Bigday

Exploring romance at work used to be frowned upon, but nowadays with more women in the workforce and working longer hours, it’s not so uncommon. Such was the case with Melissa Fuller, who works at Capitol Records Nashville. She didn’t expect to meet her future husband during a work lunch at Bricktop’s. She was with a couple of co-workers when she first met Jeremy Spillman, a songwriter at Universal Music Publishing.

Missy Zahn didn’t think she would meet her future husband while she was planting flowers on a sunny day four years ago. Anthony McElroy was visiting a friend, who happened to be Missy’s neighbor Jennifer, but he was intrigued by the dirt-covered girl in the garden. He asked Jennifer for Missy’s number, and although they started hanging out on a fairly regular basis, Missy wasn’t convinced that their relationship would progress past a friendship. “One night I thought we were hanging out as friends, and he thought it was a date,” Missy recalls.

Jessica Lehry first met Eric Bishop during college, when both were attending the University of Tennessee. While both admit to having a serious crush on the other for a while, Jessica made the first move by admitting her feelings to Eric at a friend’s birthday party. Luckily, the feeling was mutual, and the two were soon inseparable.

Ashley Schermerhorn first met Josh Chambless through her job as a marketing manager at Provident Label Group. Josh, a tour manager and audio engineer, communicated with Ashley regularly regarding projects for the label’s bands. “We got in an email ‘fight’ one day because it was 5 p.m. on a Friday, and I needed a response from him about some comp tickets before I could leave for the weekend,” Ashley recalls.

Some say opposites attract, even “bookworms” like Emily Farwell, and “emotional musician types” like Rob Blackledge.

Alabama native Lillian Quarles moved to Nashville in early 2008 to take a job with Vanderbilt University. Excited to be in a new town and meet new people, she allowed a friend to set her up on a blind date. “I had pretty low expectations, having been on a string of several bad dates, but decided, what the heck!” she says. Lillian met Craig Turman, who worked with Vanderbilt through his job at ISP Sports, at Jackson’s for drinks and a low-key dinner. To her surprise, they ended up talking all night and closing down the restaurant.

Louise Fitch, a product development manager for a wholesale home décor company, had a demanding work schedule that made dating slightly challenging. “I was traveling a lot, so it was hard to maintain any sort of relationship over a period of time,” Louise explains. She turned to Match.com to “weed out” prospective dates, and she found Shane Truett, a lawyer who devotes his spare time to the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing.

Kat Amano simply did not want to get married. “I was completely anti-marriage for a long time,” Kat, a production manager at a digital signage firm in the Gulch, admits. “I would go on long rants about how the institution of marriage is broken.”

Luckily, Terry Price changed her mind.

For you single girls out there who are getting a little impatient while waiting for your prince to come, Beth Fromm has some pretty straightforward advice for you: Be picky.

Megan Hayes, an event marketing representative with St. Jude, and Phillip Emmert, Director of Operations at ActivHealth, met during their junior year at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, when her sorority was paired up with his fraternity for a campus production called “All Sing.” “After many practices perfecting our Beach Boys montage, we became very good friends,” Megan recalls. After they started dating, music continued to play an important part in their developing relationship.