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Partners in love
FOR
RICHER OR FOR POORER TAKES ON A NEW MEANING WHEN ROMANCE
AND BUSINESS MIX.
Think
about it. We spend a third of our lives—more if you’re
not a clock-watcher—in the office or at work. Then add a
couple of hours for the traffic-plagued commute. No
wonder it’s become so common to hear complaints about
not having enough time to look for love.
And so
we turn to YM, Friendster and eyeball meetings to aid
our search. Yet we seem to forget that we do have the
office, which is generally a nonthreatening environment
that offers opportunities for meeting people—assuming
you don’t work with a staff of less than five. You know
what they look like. And it’s easy to learn more about
each other—during breaks, downtime or that after-six
happy hour.
Even
entrepreneurs, who supposedly own their time, have found
it more rewarding to mix their personal relationships
with business.
Here’s
one couple who has succeeded in making this tricky
balance work.
*****
Karen
Davila still clearly re-members what David Jude
“DJ” Sta. Ana was wearing the first time she saw him
at the newsroom of GMA Network Inc.
“He was
wearing a green-and white striped polo,” she recalls.
“He was very shy... and very cute.”
At the
time, Davila had just graduated from the University of
the Philippines, where she took up Mass Communications,
and was starting in her first job. She was 23. He, on
the other hand, was the network’s Malacanang reporter
and several years older.
“I was
already attracted to him the first time I saw him,”
Davila reveals. But it wasn’t until two years later, in
late 1995, when they started going out.
Today,
after 11-and-a-half years of being together as a
couple—they got married in Hong Kong in 2001—they’re on
top of their game. Davila is the female anchor on ABS-CBN
Broadcasting Corp.’s flagship news program TV Patrol
World, while Sta. Ana is the news director at ABS-CBN
News and Current Affairs, in charge of news gathering.
But as
anyone who works in media could attest, getting there is
hardly a romantic stroll in the park. Both admit that
it’s difficult to be in the same workplace as your
partner since there is that tendency to bring the
problems of the office home with them. They can’t help
but talk about work, particularly since they belong to
the cutthroat world of broadcast news.
“It’s
difficult to maintain a relationship in a very
competitive industry, especially when both of you are in
high positions,” Davila concedes.
In their
case, the pressures are even more stressful since they
also had to endure almost every problem in the book as
far as office romance is concerned. Given the naturally
nosy character of media, they’ve become prime target for
office intrigues and politicking.
Drawing
the line
Davila
stresses that she was never under Sta. Ana’s direct
supervision, even when she became an anchor at Saksi in
GMA 7 and he was promoted to the news desk. “I’m very
careful about that,” Davila says, noting that those
companies that generally discourage office relationships
are very sensitive to bosses dating subordinates. “He
never assigned me a story.”
They’ve
kept this line also at ABS-CBN. Davila says she reports
directly to her executive producer at TV Patrol World
and to Luchie Cruz-Valdez, who heads the current affairs
division.
In fact,
they seldom hang out with each other at the office, Sta.
Ana says. Not even for lunch. While he is heavily
involved in coming up with story ideas, Davila gets her
assignments from someone else.
“We’ve
become experts in drawing the line [between our personal
and professional relationships] so other reporters won’t
feel that I have some privilege with him,” Davila says.
Still
when Davila is on an out-of-town assignment, covering,
say, the latest disaster to hit the country, Sta. Ana
says he can’t help but be concerned about his wife, as
well as the other reporters and cameramen assigned to
that story. “Mas angat lang siya ng kaunti,” he
says with a smile.
But the
biggest test to their relationship was when Davila
joined ABS-CBN in 2000 and Sta. Ana continued to work at
rival GMA 7.
Davila
admits that her first year at ABS-CBN was the hardest in
her career. Coming from the “other” station, she was
treated initially as an outsider and found it difficult
to penetrate her new work environment. She says she
would often call Sta. Ana crying.
But the
situation was even harder for Sta. Ana—for a different
reason. With his girlfriend at ABS-CBN, Sta. Ana says
the issue of trust surfaced, especially since he holds a
sensitive position in the newsroom. “You’d feel it but
it can’t be helped,” he concedes.
How did
he handle it? “I took it day by day,” he says, stressing
that his decision to transfer to ABS-CBN the following
year in 2001 was not influenced by Davila’s employment
at the Lopez-owned network. (According to network
insiders, it was Sta. Ana’s handling of the impeachment
of former President Joseph Estrada that impressed ABS-CBN
management.)
Despite
their new workplace, the couple continues to be targets
of intrigue, the most recent of which insinuated that
Davila was going out with a top married businessman—an
issue that ABS-CBN itself denied.
“It
just goes in one ear and out the other,” Sta. Ana
motions, simply shrugging off such gossip.
Davila’s
advice to other couples working for the same company:
“Always stand together.”
“If
you’re in the same workplace, when one is hit, you’re
also hitting the other one,” she explains.
Know the
business
But
despite the problems that come their way, Davila is
grateful that both are in the same business and
therefore each one understands the requirements of the
job, which calls for working long hours, always being
on-call when a breaking news story erupts and being
ready to be deployed for out-of-town assignments.
“At
least we don’t have weird pressures like ‘nasaan ka
na’ or ‘when are you coming home,’” she notes. “He
has made me more stable and stronger in handling the
stress because he also knows the ins and outs of the
news business.”
But does
Sta. Ana get bothered that his wife is more known? “I’ve
been called Mr. Davila but I say na lang na OK lang
’yon,” he says.
Sta.
Ana, who started as a reporter for the defunct Daily
Globe newspaper before going to TV, says being an
anchor—like his wife—“never came up to my mind.” But one
also senses he misses being in the field, especially
since he says that the one thing that keeps him going in
the business is “seeing everything happen right in front
of you.”
The one
real downside to working together that they admit to is
that it’s very difficult for them to travel together,
especially since they are still a young couple with a
son, David Joshua, who turns 5 this month.
Davila
says, given her responsibilities, which also include a
radio program, it’s already such a big deal to get a
vacation leave approved. Add to that Sta. Ana’s key
position, having both of them leave at the same time
would be doubly difficult.
“That’s
why we can only take really short trips,” Sta. Ana says.
Fortunately, they live within walking distance to the
station—a very smart decision for this couple who are
passionate in what they do yet appear so relaxed while
doing it.
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