MANCHESTER, Ia. — Katie Vaske hoped to shower her hat hair away before we talked, but then the plow truck wouldn’t start.

So instead of gussying up, she and her husband, Doug Vaske, hooked their extra plow to the tractor, dug the rig out of the snow and left it running in preparation for the newest onslaught of flurries.

“Now we both smell like diesel,” she says as we log on to FaceTime, “and, sorry, the cap is staying on.”

“But,” she sighs, “that’s just life in the country.”

For much of her adulthood, Katie wasn’t sure she would find anyone who understood the particularities of rural existence. The idea that when you work in agriculture, every hour is a business hour. Or that when you have animals, your life revolves around feedings.

Or that farmers are rarely bogged down by the boredom or malaise felt by their cubicle counterparts because, really, this is so much more than a job.

Finding someone who not only enjoys that agrarian lifestyle, but embraces it, can be complicated, experts and rural singles said.

“Dating in urban and rural America is quite different,” said Susan Stewart, sociologist and professor at Iowa State University. “Because the most important predictor of your dating and marriage partner is propinquity, or nearness in terms of geography, so you are going to date people in your vicinity.”

As rural areas continue to lose population, that dating pool is only going to contract more, she said. And as family farms are gobbled up by conglomerates, there’s even more space between neighbors, meaning singles will have to travel farther and farther for possible mates.

Add into that the close-knit nature of small towns, and you lose anonymity. Knowing people’s dating history can be a good thing, but if they’ve dated your best friend or your cousin, well, that can make for an awkward Thanksgiving.

On the other hand, millennials and Gen Z represent a crest in the wave of acceptance of couples living together without getting married, single-parent households or just plain being single and not apologizing for it.

So, yeah, it’s complicated. But the entire situation gets positively labyrinthine when you add in the internet.

A boon for those who know everyone in their local bar, online dating certainly expands the scope of options for lonely country folk. And while just a few years ago saying you “met online” might have elicited a judging eye roll, people now just shrug.

Yet, look no further than the countless horrid Tinder stories one Google search generates for proof that online dating isn’t a miracle salve.

Take heed, though, because pastoral love does exist. In rural Iowa, 26 percent of men and 18 percent of women have never married, compared with 28 percent of men in the rest of rural America and 22 percent of women, according to Census data.

Hope for love exists, too. In a July 2017 Iowa Poll, more than 75 percent of rural respondents said they believed their ability to find or keep a life partner would get better in the next year.

And look no further than Katie and Doug.

Five years ago, Katie was a single, four-wheel-lovin’ woman, and Doug a single hobby farmer with 25 acres of corn and beans. If they could have shaped their perfect mates out of clay, the results would look a lot like each other.

But these two didn’t meet in person.

They met on FarmersOnly.com.

The meet-cute

Decades before they met, a day’s work started way before the sun rose for both young Katie and young Doug.

Katie lived in Farmersburg (pop. 300), where her mom worked on a hog farm and her dad raised stock cows. After high school, she went to Kirkwood Community College to study veterinary assisting, but couldn’t find a steady job, so she managed a local Subway.

When a friend moved to Manchester to open a pizza joint, she followed. Marriage just wasn’t on her mind.

“I told myself I was going to be single and travel the world,” she said.

Doug was the son of dairy farmers and corn, bean and hay growers in Manchester (pop. 5,000). He helped on the farm, showing pigs and sheep throughout his childhood. He got a job at the sawmill after high school, which eventually led to a better job at a battery factory.

He’s self-admittedly “a shy guy,” so he believed marriage wasn’t a realistic option. But he didn’t let the lack of a partner stop his life from moving forward: As soon as he could afford it, he bought a house on an acreage outside of town.

“I did want someone, but I just had it in my mind that I probably won’t find anyone because I wasn’t having any luck,” he said.

Independently, they were getting along fine, but if they’re honest with themselves, they both felt isolated.

Then they separately saw FarmersOnly.com commercials and couldn’t shake the jingle: “You don’t have to be lonely at Farmers Only.” Well, they both decided, might as well give it a shot.

And there, somewhere in the midst of their fiber optic cables, they found each other.

Doug liked that Katie talked about working on her cousin’s dairy farm. Katie liked that they lived only 5 miles apart.

He sent her a dozen roses emoji and they exchanged messages, which led to phone calls, which led to a chance meeting at the Beaver’s Lounge, a local pub. After a volley of exchanged glances, Doug got up the courage to go over to Katie.

“Are you the girl that I’ve been chatting with?” Doug remembered asking.

Yes, she replied, and a date was set.

They met the next week at the Sunset Family Restaurant, where they spent a lot of the evening talking what they knew: farming.

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A digital plat book

After decades in agricultural advertising, Jerry Miller understood that farmers were of a different stripe. They weren’t just toiling away in far-flung soil; they were intimately connected to the food they were raising and the lifestyle out on the range.

Then, in the mid-2000s, Miller found himself chatting with a recently divorced client who shared her struggles with online dating.

“She goes, well, this one guy said, ‘Let's meet at Starbucks at nine at night,’” Miller said. “And she goes, ‘Well, first, there aren’t any Starbucks anywhere near me, and I got to go to sleep because I get up at 5 in the morning to take care of the animals.”

His business nose sniffed out a need. But his former Ohio country boy heart felt a pang. Would rural folk have a better time finding love if he created a digital space where farmers could just be farmers, with no need to explain the early days or late nights or 30-mile trips to the grocery store?

FarmersOnly.com was born, as was one of the site’s taglines: “City folks just don’t get it.”

The site took off and has grown to more than 8 million paid subscribers. By Miller’s count, the site is responsible for tens of thousands of marriages.

The success comes down to one idea, Miller said: a shared interest.

It’s a new version of “plat book” dating, the tongue-in-cheek term for the old tradition of taking out the plat book and finding the closest neighborhood gal who didn’t have any older brothers.

But with farmers being only 2 percent of the population, Farmers Only expands the book way beyond county limits.

For many of local matchmaker Courtney Quinlan's clients, the call of rural life is stronger than that of their hometown. For the right person, a client will pull up stakes, said Quinlan, who founded Midwest Matchmaking.

“If we have a small-town person with that mentality and we have another small-town person, but they live 100 miles away, it could still be a great match because one of them could be open to relocating — as long as it's to another small town,” she said.

And, yet, the expanded options don’t mean dating is as simple as it was in the heydays of plat-book hookups.

Career opportunities for women in rural Iowa are becoming rarer, said Chet Hollingshead, a 30-year-old single farmer from rural Boone County, so the discussion of bringing someone onto the farm can mean a long commute or giving up his or her income. And considering all the bills that come with modern life, you simply need a two-person income to raise a family, he said.

Add in his other big dating criteria — a woman with health insurance — and he’s looking for a needle in a haystack.

“When my mom asked my grandpa about dating and love one time, he said, ‘Sometimes an old sock just needs an old shoe,'" Hollingshead said.

“But we’re pickier today because of the dating apps,” he continued. “We have this figment in our imagination that we're going to find the exact dream person that we're looking for, and I'm totally guilty of that.”

Dreams, together

After hours at the Sunset Family restaurant, Katie had an inkling that Doug might be that person.

As much as Katie had wanderlust in her early adulthood, she really wanted to marry someone like her dad — someone who loved Iowa, the land and being outside.

“I’m like, there’s got to be something here, especially when he asked me to go four-wheeling and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, let’s go!’” she said. “And then I found out he had tractors, and that was like an instant attraction for me.”

For Doug, the shared interests were great, but it was Katie’s technicolor personality that hooked him. She was warm and loving and outgoing; the perfect foil for his shyness.

After four years of dating, he took her to a Decorah waterfall and got down on one knee. In October, they wed.

Their friends tell them they are the happiest couple they know, Katie said. And during our conversation, it wasn’t hard to see why: Neither of them ever stopped smiling, and they enthusiastically played off each other, with him introducing a topic and her filling in the details.

Their friends also make good-hearted fun of them for having met on Farmers Only.

They get it: Farmers Only’s commercials are ridiculous. One has cows and dogs thinking about setting their owners up. Another series has “city girls” looking foolish fishing or riding horses.

And they all end with that jingle: “You don’t have to be lonely on FarmersOnly.com.”

But what those who dish out wisecracks may not know is that Farmers Only is very much in on the joke. Those commercials hook people to sign up, Miller said, but what he’s really doing is curing loneliness.

In the Vaskes' case, he did. Before Katie met Doug, she’d hang out at her parents’ house, go shopping by herself or do her own thing. Doug, too, would spend time alone, never realizing how much he wanted a face waiting for him when he got home.

Now, Katie and Doug farm and go four-wheeling and plan weekends away (she hasn’t lost that wanderlust). Sometimes they travel far, like Las Vegas, but their favorite trips are in the car where they hold each other’s hands and listen to music.

They’ve put their dreams together, Katie said, and they proudly attribute their connection to FarmersOnly.com. They even had shirts made to celebrate where they first fell in love.

“City folks might not get it,” the shirt’s rustic green script reads, “but we do.”

COURTNEY CROWDER, the Register's Iowa Columnist, traverses the state's 99 counties telling Iowans' stories. She got married in December after dating her husband for 10 years. Calling him husband still feels weird. You can contact her at (515) 284-8360 or ccrowder@dmreg.com. Follow her on Twitter @courtneycare.

Facts about love in Iowa in 2017:

Age of oldest man to wed: 96

Oldest woman: 86

Youngest man: 17

Youngest woman: 16

Day most marriages occurred: Oct. 7 (524 marriages)

Month most marriages occurred: September (2,895 marriages)

Day fewest marriages occurred: Jan. 16 (3 marriages)

Month fewest marriages occurred: January (689 marriages)

Oldest divorcé: 92

Oldest divorcée: 93

Youngest divorcé: 17

Youngest divorcée: 17

Longest marriage to end in divorce: 59 years

Shortest marriage to end in divorce: 10 days

— 2017 Vital Statistics of Iowa