E8 OnLove NUPTIALS KATE LALL PHOTOGRAPHY
Laiza Otero & Adam Ambrogi
Laiza Otero, 32, is an Arlington County constituent services manager. Adam Ambrogi, 33, is counsel on a Senate committee. They live in Arlington.
Wedding date: May 29.
Location: Marriott Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Guests: 120.
How they met: In 2005, Laiza and Adam worked for the Election Assistance Commission to improve language accessibility for voters and would go to happy hours together. “It took awhile to define the relationship,” Laiza says. It was clearer once Adam got a new job in 2006; soon after, they set up a weekend date to visit a dada exhibit at the National Gallery of Art.
The proposal: A year after Adam started saving to buy the ring, he discovered that his great-grandmother had left one that didn’t need to be resized and looked perfect. So in April 2009, he called Laiza and persuaded her to hike around the Tidal Basin while the cherry blossoms were in bloom. After asking her to marry him, Adam whisked her away to one of her favorite Arlington restaurants for a special tasting menu.
The wedding: They had their ceremony in San Juan, where Laiza grew up. Guests enjoyed traditional cuisine, including a roasted pig, by the beach the evening before. For the vows, Laiza worked in a promise about playing the video game “God of War III” with Adam.
Honeymoon: Enjoyed gourmet meals on Tortola, one of the British Virgin Islands.
—Kathleen Hom
KLMNO
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PHOTOS BY MARK GAIL/THE WASHINGTON POST FRIENDED: Denise Pavone-Brooks feeds Jeffrey Stork wedding cake. They dated in their teens but split up in college. Last year, he found her on Facebook. by Ellen McCarthy Every afternoon in the spring of 1974,
Jeffrey Storck would sit at his desk in high school and watch the clock, anxious for the minutes to pass. When the final bell rang, he would rush to his part-time job at the grocery store and pray for a visit from the smiley redhead with the bright green eyes. “She was the prettiest girl I’d ever
seen,” he says. She’d come in with her mother, navi-
gating the aisles of the A&P in North- port, Long Island, stealing sidelong glances at Storck. One evening she came in by herself and Storck followed her to the parking lot. He told her that he’d gotten some- thing that day and that he wanted her to have it. In his hand was a class ring, just out of the jeweler’s box. “I asked her to go steady with me. We’d never even gone out on a date,” he says. “I just had to have her.” It was a bold move considering that Storck didn’t know that Denise Pavone- Brooks was constantly looking for rea- sons to go to the A&P, harboring a crush on the cute boy who worked in the pro- duce department, although she never had the nerve to say anything to him be- yond, “Can you weigh my bananas?” That night, she took the ring and agreed to be his girl. For the next year and a half, the two, who went to different high schools, spent all their spare time together, sail- ing, taking photos, meeting each other’s families and going to the prom. “We never had an argument or a fight.
MATT TROPEA
Cherie Bartozzi & Matt Tropea
Cherie Bartozzi, 27, plans to study nursing. Matt Tropea, 33, is an information technology recruiter. They live in Potomac.
Wedding date: May 29.
Locations: Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, the District, and Woodend Sanctuary, Chevy Chase.
Guests: 362.
How they met: Cherie signed up for kayaking lessons in September 2007. Before her first one, she visited a Rockville store that Matt managed to buy gear. It was love at first sight for Cherie, but Matt was seeing someone. They hit it off, however, and talked for two hours. After the first lesson, Cherie realized the equipment Matt sold her wasn’t adequate for frigid water so she had an excuse to return. They didn’t start dating, though, until October 2008.
The proposal: Right before they took a trip to the Bahamas with Cherie’s family, Cherie’s parents gave Matt the diamond for a ring and Matt’s mother provided the setting from her wedding and engagement band. He took the finished ring on vacation and had hoped to propose after swimming with dolphins. When a thunderstorm ruined those plans, he decided to ask for her hand as they got ready for dinner.
The wedding: They were introduced as husband and wife under an arch made from kayaking paddles.
Honeymoon: Worked at a friend’s resort in Eleuthera, Bahamas.
— Kathleen Hom
Watch Cherie and Matt discuss how they met and fell in love at
washingtonpost.com/washingtonweddings.
Never once,” Storck says. “In my head, I was going to ask her to marry me — I wanted to. But I knew her parents and my parents would say, ‘Oh, you’re too young.’ ”
So Storck decided that once they got through college he’d be ready with an- other ring, this time a diamond. In fall 1975, he headed off to Southern Illinois University; she was enrolled at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. “And I was really worried about this,” she recalls. “I was worried we’d break up or something. And then he started talk- ing about how school was going to be so much fun and all these parties and all these girls, and I thought, ‘Oh, he’s breaking it to me easy.’ ” They wrote a few letters, talked on the phone occasionally and, without her parents knowing, Pavone-Brooks bought a plane ticket to visit Storck in Illinois. But something wasn’t right. To her, he
THE PROFESSIONAL After a lawyer’s own split, a different approach to divorce by Ellen McCarthy
It used to be all business for divorce law- yer Regina DeMeo. Her approach was always the same:
“This is a partnership and the partnership is dissolving. What are the assets? What is the time-sharing arrangement you think is going to work best? Okay, come on,” she would think. “Get yourself together and let’s move on.” Then, after seven years of marriage, De-
Meo went through her own divorce. “It was a very humbling experience,” she
says. “All your dreams are shattered . . . your whole world is rocked.” DeMeo began reading everything she could about what makes and breaks mar- riages, and she changed the way she prac- tices law. Soon after the divorce, the George Washington University Law School graduate became trained in a growing practice called collaborative di- vorce. Now when a potential client lands in
her office, she asks to hear the story of the marriage and the reasons for divorce. When there’s even a hint of ambivalence she’ll nudge the client toward a counselor. “If you can save this marriage, that’s what you should try to do,” says DeMeo, 37. “Be- cause I can tell you personally, I’ve been down this dark path, and it’s not fun.” But if clients are sure that ending the marriage is the only solution, she’ll en- courage them to consider collaborative di- vorce, a process that requires both spouses to agree not to go to court. Instead, they and their individual lawyers, along with mental health professionals and a neutral financial adviser, meet to openly hash out the terms of the divorce. The process re- quires that all relevant information be shared willingly — “so I don’t have to issue subpoenas to 50 different banks and waste time and money,” says DeMeo, a lawyer with Joseph, Greenwald & Laake in Rock- ville. The couple has to reach an agreement
on every issue that needs to be addressed —including child-care arrangements, real
estate decisions and division of assets. And if they don’t reach a complete agree- ment, both lawyers lose the case. The cou- ple will lose all the money they’ve invested in the process and must start over with new attorneys. DeMeo, who is president of the Collab-
orative Divorce Association, a group that promotes the practice, says the process is less painful than a divorce that involves litigation. “There are no surprises,” she says. “And they feel like they own it be- cause they’re the final decision makers, as opposed to some person they’ve never met before who’s going to hear their case for six hours and make a decision for the rest of their lives.” And maybe more important than that,
she says, the collaborative divorce process forces two people whose lines of commu- nication are broken to learn to work to- gether and talk respectfully to each other. “Because if you have kids, you’re going to have to continue to communicate for the next 20 years,” she says. About a quarter of DeMeo’s clients
choose to conduct collaborative divorces, a percentage she hopes will grow signifi- cantly in the years ahead. But it’s not for everyone, she realizes, and can run count- er to what many lawyers are trained to do regarding the protection of their clients’ information.
Still, she remains in favor of anything
that can mitigate the emotional devasta- tion that often accompanies divorce. But she knows as well as anyone that much of the pain has already been inflicted by the time clients reach her. “You can’t undo damage that’s been going on for the last five years,” she says. “Marriage is like a plant, and if you don’t water it and give it sunlight, it’s going to die. You can’t just take it for granted.” DeMeo thinks her own experiences
have made her a better, more empathetic lawyer.
“I really know what they’re going through,” she says. “But I would much rather have paid for the knowledge with- out having the pain.”
mccarthye@washpost.com
“I thought: ‘My God, it’s Denise!
I can’t believe it!’ ” Denise Pavone-Brooks & Jeffrey Storck
marveling that they lived so close. “My jaw hit the floor,” Pavone-Brooks says. “I was crazy about him. But I didn’t know if I wanted to answer — the way things happened at the end left a bad taste in my mouth.”
She did respond, and after a few e- mails catching up on life, they decided to meet for lunch. Sitting across from each other at a pizzeria in Reston, they en- countered the past. Each had put on a few pounds and about 35 years. But she still nodded sweetly as she talked. His deep voice was just the same. Two and a half hours later, he left wanting more but was wary of falling twice for the woman who’d hurt him the most. They hung out once more before Christmas, exchanged messages over the holidays and met up on New Year’s Day. What began as a fun outing to his mari- na turned into an intense marathon con- versation about what happened between them. Both said the things they’d never had the courage to say as teenagers. “It was just sort of an epiphany,” he
says.
“I was blown away,” she adds. “I had no idea how he felt about me.” That day, for the first time in more than three decades, Storck kissed his ex- girlfriend. And they decided to drop the “ex.”
Six days later, Pavone-Brooks left for a AT THE RECEPTION: A photo shows the couple at their senior prom.
seemed removed and uncaring. In truth: “I was lonely — and I was lonely for her,” he says. But he never told her that, or how much he loved her, or that he wanted to marry her someday. “I didn’t say those things to her, but really where it came from was my own insecu- rity.” Pavone-Brooks thought she was doing Storck a favor when she wrote him a Dear John letter — saving him from be- ing the one to call it off. She also secretly hoped he’d tell her not to do this, that the relationship was worth fighting for. He never wrote back. “I remember checking the mail every day to see if I’d gotten something, but after a few weeks, there was nothing,” Pavone-Brooks says. She took that to mean he didn’t care. But Storck was devastated. “I didn’t
leave my dorm room for three days,” he says. “I just kept reading it and balling it up and throwing it away and rereading it and balling it up and throwing it away.” It would be three years before Storck would date somebody new and a decade before he could go out with a woman without comparing her to Pavone-
Brooks. After college he settled in the Wash-
ington area. Unknown to him, she did, too. At one point in the early 1980s, they lived in developments across the street from each other in Fairfax and shopped at the same grocery store but never ran into each other. Pavone-Brooks eventually married and had three children. Storck came close to tying the knot once, but the wed- ding was called off. After her 14-year marriage ended, Pavone-Brooks focused on being a mom and building a career in the satellite industry. Storck, who works in sales and marketing, was mournful but resigned to a life alone, especially af- ter a tough breakup in 2005.
But last fall, a former girlfriend con-
tacted him through Facebook. It prompted Storck to wonder whether his first love, Pavone-Brooks, could also be found on the site. A quick search brought up her profile. “I thought: ‘My God, it’s Denise! I can’t believe it!,’ ” he says. In November Storck e-mailed her, ask- ing whether she remembered him and
two-month-long project in Kazakhstan. They talked for three hours a night and “wrote books to each other” via e-mail, Storck says. He made offhand remarks about marriage, and then she asked what he was waiting for. Just before Val- entine’s Day, he proposed over the phone. “I’m 52,” she says. “Why waste time?” Storck’s brother urged caution at first,
saying: “Oh, be careful. She dumped you once,’ ” he recalls. “And I said, ‘No, man, you don’t understand — I should’ve mar- ried her 35 years ago.’ ” Both say their relationship feels much the same as it did in high school — with some significant improvements. “It’s like 35 years never happened. But
it’s better because we’re both older and more mature and we talk to each other,” he says. “I’m not a 17-year-old boy any- more. I’m not afraid to tell her how I’m feeling.” On June 5, Pavone-Brooks was beam- ing as she walked down the aisle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Arlington. Throughout the cer- emony, Storck never took his eyes off the smiley redhead — still “the prettiest girl I’ve ever known.”
mccarthye@washpost.com
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