'Marry Lisa': Bay Area bachelorette puts up billboards in quest to find a husband

OAKLAND, Calif. - Lisa Catalano is taking a rather unconventional avenue as she hopes to look for love in all the right places.

The 42-year-old Bay Area woman this month put up billboards along Highway 101 stretching from Santa Clara to South San Francisco as part of her campaign to find her future husband.

The billboards have a photo of the smiling brunette with the words "MarryLisa.com," and the objective of this campaign is just that — to find love and get married. 

Potential suitors or folks who are just curious about this woman can check out her website, which she carefully curated to include details about herself, endorsements from friends and family, specifics on what she’s looking for in "Mr. Right," and an application to fill out, though she urged possible candidates to first check and see if the two would be compatible.

"I really can't stress this enough that the men who are filling out these applications should maybe read first a little bit about me and not just go off of the photo and the fact I'm looking for a husband," Catalano shared with KTVU on Friday.

She said a big component of her method is transparency.

"I strive for transparency with what I'm putting out there about who I am and what I'm looking for," Catalano said, adding, "because I don't want to lead anybody on, misrepresent anything and so I would encourage people to read."

About Lisa

On her website, what readers will find are facts like her physical attributes: She’s 5 foot 5.5 inches tall, 130 pounds, with a 36C bust size, and she hasn't had any cosmetic procedures; personality traits: She has a great sense of humor, she’s active, artistic and creative; her favorite baseball team: She’s a Giants fan; her likes and dislikes: She loves cats, enjoys wine and an occasional cocktail, but does not do tobacco, marijuana, or drugs; she’s self-employed, and when it comes to politics, she describes herself as democrat/liberal.

One thing she’s very open and honest about is her primary objective and hopes: "Wants marriage and kids within the next 2-3 years with the right man!" shared on her website.

What is Lisa looking for?

Beyond that, she also listed other non-negotiables: Her future husband should be college-educated, lead a healthy lifestyle, not a smoker or someone who partakes in drugs, has good hygiene, is politically aligned with her, does not have a criminal record and is "not particularly religious." 

Preferences with ‘flexibility’

She also detailed areas where there is some wiggle room, including the target age of 35-45, which she said she can be flexible within a year or two at most. She would also prefer, though not set in stone, the man she ends up with has never been married and doesn't have any kids.  

Catalano also prefers her future husband to live in the Bay Area.

"I am hoping to find somebody local and because I love living in the Bay Area," the bachelorette said, noting her parents are aging and live nearby, so she’s hoping to stay close to them. "There are so many people in the Bay Area, and I think that my guy is here as well."

And as for her "type" physically, her website said she does not have a height requirement but is generally "attracted to more clean-cut looking men, slim to medium build, no or minimal tattoos/piercings." 

Application process 

If her potential partner fits the description, he can then go ahead and fill out an application. There’s also a tab that allows a matchmaker want-to-be to fill out an application for someone they feel would be the right fit.

"I have received a fair number of applications that are people filling it out for their friend for their brother," Catalano explained. 

As part of the process, there are some very simple questions she’s come up with as well as an area that allows for written responses. 

"I tried to ask the right questions on the application. I also really tried to make it not that overly complicated or overly time-consuming because I didn't want to go overboard with it and have it be a mass time commitment for men," she said. "The majority of it though, very simple questions name, contact information, city that they live in, but then there's a whole lot of just drop-down menus and multiple-choice." 

And of course there is that non-quantifiable aspect of chemistry and attraction, so she asks for four photos from her applicants. She said she’s offering up many recent images of herself, so it’s natural for her to want to see what a potential partner looks like. 

"I think that the chemistry in person is something you can't measure through an application," she explained.

Catalano said that while her process here may not be the most conventional, she’s not naive or delusional in thinking she’ll find her husband and the father of her children off a billboard and website. 

Much like a dating app, after the initial "screening," she said the next step would be a more traditional route.

"This whole website it's Marry Lisa right, that is the goal I want get married, however I'm not expecting to just immediately find a guy through an application, call him up and be like, ‘Hi. It's Lisa from marrylisa.com. You wanna go get married tomorrow?'" she said, "This is a very unconventional thing that I'm doing, however, hopefully I can schedule some dates and have it be a normal situation from there on out that's the goal."

The backstory:

This "project" as she calls it, is all based on dating journey, history and experience, which have helped her provide specifics on what she’s looking for.

"I put a lot of thought into these based off of how prior relationships have gone and things that I felt," Catalano explained.

On her website, she shared that she was in a long term, committed relationship that led to an engagement, but an illness took her fiancé. 

He was terminally ill and after four years, he died in 2023, she shared.

She said she finally decided to try and begin dating again, motivated by the fact that she wanted to have kids. She ended up in a "very meaningful relationship" that lasted about a year. But when the couple released, they didn't want the same things, and he "wasn't willing to commit," that relationship came to an end. 

Catalano has shown to be someone who can identify what she wants and take steps to go after it.

Retired from bridesmaidship

In April, as a serial bridesmaid and never a bride she announced on Facebook that she was retiring from the role of being a bridesmaid or maid of honor. 

"No longer accepting requests," she wrote in a post, after she had completed her duties as maid of honor, standing next to a best friend at her wedding. And Catalano declared, "the next wedding I will be in will be mine. Groom is yet to be determined, but I am hopeful I will find one soon!"

It wasn’t long after that she embarked on that plan in her journey for a husband.

She said at first, frustrated with the dating scene, and not having any success on dating apps, she joked with her friends that she was just going to go and start a personal dating website herself.

She found herself working on that idea a little bit every day, and before she knew it, she had a full-blown website that she had created. 

Then there was the issue of driving traffic to the site. While her social media posts garnered some interest, she knew she needed to take it up a notch.

Using some of her business background — she has a business degree from Santa Clara University, as well as a leadership and an entrepreneurship certificate — she came up with the plan to advertise on a grander scale.  

Billboard idea is born

"Then I decided you know, I need to drive traffic to the website. I need men to actually see this. How are men gonna see it?" she asked herself. "And I thought, well what's more local than billboards? You can't ignore them. They're big it's flashy. It's very local, highly local," Catalano shared, "So a targeted captive audience on the freeway when you're driving and I'm targeting in the morning and evening commute."

After launching her website earlier this month, the billboards came into play. 

At first, she put up about a dozen ads on digital billboards, then she reduced the billboards to about six or seven locations, still along the same stretch of 101, as she chose the locations that had the best visibility.

And it should be noted, people may also see her MarryLisa.com ads on taxi toppers in San Francisco.

"As you go further north into San Francisco, the billboard space gets more expensive," she explained, saying she took that approach to be more budget conscious and to diversify how she got her message out. 

Catalano, said she’s worked in tech, in the cosmetic industry and now doing freelance work, and doing things that make her happy. 

"My main thing that I love is that I have a booth at the Cannery Row antique mall in Monterey and I sell vintage clothing there, so that's like one of my passions. I love vintage clothing," she shared.

What we don't know:

What she wasn’t ready to share was how much her husband-searching project was costing her. 

"I would say that what the amount is, people are gonna be shocked. But I'm actually not going to get into any financial specifics about this whole thing until I am totally done with the project," Catalano explained.

A quick search suggested running a digital billboard could cost anywhere from $7,500 to $19,000 for four weeks.

"Being in the Bay Area, I'm competing with the marketing budgets of like, tech companies, real estate firms, law firms," Catalano said, adding, "I'm self-funded."

But the single woman firmly believes this is a huge investment in her future. 

"There's an expense to all of this but I mean it's worth it to me," she said.

What's next:

And she has no plans to shut down her campaign until she’s sure she’s found the one.

"I am keeping this up indefinitely," Catalano explained. "The plan is to keep the billboards up until I meet somebody and I'm in a committed, exclusive, monogamous relationship, and it's a similar concept too, just as if you're in a committed exclusive relationship with somebody that you would expect each other to delete the dating apps so just as you would delete dating apps, I will stop running the billboards."

She also said that she hasn’t stopped using dating apps as she runs this campaign, and will continue all avenues to find the right man.

"I'm still giving everything a shot. Basically, it's not just the billboards. It's everything right now, because you never know where you'll meet somebody," she explained. 

Viral story

Catalano’s story has been shared widely, and her campaign has garnered quite a bit of attention in recent days. 

She said she’s been overwhelmed by all of this attention.

But she’s keeping her eyes on the prize and committed now more than ever to be positive, optimistic, and to go after her dreams. 

"The primary thing that I need to take care of first is dating and finding the love of my life," the billboard bachelorette shared, noting that she’s aware of the time crunch she’s facing. 

"My desire to try to have kids and start a family. It really has been a motivator for me on all of this so you know, I don't have two or three or four years to find somebody," the husband seeker said. "I'm ready now. I'm ready for love now. I would really like to have kids, and we'll see if that's in the cards.

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