Love at Work: 5 Couples Tell Their Stories
Yes, you deserve to love your job. But there's more to life than your career. Judging by the results of a survey on workplace romance, we're not the only ones who think that way. So for Valentine's Day, AOL Jobs turns to love of a different sort. We cast a net for couples who met their partners at work. Here are five of their stories:
Vinnie and Bill Harrity of Broadview Heights, Ohio
I started working at Roy Rogers Restaurant on Route 17 in Rutherford, NJ (it's now a Wendy's) and met my husband-to-be there. He cooked the roast beef in the kitchen. I made the french fries and Roast Beef sandwiches. Bill and I enjoyed talking about music--something we still do to this day. He was smart, kind, fun--and had a great family. I considered him "just a friend". We would go to parties together, concerts and Wildwood, NJ (the Jersey shore). One day my dearest friend asked me "why aren't you dating Bill?" I said I didn't want to ruin a great friendship. Well, let's just say we both got over that and have been married for 34 years. He's still my best friend.
Nina Lentini and Richard Norman of Norwich, CT
One day at Adweek, a strange copy editor showed up, hired to freelance by someone who had worked at Newsweek, where this guy had a full-time job. He was quiet, kept to himself. Maybe a week or two later, I returned from lunch with what turned out to be a mutual acquaintance and, as I stepped off the elevator, there was Richard Norman, sitting at the desk facing the lift.
We chatted briefly. I liked his smile. That weekend, he called me at home and asked me to dinner. I knew right away this was going places and it felt a bit disturbing to have him in the office, to glance sideways, for us to have this secret. But we kept it that way, mostly because he was so private (me, less so). I was never his boss as he worked on publications other than the one I worked on so that was not a problem.
About four months later, we married, also on the sly, with just two attendants and a photographer. When our Los Angeles office received the announcement I sent, they thought I'd married a different Richard, so unknown was mine to them. That was nearly 26 years ago.
Eleanor and Al Kamieniecki of Nutley, N.J.
Al had a few friends who worked for me in the office. They set us up and Al eventually came in on a Saturday when I was working and worked up the nerve to come talk to me. He noticed I was reading Disney's biography and how Disney was born in Chicago, so he asked me if I'd like to go for a ride to find his birth home. That was our first date. He was an Area Supervisor at the time and I was the Manager for the Customer Service office of what was then Fisher Scientific.
Al did not report to me but he did report to my partner who was the second manager in the office. We did keep it quiet for awhile, but Al was so happy to have met someone (his first wife had died several years earlier). I found out the office friends had been prompting him to ask me out for quite a while before he worked the nerve up to do so.
When we got engaged, the Director in the office changed the reporting structure for him to report to her. And so we got married just over a year later. The only problem it caused is that he couldn't work for Thermo-Fisher in our business unit because he would ultimately have been reporting to me when we moved to New Jersey.
The only challenge with marrying a co-worker is that you start talking shop all the time and you don't get a break from work when home, and since he was a supervisor and I a manager, I couldn't discuss much of my job since it was proprietary. We've been married 12 years.
