Petra Canan Trudell and Craig Trudell did not start dating for more than a year after they graduated from MSU.
Craig was living in New York City and working for Bloomberg when Petra moved to New York from Chicago to start a new job.
She was going to stay with a mutual State News friend, but her room wasn’t available for the first few weeks she was in New York City.
“She ended up shacking up at my place, and after a couple weeks that sort of became less of a, ‘yeah, you can crash,’ to a ‘hey, why don’t you just keep the key?’” Craig said.
Petra and Craig learned after they started dating that a lot of their friends saw it coming, she said.
“I think other people had the idea, but it didn’t really dawn on us at the time,” Petra said.
They met at The State News in fall 2007. Petra had worked there in spring 2007 and left for a summer internship, and Craig started in summer 2007.
“When I came back in the fall, he was (who) everybody was talking about, how talented he was and how smart he was,” Petra said. “Naturally, I had to meet whoever this new kid was, and then I realized just how incredibly nice he was.”
“Petra’s leaving out that she was the one all everybody was talking about in the spring before,” Craig said.
Working together at The State News was the “clash of the goody two-shoes,” Craig said.
“I think we would acknowledge there was a little bit of spark with us, but we were always very friendly rivals with each other at The State News,” Petra said. “We wanted a lot of the same positions. We both were ME (managing editor), we both wanted to be editor-in-chief and both lost. We had always had a friendly competition with each other so we were always on very good terms. I think we noticed it but we were always in other relationships.”
After they started dating in August 2010, Craig moved to Detroit in December 2010 for his job and Petra stayed in New York City.
“We continued dating and talked every day and eventually Petra decided to move from New York to Detroit—reluctantly,” Craig said.
“I was tired of being a very poor journalism intern,” Petra said.
They lived in Detroit for three years until Craig had the option to take a transfer to Tokyo, Japan.
Craig said when he came home after he received the offer Petra was cooking.
“(She) put down the spatula, took a deep breath and said, ‘OK, let’s do it’,” Craig said.
They moved to Tokyo six months after their wedding.
“We got married in August of 2013, and they always joke the first year of marriage is the hardest. We threw an international move to the other side of the world where we knew nobody in there, and it made the first year interesting,” Petra said. “We like the adventure and we knew we wanted to live abroad so it was perfect for us.”
After they spent three years in Tokyo, they moved back to Detroit and have been there for almost a year.
The State News taught them a lot about journalism and about each other, they said.
“You can learn a good amount by spending time with someone by just being friends or going out on dates … but it’s another thing to spend entirely too much time with one another in a professional setting where it’s really high stress and everyone has to coalesce around a common goal and common values,” Craig said. “There are a lot of up and downs to that and stresses and you end up sometimes being absolutely jubilant and other times absolutely at each other’s throat. In the end, you learn a lot about the people around you.”
Both being “news junkies” is another major part of the relationship, Petra said.
“When your date nights are ‘The Post’ and then coming home and watching ‘Frost Nixon’ you know you found the right person,” Petra said.
Without The State News, their relationship probably would not have happened, Craig said.
“I think we will always look back on that time very fondly, and I think that we’re very lucky to have that unique experience that brought us together,” Petra said.
© The State News