Cupid slings his inky arrows

TONY DODERO

By now, most of you are probably like me and thanking the newspaper

gods that Valentine’s Day and all its mushiness has come to a

merciful end.

If you haven’t got enough of it, however, and the Daily Pilot sure

did its share of doling it out this past week with an entire series

of Valentine stories, then keep reading.

If you have had enough, you should stop right here.

But in keeping with the love theme, I thought I’d ponder an

interesting phenomenon here in Daily Pilotville -- newsroom romances.

Late last year, we learned that one such romance was going to

become permanent.

Joey Santos, the Daily Pilot’s art director and news desk chief,

and Alicia Lopez, the city editor of our weekly sister paper the

Coastline Pilot in Laguna Beach, announced to us all that they will

tie the knot in April.

They met here in the Daily Pilot newsroom and we are all very

happy for this perfect couple.

But besides Joey and Alicia, I can think of at least six couples

who have met in this newsroom and are married or will soon be.

And in one case, there’s a new baby to celebrate.

Anastacia Grenda, formerly Freeberg, was a long-time reporter and

editor here at the Pilot where she met her future husband, Tim

Grenda, who covered Costa Mesa city government. The Grendas just had

a baby boy named Jack and are no doubt learning that kids are all

about getting no sleep.

The other couples that I can remember include former Daily Pilot

City Editor James Meier, who is married to former Pilot reporter

Stefanie Frith; Jasmine Lee, a former city editor and reporter

married former photographer Greg Fry; former copy desk chief DeAnna

George married former business and politics reporter Paul Clinton;

former cops reporter Greg Risling married former page designer Cathy

Yarnovich; and former copy editors George Hutti and Paula Pisani, who

now work together at the Santa Barbara News-Press, will be getting

married soon.

And I’m sure there are even more that I can’t remember or never

knew about.

Having once experienced the disaster of dating someone I worked

with, I wondered just how hard such romances might be to carry on.

There are a lot of negatives, like dealing with the reaction of

co-workers and having work problems follow you home.

So I posed the question to Alicia Lopez and at least one expert in

the area.

“I wouldn’t recommend it, but for all the negatives I ended up

with the absolute love of my life, so I suppose it’s a fair

exchange,” Lopez said.

And my expert agreed it’s not an easy balance.

“I think they are really tricky,” said Maxine B. Cohen, a longtime

Newport Beach marriage and family therapist. “I think it’s only

natural that people meet people where they spend their time. But if

you are dating someone you go home with or go to work with, you have

to be careful how you behave. You don’t want to be making out at the

water cooler, and if you fight at home you don’t want to fight at the

work place.”

Cohen, whose offices are at Newport Center, said couples who date

at work have multiple challenges, top of which is to maintain

professionalism.

“What do you do when it doesn’t work out,” she asked? “Not only is

it hard on you, but everybody knows about it.”

While she recommends space in a relationship and recalls seeing

numbers that show only one-third of those types of relationships work

out, Cohen did say there are worse ways to meet people.

“It’s a much nicer way to meet someone than going to the bar scene

certainly.”

No offense to the bar scene folks, of course.

So there you have it. Cupid’s arrow seems to whiz in and out of

this newsroom with reckless abandon.

And while the odds are sometimes stacked against such workplace

coziness, we seem to do a good job of matching up couples quite

nicely.

Maybe we should be running a dating service instead of a

newspaper.