Some people find love a few drinks deep at the bar or in the check-out line at the grocery store. Or more often these days, on the apps. But a lucky few discover it knee-deep in the crisis of a massive water main break in the middle of the woods.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight for Celeste Amato and Stephen Stricklin, two City Hall veterans who find joy in efficiency. But they each came away from the experience with strong feelings about the other, rooted in something else: respect.

Stricklin, then an emergency manager for the Baltimore City Department of Public Works, remembers Amato being quick to offer kind words in the midst of the chaos. Assigned to help the department communicate about the 2010 incident, Amato walked away regarding Stricklin as a trusted partner.

Amato seemingly always needed a phone charger; Stricklin thought it was just a way to start conversation. Over time, he realized, Amato tended to give the job, the phone, everything, 100%.

“Steve’s a very positive person and doesn’t get ruffled easily,” Amato, 57, recalled. “He’s a good sharer of information — something that doesn’t always happen easily in a city.”

“Celeste was always appreciative,” Stricklin, 59, added. “Always made it worthwhile.”

Their first date happened at Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant in Annapolis about a year or so after the water main break. They say some of their best moments happened outside of the small circle in which they worked.

“If you’re going to date someone in Baltimore,” Amato noted, “you need to do it in another city.”

“Between the two of us, we know a lot of people,” Stricklin said.

“We are so Smalltimore.”

Sometimes Stricklin and Amato have found themselves at odds. They have reported to different, at times ideologically opposed, managers. And yet, their relationship has found a way to rise above any office drama.

Amato started her career in private development before taking her first job for the city under then-Mayor Kurt Schmoke in the 1990s. She’s worn a number of hats — in the Department of Housing and Community Development, the Baltimore Development Corp. and the public works department, to name a few. Now chief of staff for Comptroller Bill Henry, Amato once helped run Mayor Sheila Dixon’s “Cleaner Greener Baltimore” campaign to engage city residents in beautifying the city.

Stricklin said Amato’s enthusiasm for Baltimore has rubbed off on him, too. A former Coca-Cola and PepsiCo employee, Stricklin once joked that he would never work in city government. Then, a family member turned him on to a city job around 2008, and he went for it.

Stricklin has run the fleet at the public works department and worked for emergency management and the Department of General Services. Once serving under former Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, Stricklin now works as the city’s Chief of Operations and Construction in the Mayor’s Office of Infrastructure Development.

The couple said their work “crisscrosses” often, though they’ve never had to worry about violating professional boundaries (they have never supervised or managed each other). They maintain their own views and opinions. Sometimes they agree to disagree and retreat to their “separate corners.”

“We might agree a process wasn’t the best,” Stricklin said, “but there’s no point in us fighting.”

“We’re not ‘yes people,’” Amato added. “We push back on each other. There’s a willingness to be honest with each other and the people we work with, and it has served us and the people we work with well.”

Amato and Stricklin aren’t the first, or only, civil servants to find connection by way of Baltimore City Hall. The jobs tend to be stressful and thankless, requiring long hours, sacrifices in pay and a shared belief in the mission, forcing together even the unlikeliest of pairings.

Yet both Amato and Stricklin said these relationships are less common than they used to be; as Amato puts it, there’s less “hiring nepotism” nowadays. Many of the other intra-governmental couples they know have either retired or have left to take other jobs. Today’s city government workforce is also smaller than when Amato and Stricklin got to talking.

A few years ago, Amato and Stricklin went shopping for a ring, but there was no rush to tie the knot. They were already partners at work and in life — in Baltimore, and outside it.

But one day, Stricklin heard that Amato’s boss, comptroller Henry, planned to take a tour of the City Hall dome in late October with his staff, and it caught his attention. He called Henry and asked if he could come, too.

“I said, let me know when you do that, because I have a question I need to ask Celeste,” Stricklin recalled saying to Henry. “He goes, ‘Is it the question I think it is?’”

That day, Stricklin, with his sister and a friend, climbed the long and narrow staircase to the top of the building — a place Stricklin and Amato described as reflective and intimate — and waited to surprise the group. Amato entered ahead of the pack, looked around, and saw Stricklin and their loved ones gathered in the old, dusty space — unsure why they felt the need to attend the work function.

Stricklin got down on one knee and asked his colleague to marry him.

Amato responded, “Thank you!”

“Is that a yes, no, maybe?”

“It’s a yes,” Amato said back. As Stricklin tells it, the room then broke into a round of “thunderous” applause.

About two weeks later, the couple used their keys to let themselves into the building on a weekend with a couple witnesses and Henry, their officiant, for a brief ceremony. After more than a decade together, they made it official in the heart of their city. The heart of their love.

Sometimes the job has unexpected perks.