A TV news anchor clicked with her on Instagram. Celibacy helped them find true love.
Newlyweds Fred and Marley Shropshire spent the beginning of their relationship the way a lot of couples who feel an instant and intense attraction do.
That is to say, they could barely get enough of each other when they started dating in December of 2019.
Just a few short weeks after meeting via social media, having sensed powerful chemistry with Fred, Marley decided on a whim to fly from Houston (where she was working in the theater business) to Charlotte (where Fred works as a night-side news anchor at WCNC-TV) to see how they might click in person.
And ohhhh, the clicking they did.
The first night, they had dinner at Bang Bang Burgers in Elizabeth, then caught the “Jersey Boys” musical at Ovens Auditorium. The next, they went for cocktails at Dot Dot Dot, an upscale speakeasy behind Park Road Shopping Center. Over the course of her whirlwind 48-hour visit, they also took a cooking class, visited a museum, even attended church. On one of the days, the two had breakfast, lunch and dinner together.
But there’s one significant thing that Fred and Marley conspicuously abstained from that weekend. It’s something they discussed over glasses of wine, during what they now refer to as a “define-the-relationship talk.”
After agreeing that, yes, they would move forward as a couple — despite the challenges presented by the long distance between them and the hectic lives they were leading as single parents still smarting from their respective divorces — they also agreed upon this:
Unless they got married, they were not going to have sex.
‘Skeptical that I was going to find anybody’
Before they met, their outlook on love and relationships wasn’t exactly rosy.
Marley — then Marley Singletary — had been living in Houston for eight years, during which time she’d had a son with her first husband, been separated for two years, and gotten divorced in February 2017 at the age of 29.
Fred and his first wife were separated not long after the birth of their third child, about a year and a half after they moved in 2015 to Charlotte from Durham, where he had been working as a reporter and anchor at WTVD-TV; their divorce was finalized in 2018, when he was 40, and he and his ex-wife have since split custody of their son and two daughters evenly.
“Divorce is a trauma — especially when kids are involved,” Fred says. “You have this perception that your life is gonna be a certain way, then when that comes apart, it feels like not just a failure, but it feels like a significant failure. So, for me, going through the process of divorce was very depressing. It was difficult to see myself being married again.”
Says Marley: “I knew I needed to deal with some things in myself. A lot of the hurt. Then also, what did I contribute to that divorce? Because I think that that’s a huge part of moving forward. So I started dating around, but then I realized, this is even tougher because my priority is my child. I have a whole different mindset of what I want, and some of these people out there —” She pauses, then continues, plainly: “The dating thing is not the same as it was as an early adult. I was hopeful, but very skeptical that I was going to find anybody.”
“Yeah, things are so different from when I was dating before I was married the first time,” Fred says. “The games people play and the rules people play by, just —” He chuckles and shakes his head. “And I was dating flippantly, making decisions on dating people and meeting people who just were not consistent with who I wanted to be. So at that point, I was like, I don’t even know that I’m cut out for meeting people nowadays. I feel outdated.”
Meanwhile, Marley says, “I had dated somebody for a little while, and it ended up — it wasn’t good. So I just thought, you know what? I need to take a break and really self-reflect, and just give myself time to heal and to not try to jump into anything.”
Then one day in November of 2019, fate — or, to put a finer point on it, Instagram — threw them a curve.
It started with elderberry syrup
Marley was fairly low-key about Instagram back then. She only followed about 500 accounts, the vast majority of which belonged either to friends, family, people she knew from the theater world, or speakers who inspired her. It was because she had recently followed a few speakers who were based in Charlotte, she surmises, that the platform’s algorithm suggested “@therealfredshropshire” as someone she might be interested in.
The algorithm guessed correctly.
She was intrigued enough that she clicked through to his profile, where she found a collection of photos and videos that painted the picture of a great dad — a great single dad. From more than a thousand miles away, Marley clicked on the button to follow him.
Fred happened to see the notification that she had started following him, and a quick glance at her profile made her stand out. Typically, he says, people start following him because they’re other media professionals, or because they’re viewers who live in the Carolinas. This woman was neither. And he got a similarly good feeling after perusing her posts.
A week later, Fred put a story on Instagram that showed him with his kids, who were crying because they couldn’t stand the elderberry syrup Dad had given them. In it, he asked his thousands of followers to suggest a brand that his kids might not be disgusted by.
Marley saw it and sent him a private message that was something to the effect of: “Oh, well, I just give mine the Flintstones gummies. They’re organic now. So your poor kids don’t have to suffer.” Fred replied with a “thank you” and a “nice to meet you.”
A conversation had been struck up, and from there, it took off. After a week of messaging each other, he asked her if he could give her a call. A week after that, they Facetimed for the first time.
Things got serious, fast, in part because neither wanted to play those silly dating games. Before they’d ever even met in person, they’d taken The Love Language Quiz, which showed theirs — quality time — matched up perfectly; they’d filled out Myers-Briggs questionnaires, and were only one letter off from each other; they’d spent hours having deep conversations that revealed how aligned their desires and values were.
And not four weeks after Marley found Fred on Instagram, they were at a table at Foxcroft Wine Co. in SouthPark having their deepest conversation yet.
‘I want you to know: I’m determined to wait’
Both had always been serious about their faith. Neither had ever pledged to be celibate with someone they were dating.
But during their “define-the-relationship talk,” Fred and Marley agreed that it was the right decision given what was at stake for them this time around, as divorced parents with four young children between them.
“I was tired of going from person to person to person feeling all those empty things you feel,” says Marley, reflecting on their conversation, “and it was just not something I wanted to do again. So I said, ‘I want you to know: I’m determined to wait.”
Fred told her that, actually, he was, too.
“For the same reason,” he says. “I’ve always had a thought that I should be more careful about who I allow myself to be with physically, and I wanted to have clarity in this relationship — because she was a prayer answered, and I wanted to honor that conviction. I said, ‘OK, God. I see what you’ve done here. I want to honor you with how I move forward in this relationship.’”
“A lot of people who I know have experienced that,” Fred continues, “where they had a hard time breaking off relationships with people because they connected with them in that way, and that was all that that relationship was about. It was all it had. They stayed in it longer than it should have lasted.”
Asked whether it was more or less difficult than they anticipated, they both laugh.
“It was harder at the beginning,” Marley says, “because of the butterflies, the infatuation. That’s just what we’re wired to want to do. But once we got into a habit and a rhythm and we had some very firm boundaries, it got easier, as time went on.”
Still, she adds: “It wasn’t easy. Even then it was still like ugh. Sometimes like, Oh Lord, how long do we need to wait?”
The answer was almost exactly two years.
Bringing their lives to the same city
For the first several months, their determination to remain celibate was made somewhat easier due to the fact that they were half a country away from each other.
Of course, this also meant they would sometimes go weeks at a time without seeing each other in person over the course of the winter that bridged 2019 and 2020; and then starting in March, because of the pandemic, they had to go a full two months without a visit.
COVID also had another deep impact on Marley: The theater business was effectively shut down due to fears and mandates, so she was suddenly out of work.
The bad news was the loss of income. The good news was it freed her up to get to a place where she could put her Houston house on the market, which she did in December 2020, and move with her son, Owen, and her Goldendoodle, Coco, to an apartment near Fred’s Matthews home, which they did in February 2021.
After that, photos of Fred and Marley, often with their children, started appearing more frequently on their social media accounts. And by all appearances, they looked like a perfect couple — beautiful, happy, very in love.
Privately, however, their new life together didn’t always have smooth edges. Last summer, they started couples counseling because they felt they could use some help with their communication skills and their ability to work through conflict; both of them also clearly were still struggling with issues related to their previous relationships.
They did it because this was serious business to them.
They were serious about each other. They were serious about getting married at some point. And they were also very, very serious about the fact that they didn’t want to put themselves, or their children, through another divorce.
So they took counseling about as seriously as anything they’ve ever taken.
‘I felt like it was something to celebrate’
It paid off. The sessions wound up bringing them closer together, just like all the other intentional efforts they’d made to get to know each other over the course of nearly two years, from the Myers-Briggs and Love Language exercises to the countless relationship books they read together and talked about.
On a chilly Friday in November, Fred got down on one knee in front of Marley in the middle of Romare Bearden Park. Thirteen days later, on Dec. 2, they were married at Mecklenburg County Courthouse.
The following week, Fred went back to the place where they first met — Instagram — and shared a long post outlining their journey as a couple, in which he revealed that they’d practiced celibacy for two years.
He figured their story might inspire others, but mostly, he says, “I felt like it was something to celebrate.”
They’re sitting in the living room of the home they now share together, which is decorated with big, happy portraits of Fred and Marley with his daughters, Carolina, 10, and Johanna, 5, and their 8-year-old sons, Ezra and Owen. As they reflect on what they’ve been through and achieved together, they smile, and they laugh, and they talk about how much they love each other, a lot.
Yet Fred, who is now 43, and Marley, 34, also both readily acknowledge that the challenges will always be there.
“The ‘happily ever after,’” Fred says, “that’s kind of a fairy tale, ’cause there’s still work. My parents have been married for 51 years. It will be 52 in April. And when my dad tells me, ‘I’m still learning about your mom,’ it’s like that emoji with the blown mind. I’m like, Gosh. So we’ve done a lot of work on each other leading up to this time that we now have, but we’re still learning.”
“I really feel like it’s just beginning,” Marley says, smiling warmly.
“Because a marriage is like a beginning — and because we waited as well — there’s a whole lot of things that are just beginning for us.”
This story was originally published February 11, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "A TV news anchor clicked with her on Instagram. Celibacy helped them find true love.."
