the journey toward marriage. Not just online. From screen to parish hall. From AI coaching to a real conversation with Katie over coffee.

Katie still meets with people one-on-one. She always will. But now, at 11 PM on a Tuesday, when someone is sitting in their car after a bad date wondering if something is wrong with them — Katie is there too. And on the first Sunday of the month, a parish in their city is waiting for them to walk through the door.

Blog Post 2: “Teaching an AI to Think Like a Catholic — The CCMMP, Katie AI, and Why Architecture Beats Training”

Target audience: Catholics curious about AI in ministry, relationship coaches, theology/psychology integration enthusiasts, marriage prep leaders Hook: How do you give an AI the pastoral sensitivity of a seasoned Catholic mentor? You don’t train it. You architect it — starting with a framework that sees the whole human person, not just behaviors and feelings.

Draft

When people hear that Game of Love has an AI dating coach, they usually ask one of two questions. The secular crowd asks: “How is this different from ChatGPT?” The Catholic crowd asks: “How do you keep it from saying something heretical?”

Both questions have the same answer: the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person.

Why Public AI Models Fail at Relationship Guidance

Let me be direct about something. You can go to ChatGPT right now and ask for dating advice. It’ll give you something. It might even sound reasonable. But here’s what it can’t do:

It can’t see you as a body-soul unity. It doesn’t know that your attachment wound isn’t just a psychological pattern — it’s a dimension of your fallen nature that redemption is actively healing. It can’t tell you that your desire for love isn’t just an emotion to manage but a sign of your created goodness, your being made in the image of a God who is love. It will optimize for your comfort when what you need is the virtue of fortitude. It will affirm your feelings when what you need is the truth about self-gift.

Public AI models have no anthropology. They have pattern recognition. And pattern recognition without a vision of the human person is dangerous when someone’s heart is on the line.

The CCMMP: Seeing the Whole Person

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person is what makes everything we build different. Developed as a comprehensive framework for understanding the human person, it integrates three disciplines:

1. Theological — Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium’s teaching on who we are
2. Philosophical — Human experience, reason, and the Christian philosophical tradition
3. Psychological — Empirical psychological science and its genuine insights into human behavior

The CCMMP sees every person through eleven dimensions organized around a redemptive narrative:

The Story We’re All Living:

• Created — You are inherently good, dignified, valuable. Made in the image of God.
• Fallen — You carry disorders, wounds, and the effects of sin — your own and others'.
• Redeemed — Healing is real. Meaning is available. Flourishing is the invitation.

The Capacities That Make You Human:

• Personal Unity — You are a body-soul whole with a unique, unrepeatable identity
• Fulfilled Through Vocation — Your life has a specific calling: a state of life, a form of service
• Fulfilled in Virtue — Your character is meant to grow. Virtue isn’t restriction; it’s freedom
• Interpersonally Relational — You were formed by relationships and made for communion
• Sensory, Emotional, Rational, Volitional — You perceive, feel, think, and choose — and each capacity has its own logic and its own wounds

When Katie sits across from someone in her coaching office, she sees all eleven dimensions simultaneously. She doesn’t just hear “I keep dating emotionally unavailable people.” She hears: interpersonal relationality shaped by family of origin (fallen dimension), attachment patterns revealing a wound in the capacity for communion, fortitude and self-possession needing formation (virtue dimension), and a vocation to marriage that requires authentic freedom (volitional dimension).

That’s what we encoded into Katie AI. Not a personality. A vision of the person.

The Foundation: 12,000 Chunks of Catholic Wisdom

Before Katie AI can coach anyone, she needs access to the sources. Not summaries. Not paraphrases. The actual texts.

We built FAFE-RAG — a Retrieval-Augmented Generation system powered by a Weaviate vector database. We indexed nearly 12,000 chunks across:

• The complete Catechism of the Catholic Church — 2,865 paragraphs
• Theology of the Body — John Paul II’s revolutionary vision of the human person and sexuality
• The Summa Theologiae — Aquinas on virtue, the passions, and the moral life
• The CCMMP itself — all 26 chapters, indexed and searchable, so Katie AI can retrieve the specific framework dimensions relevant to a user’s situation
• Papal encyclicals — Humanae Vitae, Familiaris Consortio, Deus Caritas Est
• Canon Law — the Church’s legal framework for marriage
• Vatican II documents — the Council’s vision for the laity and family
• Katie’s own ministry content — blog posts, workshop teachings, practical dating advice

Each chunk is embedded as a 1,536-dimension vector, tagged with source metadata, topic labels, and citation information. When a user asks Katie about whether it’s okay to date a non-Catholic, she doesn’t generate an answer from vague training data. She retrieves the specific relevant passages — Canon 1086 on disparity of cult, CCC 1633-1637 on mixed marriages, the CCMMP chapter on interpersonal relationality, Katie’s own blog post on interfaith dating — and synthesizes a response grounded in those sources.

The Intelligence Layer: Different Models for Different Moments

Not every AI task needs the same brain. We built a tiered intelligence system:

• Claude Opus handles the heavy lifting — the comprehensive KNOW profile that synthesizes four psychological frameworks into a unified portrait through the CCMMP lens. This requires the kind of nuanced reasoning that only the most capable models can deliver.
• Claude Sonnet powers the sub-assessments, GROW question generation, and targeted coaching responses — fast enough for real-time interaction, smart enough for theological precision.
• Llama (via Together.ai) serves as our fallback — ensuring users always get a response, even during provider downtime.

This isn’t just cost optimization. It’s pastoral design. When someone completes their entire KNOW profile and the system synthesizes temperament, love languages, attachment style, and virtue into a personalized Catholic Relationship Profile, that moment deserves the best reasoning available. They’re seeing themselves through the integrated lens of the CCMMP — maybe for the first time. We give that moment Opus-level attention.

The Assessments: CCMMP in Action

Each assessment maps to specific CCMMP dimensions:

KNOW — “Who Am I?” The flagship self-discovery assessment combines four frameworks:

1. Temperament → CCMMP dimensions: Personal Unity + Emotional capacity. Your temperament is God’s design — not a flaw to fix but a gift to steward.
2. Love Languages → CCMMP dimension: Interpersonal Relationality. How you give and receive love connects directly to the Catholic understanding of self-gift.
3. Attachment Style → CCMMP dimensions: Fallen + Redeemed. Your attachment wounds reveal where healing is needed — and redemption is the path, not just therapy.
4. MATRIX Virtue Assessment → CCMMP dimensions: Fulfilled in Virtue + Rational + Volitional. The four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance) mapped against your actual life patterns.

Katie AI synthesizes all four into a unified portrait — not parallel summaries, but genuine integration. She might notice that a melancholic temperament combined with anxious attachment and low fortitude creates a specific pattern: someone who overthinks relationships, struggles to speak up, and stays too long in situations that don’t serve them. Then she connects that to the CCMMP’s vision of volitional freedom and authentic self-gift, offering practical steps.

READY — “Am I Free Enough to Love?” 115+ questions across eight dimensions of readiness, severity-flagged at three levels: critical, caution, and to-work-on. When someone reveals a struggle with pornography, unresolved family wounds, or spiritual stagnation, Katie AI doesn’t just flag it. She provides growth guidance that sees the wound through the CCMMP’s Created-Fallen-Redeemed narrative — acknowledging the pain, naming the disorder, and pointing toward concrete healing.

GIFT — “Are We Ready for Each Other?” 140 questions for couples considering engagement. Red flag detection for critical misalignments. Formation opportunity flagging when both partners are undecided on a Church teaching — because that’s not a red flag, it’s an invitation to learn together. The output is a PDF workbook designed for real conversations with a priest, mentor couple, or certified coach.

The Dating Discernment Toolkit

This is where Game of Love does something no other Catholic platform offers: active dating accompaniment.

Post-Date Assessment (PDA) — After every date, users complete a structured reflection. Not “rate this person 1-10.” Real discernment questions: Were virtues present — patience, kindness, honesty, generosity? Did you feel relaxed or tense? Was faith evident? Were your boundaries respected? Did you feel heard? On a scale of 1-10, how curious were you to learn more about this person?

Katie AI analyzes each assessment individually, but the real power is pattern detection across dates. The system auto-numbers dates with the same person and tracks trends: Is curiosity deepening or flattening? Are the same red flags appearing on date three that appeared on date one? Are green flags growing? Katie pulls from the user’s KNOW profile to personalize her analysis — she knows your attachment style, your temperament, your virtue scores. She’s not giving generic advice. She’s coaching you about this person.

My Date — When a relationship becomes exclusive, users graduate from PDA into My Date — an ongoing relationship dashboard. Periodic check-ins track the things that matter: Do you feel heard? Do you share a good faith life? Do you trust them? Do you always feel safe?

The system maintains full relationship history — including how the couple met, previous check-ins, and even the PDA history from when they were first dating. If a user had five post-date assessments with this person before going exclusive, all of that context flows into Katie’s ongoing analysis. She can see the full arc.

And when a relationship ends, the system captures why — green flags, red flags, duration, lessons learned. So the next time that user starts dating someone new, Katie has context. She can notice patterns across relationships, not just within one.

The Guard Rails: Keeping Katie Catholic

• Off-topic detection: Katie warmly redirects conversations outside her expertise
• Sensitive topic handling: Same-sex attraction, divorce, contraception — Katie addresses these with the compassion and clarity of the Church, pulling from specific Catechism paragraphs
• Prompt injection protection: Yes, people try to jailbreak Catholic AI coaches. Our system detects and refuses
• Content safety scoring: Every response evaluated before delivery

The Bridge to the Real

Here’s what matters most: Katie AI is not the endpoint. She’s the bridge.

Every assessment, every PDA, every coaching conversation is designed to move users toward real human encounter. The GIFT workbook goes to a real priest. The READY growth plan gets discussed with a real spiritual director. And any user, at any time, can book a complimentary 30-minute consultation with the real Katie — a certified Catholic dating coach who will sit across from them (in Kansas City or on video) and do what no AI ever can: be fully present to another human person.

That’s the CCMMP in practice. We are interpersonally relational beings, made for communion. Technology serves that communion. It never replaces it.

Blog Post 3: “The Engine Behind the Ministry — ThinkTank, GROW, Sunday Group Date, and How Two People Power a Nationwide Catholic Dating Movement”

Target audience: Ministry leaders, content creators, Catholic entrepreneurs, parish leaders, ed-tech enthusiasts Hook: The platform users see is just the tip. Underneath, an AI content engine, a learning platform, a nationwide meetup network, and a live coaching practice all work together — managed by two people and an AI.

Draft

Here’s something people don’t think about when they see a Catholic ministry with a polished app, an active blog, regular workshops, and events in 358 cities: someone has to build all of that. And keep it running. And create fresh content. And respond to users. And manage the tech. And market it.

For most ministries, that means either a team they can’t afford or burnout they can’t sustain. We chose a third option: we built an AI-powered engine that multiplies everything we do, and we designed a platform that bridges the online tools people use at 11 PM with the physical community they need on Sunday morning.

The Philosophy: Online to In-Person

Let’s start with the big idea, because it shapes everything.

Game of Love is not an app. It’s not a website. It’s a next-generation remote marriage preparation platform that exists to move people from screen to sacrament.

The online tools — assessments, AI coaching, learning quizzes, dating discernment — meet people where they are: on their phones, late at night, between appointments, during lunch breaks. They provide formation, self-knowledge, and accompaniment at scale.

But the mystery of love unfolds in person. In a parish. Across a table. In the presence of another human being who sees you and chooses you. Our platform is designed with that truth at its center.

That’s why every tool in Game of Love points toward physical encounter:

• GIFT generates a PDF workbook designed to be brought to a real priest or mentor couple
• READY’s growth guidance recommends real spiritual directors and counselors
• Katie AI’s coaching consistently points users toward booking a session with the real Katie
• And Sunday Group Date puts a real parish in your city on the first Sunday of every month

The technology is the on-ramp. The encounter is the destination.

Sunday Group Date: 358 Parishes, One Simple Idea

This might be the simplest and most powerful feature in the entire platform.

Catholic singles struggle to meet each other. Parish communities skew older. Young adult groups are hit-or-miss. Dating apps feel antithetical to what they’re looking for. And there’s a fundamental problem no one talks about: if you’re a faithful Catholic in, say, Topeka, Kansas — where do you even go to meet other faithful Catholic singles?

Sunday Group Date answers that question for 358 metropolitan areas across the United States.

Here’s how it works: Enter your zip code. The system finds your nearest metro area and shows you one featured Catholic parish — carefully selected for young adult friendliness — with Mass times and a meetup time. Show up on the first Sunday of the month. Go to Mass. Meet people afterward. That’s it.

The parish selection isn’t random. We built a scoring algorithm that analyzes census demographics (young adult population, education levels), prioritizes parishes in city centers over suburbs, gives bonus weight to Newman Centers and campus ministries (14 metros feature Newman Centers as the primary parish), and prefers late-morning Mass times that are social-friendly. The result: every metro has a thoughtfully chosen gathering point.

We cover 358 of 377 US metropolitan statistical areas — that’s 98% of the urban population. From New York to rural Kansas. Each with a featured parish, Mass time, and RSVP system.

No algorithm. No swiping. No profile photos. Just Mass, and the people who show up.

ThinkTank: The Brain Behind the Content

Now let’s talk about how two people keep the content engine running.

ThinkTank started as a simple idea: what if the same Catholic knowledge base that powers Katie AI could also help us create content?

Our FAFE-RAG system already held nearly 12,000 chunks of indexed Catholic teaching — from the Catechism to papal encyclicals to the CCMMP chapters to Katie’s own coaching insights. That knowledge base wasn’t just useful for answering user questions in real time. It was a goldmine for content creation.

ThinkTank connects to our RAG system via a secure service-to-service API. When Katie identifies a pattern in her coaching — “I keep seeing couples who can’t talk about money” — ThinkTank queries the knowledge base for relevant theological foundations. What does the Catechism say about material goods and marriage? What did John Paul II write about shared responsibility in Familiaris Consortio? What does the CCMMP say about the volitional dimension and financial decision-making? What has Katie written about this before?

The workflow creates a virtuous cycle:

1. Katie identifies a topic from her coaching sessions — a pattern, a recurring question
2. ThinkTank searches across our indexed Catholic sources for relevant teaching
3. We draft content that weaves Katie’s practical coaching wisdom with the theological foundations ThinkTank surfaces
4. The finished content gets published on blog.gameof.love
5. Published content gets ingested back into the RAG system — parsed into sections, chunked, embedded, tagged with topic labels from 17+ categories
6. Katie AI becomes smarter for the next user who asks about that topic

Ministry experience generates content. Content feeds the knowledge base. The knowledge base improves AI coaching. Better coaching generates more insight. More insight generates more content.

This same engine powers our workshops. When Katie builds a workshop on attachment wounds through the lens of the Theology of the Body, ThinkTank pulls every relevant indexed passage — TOB audiences on self-gift, Catechism paragraphs on the person-as-made-for-relationship, CCMMP chapters on interpersonal relationality, Katie’s blog content on attachment in Catholic dating. The workshop material then gets documented and ingested back into the RAG system. Another turn of the cycle.

Our blog at blog.gameof.love isn’t a side project. It’s a living extension of the knowledge base — every article enriching the AI that coaches users who might never read the blog itself.

GROW: Formation Through Play

If ThinkTank is how we create content, GROW is how we deliver formation directly to users — and it might be the most quietly revolutionary feature in the platform.

GROW is an AI-powered Catholic learning system spanning 11 categories: Scripture, Theology, Sacraments, Moral Life & Virtue, Prayer & Spiritual Life, Church History, Social Teaching, Saints & Holy People, Liturgy & Worship, Marriage & Family, and Evangelization & Mission.

Each category has five difficulty tiers designed using Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive learning:

1. Seeker — Recall and recognition
2. Student — Understanding and explanation
3. Disciple — Application to real life situations
4. Teacher — Analysis and synthesis across sources
5. Master — Evaluation, creation, and integrated theological reasoning

The questions are generated by AI grounded in RAG context from our Catholic knowledge base. Each question gets four options with carefully crafted distractors — wrong answers plausible enough to require real understanding, not just elimination. Users earn XP (10-50 points depending on difficulty), score 70%+ to unlock the next tier, and progress through 30+ badges themed around Catholic virtues.

But the genius of GROW isn’t the quizzes. It’s the formation architecture underneath.

Gamification That Forms

We didn’t gamify a quiz app. We designed a digital rule of life:

• Daily goals: Three GROW questions and a Scripture reading — a digital “plan of life” central to Catholic spiritual formation
• Weekly virtue challenges: 52 rotating challenges aligned with virtues — Faith Formation Week, Charity Week, Hope & Trust Week. Each focuses on targeted GROW content
• Streak system with a grace mechanic: Miss a day? If you’ve been active 6 of the last 7 days, your streak survives. Mercy is part of the design.
• Badge names that teach: “Crown of Charity” (all assessments completed), “Eternal Flame” (365-day streak), “Guardian of Virtue” (MATRIX completed). Every badge name is drawn from Catholic tradition.
• Milestone bonuses: Recognition at 3, 7, 14, 21, 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days — because formation is measured in faithfulness, not intensity

The whole system drives users toward the same outcome as everything else in the platform: deeper knowledge of self, deeper knowledge of the faith, and deeper capacity for authentic love.

The Coaching Bridge: Where Digital Meets Human

Here’s where everything converges.

A user takes the KNOW assessment and discovers they have an anxious attachment style with low fortitude. Katie AI provides a comprehensive Catholic Relationship Profile and recommends growth areas. The user starts working through GROW quizzes on virtue and spiritual life. They join their local Sunday Group Date and start meeting people. They go on a few dates and use the Post-Date Assessment to reflect with Katie AI’s help. Things get serious. They move to My Date for ongoing relationship check-ins.

At any point in that journey — and users are explicitly encouraged to do this — they can book a session with the real Katie. A complimentary 30-minute initial consultation. Dating coaching, life coaching, couples coaching, or a deep-dive session on their assessment results. In person in Kansas City or virtual nationally.

Katie — the real Katie — then has context. She can see the user’s assessment results, their growth areas, their learning progress. The platform didn’t replace the coaching relationship. It prepared for it. It made the first real conversation deeper, more focused, and more productive than it could have been if the user had walked in cold.

This is what we mean when we say Game of Love is a next-generation remote marriage preparation platform. It’s not remote instead of in-person. It’s remote leading to in-person. The AI coaching, the assessments, the learning platform — they’re all building toward the moment when two human beings sit across from each other, fully known and freely choosing.

The Numbers Behind the Mission

What two people and an AI have built:

• 11,918 chunks of indexed Catholic teaching across 10+ source categories including the full CCMMP
• 500+ quiz questions across 11 knowledge categories and 5 Bloom’s taxonomy difficulty tiers
• 410+ assessment questions across KNOW, READY, GIFT, MATRIX, and PDA
• 5 comprehensive AI-powered assessments each grounded in the CCMMP framework
• 2 active dating discernment tools (PDA + My Date) with cross-date pattern detection
• 358 metro areas with featured Catholic parishes for Sunday Group Date
• 30+ gamification badges with complete XP, leveling, and streak systems
• 52 weekly virtue challenges rotating through the year
• A full content pipeline from coaching insight to blog publication to RAG ingestion
• ThinkTank powering workshops, blog content, and the knowledge feedback loop
• 24/7 AI coaching backed by the largest Catholic relationship knowledge base we’re aware of
• Live coaching access — any user can book a session with a real certified Catholic dating coach
• Subscription tiers from free access through premium, with Stripe integration

All of this — the platform, the content engine, the knowledge base, the AI coaching, the parish network, the live coaching practice — is managed by me on the technical side and Katie on the content and coaching side. Two people. One mission.

What This Means for the Church

We’re not sharing this to showcase technology. We’re sharing it because we believe this model — AI extending the reach of real pastoral wisdom, digital tools bridging to physical community, formation at scale leading to encounter in person — is the future of Catholic ministry.

The Church is full of brilliant pastoral minds like Katie. People with deep formation, years of experience, and genuine charisms. What they don’t have is a way to scale their reach beyond their personal calendar.

AI doesn’t replace the human encounter. Katie will always meet with people one-on-one. The sacraments can’t be automated. Discernment requires real relationship. The grace that heals attachment wounds flows through the Eucharist, through Confession, through the presence of another person who sees you as God sees you.

But the space between appointments? The Tuesday night panic? The couple who needs to have the hard conversations but can’t afford a marriage prep program? The 22-year-old who wants to understand her faith but doesn’t know where to start? The single Catholic in Topeka who has no idea where to find community?

That’s where the platform meets them. And then it walks them — through assessments, through learning, through coaching, through a parish door on Sunday morning — toward the encounter that changes everything.

That’s what Game of Love is. That’s what two people with a kitchen table, a mission, and an AI built together.

Come find us at gameof.love. Katie — both of her — will be waiting.

Series Summary

Key Themes Threaded Across All Three Posts

1. CCMMP as differentiator — Not pop psychology with prayer. A rigorous 3-discipline, 11-dimension framework that makes every feature categorically different from public AI
2. Online → In-person bridge — Every digital tool points toward physical encounter: parish, coaching office, sacrament
3. Real coach access — Users can always reach a certified Catholic dating coach (Katie), not just an AI
4. PDA + My Date — Active dating accompaniment from first date through relationship discernment
5. Sunday Group Date — 358 metros, real parishes, no swiping — community the old-fashioned way
6. Next-gen remote marriage prep — Not remote instead of in-person, but remote leading to in-person
7. Two people + AI — The vibe-coded ministry model as inspiration for other Catholic leaders

Suggested Publication Strategy

• Platform: blog.gameof.love + LinkedIn (Michael’s profile) + Catholic tech communities + parish bulletins
• Timing: Space 5-7 days apart to build momentum
• Cross-promotion: Each post ends with a teaser for the next
• CTAs:
  • Post 1 → “Explore Game of Love at gameof.love” + “Book a free consultation with Katie”
  • Post 2 → “Take your KNOW assessment” + “Try the Post-Date Assessment after your next date”
  • Post 3 → “Find your Sunday Group Date parish” + “Start learning with GROW”
• Supplementary: Short video walkthrough of the platform to accompany Post 1; Katie video intro for Post 2
• Parish outreach: Post 3’s Sunday Group Date content is perfect for sharing with parish young adult coordinators