How a Writers Strike Gave Birth to a Real-Life Romance

It’s the perfect premise for a rom-com. Two TV writers looking for love find it in the most unlikely place: on a picket line, striking with their union. That’s exactly what happened to Stacy Traub and Hunter Covington during the 2007 writers strike, but no studio executives have been interested in bringing that scenario to the screen. “Anytime I write something slightly close, they never want my character to be a TV writer,” Traub says with a sigh. “People feel like it’s not relatable. But for me, it’s relatable!” 

Less than a week into the 2023 writers strike, they’ve invited friends and colleagues to celebrate their 10th anniversary on the exact spot where they met and later got engaged. A number of people gather on a windy corner in front of Fox Studio’s Galaxy Gate, holding up their picket signs to make a tunnel for the couple to run through. Traub wears a white sash with the word “BRIDE” ironically slung across her fuschia blazer. Covington sports a bushy beard, tattoos, and a T-shirt that says, “If my wife can settle, then so can the AMPTP”—referring to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the organization that represents the industry’s studios. 

The two originally met in the fall of 2007 at a singles-themed picket that Covington organized. He was writing for My Name Is Earl at the time, and egged on by a few fellow singletons, he decided to look for a silver lining in a potentially grueling strike. This was an era before modern-day dating apps, he points out; it was worth a try. His Earl colleague Danielle Sanchez-Witzel brought her friend Traub, who was then the showrunner of a show called Notes From the Underbelly. The mother of an infant and a toddler, Traub had recently gone through a divorce. “Being in a writers room is such a safe space, and if your life is gonna fall apart, it’s kind of a great place for it to happen—you know, I had people around me making me laugh,” she recalls. When the strike hit, she looked to the picket lines for a sense of community. 

The singles picket was low pressure. “I thought there’s a chance that this [fix-up] could work,” says Sanchez-Witzel. “It would be so, so casual, because we’re always walking in a circle. So we could walk by and say hello, and kind of loop back around.” Afterward they went out together for a meal that cemented their interest. “That was the start of a beautiful union within our beautiful union.”

Not that their romance ran smooth: There were enough bumps in their relationship to fill a six-episode streaming series. “I had an almost three-year-old and a four-month-old, and he didn’t have kids,” says Traub. “I came with a lot of baggage and he was like, I don’t know if I can handle this. So we broke up.” A year later, though, they found their way back to each other, began dating and had a child together. In 2012, Covington came home one night suggesting that they head to Culver City to buy a sofa that was on sale. He took a weird route, and suddenly Traub realized where they were: the Galaxy Gate. “Hunter takes off his jacket and he’s wearing his Writers Guild strike T-shirt. He gets down on one knee and he proposes exactly where we met.” They married in May of 2013.

Their strike romance is now legend in the community, according to Sanchez-Witzel. She was talking about the anniversary to a young writer picketing at Amazon this week. “She said, ‘I heard that story that someone got married, but I didn’t know it was actually true!’ I think there was some optimism in her eyes, like, ‘maybe we should do a singles picket.’”

For Covington, this strike feels different than the 2007 one—and not just because he’s 10 years older with a wife and kids. Back then, writing for television and film felt like a more stable career. “Now I think most people are hurting,” he says, “especially when you adjust our earnings for inflation…. ln 2007, we were fighting about what TV on the internet was gonna be and getting a foothold in that. And now it’s that television as a career seems like it’s not a sustainable thing…. I feel like we are really fighting for the future in a way that we weren’t in 2007.” He pauses as more well-wishers with picket signs arrive, then continues. “A group existential crisis about a career is kind of a weird place to be. But that’s why we’re in a union, and that’s why we have each other.”