Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  Name checking became a common feature of serious writing about yuppies, too. In one scene of Don DeLillo’s 1985 breakout novel, White Noise, the narrator overhears his young daughter murmuring the names of car models in her sleep. “She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant. Toyota Celica.”

  * * *

  Jerry Rubin not only inspired a label for a generation obsessed with labeling. His Business Networking Salon also captured an important shift in how young professionals were approaching their careers. That was the rise of the idea that everyone should work—and should love working—nonstop. If shopgirls of the 1920s had tried to flirt, and even date, on the job, yuppies continued to hustle well after the office closed.

  The complicated financial instruments and maneuvers that Wall Street bankers and their lawyers cooked up inspired many a pun. “Corporate marriage” could refer either to a corporate merger—the consolidation of companies that was generating so much of the new wealth on Wall Street—or to a romantic partnership in which both lovers were lawyers or bankers, too busy to have much sex and therefore tolerant of affairs conducted on business trips. Consider the possibilities for double entendre afforded by “horizontal mergers,” “profit squeezes,” “position limits,” “extension swaps,” “rollovers,” “interlocking directorates,” and “tender offers,” and you get a rough idea of what passed for flirtation at an MBA cocktail hour.

  The famous speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford’s commencement in 2005 was tame by comparison. However, Jobs, too, exhorted college graduates to mix business and pleasure. Jobs insisted that the best thing that ever happened to him was being fired from his own company in 1985, because it taught him how important passion was for professional success.

  “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.” What he said next was widely reprinted and reblogged. “You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers … The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

  Do what you love. Love what you do. By the 1990s, versions of this exhortation had become ubiquitous. Still, they could not quite cover up the fact that the career prospects of many Americans were getting worse.

  In the Year of the Yuppie, the Research Institute of America found that overall, young Americans were experiencing downward mobility. Between 1979 and 1983, the median annual income for households in the twenty-five-to-thirty-four age range decreased by 14 percent in constant dollars. For the relatively unskilled, $12/hr union jobs manufacturing cars were disappearing and being replaced by $5/hr gigs flipping burgers.

  Today do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life no longer sounds very reassuring. Since the 1970s, falling wages have meant that everyone has to work more and more, whether they love it or not.

  * * *

  With the stakes of staying upper middle class so high, the yuppie who would consider dating anyone other than another yuppie would be out of his or her mind. And indeed in the 1980s, for the first time since the dawn of dating, America experienced a trend toward assortative mating.

  In biology, assortative mating is “a nonrandom mating pattern in which individuals with similar genotypes and/or phenotypes mate with one another more frequently than would be expected under a random mating pattern.” Textbook example: Animals with similar body sizes tend to reproduce with each other. Although it might theoretically be possible, one rarely sees a Yorkshire terrier attempt to mount a Great Dane, or (God forbid) vice versa.

  Before the rise of dating, courtship rituals like calling and church socials or Jewish settlement dances encouraged and even enforced similar mating patterns among humans. Parents and communities collaborated to ensure that young people paired off with partners who came from similar backgrounds.

  Dating did not entirely break down these old biases and barriers. The middle- and upper-class men who frequented saloons and speakeasies did not all marry the Charity Girls they treated. Institutions like schools sorted young people by educational attainment, which strongly correlated with family background and future earnings. Still, the migration of courtship from the privacy of the household, or the closed ranks of community centers, into public places where daters roamed unsupervised introduced an element of unpredictability. People who went out and hit it off with a stranger might actually fall in love.

  Moreover, workplaces offered opportunities for people from different classes and backgrounds to mix. At least until the early 1960s, a young woman in a professional workplace usually came from a lower socioeconomic bracket than the men she worked for. Until the 1980s, it was far from unheard of for a manager to marry a shopgirl, a boss to marry his secretary, or a doctor to marry a nurse. However, as women gained opportunities to enter corporations as associates and partners, as well as secretaries and stenographers, the office dating pool grew. It made sense that young men and women who came from similar backgrounds, had attended the same colleges and graduate schools, and spent twelve-hour-plus days working closely together would hit it off.

  It is difficult to find reliable government data on how much and what kinds of people date in any given period. But it is clear that in the final decades of the twentieth century, the highly educated women climbing the corporate ladder started marrying men who were their professional peers.

  A 2014 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that, whereas in 1960 only 25 percent of men with university degrees married women with them, in 2005, 48 percent did. Moreover, most highly paid women loved what they did. Or at least they faced huge opportunity costs for any time they spent off the job. If and when they had children, most promptly returned to work. Amplifying the growing economic inequality among American households, assortative mating patterns reinforced themselves.

  * * *

  Yuppies wanted to date other yuppies. The thing was, who had time? They may have been the first elite in human history to boast, as a mark of their status, that they could not afford a moment’s leisure. The leisure goods that yuppies did consume, they described as necessary to their work—as conveniences that made nonstop work possible (like eating out) or as part of a lifelong effort to work on themselves (like diets).

  Marketers soon discovered that you could sell yuppies anything if you promised that it would make them better. In New York, in 1982, a line of fitness studios called Definitions opened, offering $600 monthly memberships to young professionals who already belonged to a gym but wanted more targeted personal training. Today you can still buy sessions with a personal trainer in packages of twenty-five, for $2,800, at any one of a dozen locations.

  A sense of anxiety and precariousness lay not far below the well-toned surface of the yuppie, urging him or her to improve harder, better, faster. In 1984, Kellogg ran an ad campaign with the tagline It’s not “Are Grape Nuts good enough for you,” but “Are you good enough for Grape Nuts?” If you’re not the predator, you’re the prey, billboards for Puma sneakers warned.

  No wonder people were stressed! How could you know who was good enough to date? And where could you take them out, to prove you might be worthy of them?

  Yuppie daters were very particular about the restaurants they went to. Local newspapers of the 1980s are full of reviews of hot spots coming in and going out of fashion faster than the writers can keep up with. The Washington Post food editor Phyllis Richman told Newsweek in 1984 that whenever she went somewhere, “I inevitably find the same crowd of people have discovered it already.” She said that she could also sense when the yuppies would ditch a place, or taste—basically, as soon as the plebs caught on.

  “When I saw white-chocolate mousse being served in a Hot Shoppe,” Richman recalled, “I knew.”

  Luckily for daters who got restless so quic
kly, yuppies themselves came in many flavors. The press and pollsters sometimes talked about yappies (“young aspiring professionals”) and yumpies (“young, upwardly mobile professionals”). The Yuppie Handbook included a three-page spread listing the traits of Buppies (“black urban professionals”), Huppies (“Hispanic urban professionals”), Guppies (“gay urban professionals”), Juppies (“Japanese urban professionals”), and Puppies (“pregnant urban professionals”).

  Each subspecies had its own defining characteristics, but all were presented as customizations you might choose on a single yuppie model. Bullet points under “Buppie” included Greater familiarity with Reggae music. Preference for custom-made business suits. Tendency to name their daughters Keesha instead of Rebecca. If female, the inclination to wear a second pair of pierced earrings with their diamond studs. Guppies, by contrast, were distinguished by summer holidays on Fire Island instead of in the Hamptons and use of free weights instead of Nautilus equipment.

  These rhyming labels caught on with newspapers and magazines that carried stories about dating. The pun “yuppie love” became inescapable; “buppie” and “guppie” made good showings, too. The aural proximity of these jingling acronyms reinforced deeply held beliefs of the Reagan era: politics were passé; everyone started out the same; it was this equality of opportunity, not outcomes, that mattered.

  By this logic, a yuppie might choose his mate as freely as he chose a blue or tan or silver paint job for his Saab. Indeed, satirists described yuppies as treating their love lives like any other consumer or career choice. Only, if anything, a little less important.

  The section of The Yuppie Handbook devoted to dating and marriage is called “Personal Interfacing.” “Yuppies don’t love their lovers,” the preamble begins. “They love Vivaldi, their new apartments, and the color of the ocean off St. Thomas in January. They have relationships with their lovers.” According to the Handbook, yuppies broke relationships, like business deals, into three stages: (1) getting into, (2) working on, and (3) getting out.

  In an article on “Yuppie Love” in its 1984 Year of the Yuppie issue, Newsweek adopted a similarly arch tone. “It can happen anywhere, anytime. You’re sitting at a sales meeting, and this fabulous looking guy stands up and gives this really tremendous presentation, and all of a sudden you know, you’ve just got to have him in your division.”

  All joking aside, many yuppie daters felt despair. In 1985, the Associated Press interviewed a Boston social worker who taught a free course on “Spouse Hunting” at the city’s Adult Education Center. She recalled that ten years earlier, most of her students had found being single glamorous. Now, they all seemed miserable. “Urban life is so anonymous,” she said, “everyone is dying to know how to meet somebody.”

  Spending long days at the office, and one or two hours a day besides in the gym and personal-training sessions, many yuppies found that they had little of themselves left over to invest in romance.

  What could you do if doing what you loved took so much time and energy that you had none left for dating? One 1980s dating advice manual suggested buying an eye-catching breed of dog to meet other singles. The fitness addict could kill two birds with one stone by taking his or her canine conversation piece for a jog.

  “That’s still a thing!” my friend exclaims when I read this tip aloud to him.

  A more efficient approach was figuring out what you wanted in a partner before you started shopping. Just as businesses developed to cater to yuppies who were too busy to cook, or wanted to target their trapezius muscles without wasting time on, say, rowing, so did new services promise to help you date. To have highly specific taste was a plus: It helped you speed up your search by narrowing it down.

  * * *

  Cookie Silver was short. But she wanted tall.

  “I want tall,” she kept telling her matchmaker. “When I’m with a short man we look like Munchkins.”

  “But this one’s a doctor,” the matchmaker protested, of one of her prospects. “When he stands on his wallet, he’s over six feet!”

  Cookie recounted her story to the Chicago Tribune in 1985. By then, she and the tall man she held out for—an entrepreneur by the name of Howard Feldstein—had met, married, and acquired the local franchise of the video-dating service that introduced them. IntroLens was growing at a quick clip, adding hundreds of users every month and opening several new offices across the Midwest. It was only one of a spate of new businesses offering dating services to yuppie lonelyhearts. These promised to help daters find what they wanted in what little time they had.

  Dating services had been around since the 1960s. The first primitive forms of computer dating debuted during that decade. Like Facebook, Operation Match was designed by three students at Harvard. It allowed curious singles to submit several pieces of information about themselves and what they wanted, have these cross-referenced in a database, and receive a handful of recommended partners.

  In 1964, an accountant and an IBM programmer in New York unveiled a similar prototype that they called Project TACT (for “Technical Automated Compatibility Testing”). It catered to singles on New York’s Upper East Side. But these were novelties. The first “introduction services” to develop viable business models were low-tech.

  You would sign up, usually after a phone call, and then make an appointment to do an in-person interview with one of the “counselors” who worked in the office. The counselor would ask you a long list of personal questions—about your childhood, romantic history, job, hobbies, and religious preferences—and then whether you yourself had any deal breakers. Would you date a smoker? Would you date a divorcé? Within a few weeks you would start receiving cards in the mail with the names and phone numbers of dating prospects. These would continue arriving as long as you paid your membership fee. If you liked someone after talking on the phone, you could meet in person. The whole thing was basically like outsourcing the role of a meddlesome aunt who sets you up on blind dates to a stranger who had a bigger Rolodex.

  The personals sections that proliferated in the backs of many newspapers and magazines in the 1970s seemed less enticing to yuppie daters of the 1980s. Dating services that required so little investment up front were generally suspected of delivering low returns. For singles who wanted more selectivity, video dating offered an alternative.

  The first video-dating services started appearing in the 1970s, as the prices of video cameras, cassettes, and players fell. At most companies, when you signed up, you would be paired with a counselor. After you filled out some of the usual questionnaires—with basics like race, age, education level, occupation, and religious beliefs—the counselor interviewed you on camera, hiding herself offscreen. At IntroLens, Cookie Silver called this part “the talk show.” When you had finished, she allowed you to view your tape. You could ask to reshoot and edit, if you wanted. She labeled the finished product with your first name and filed it in a video library. At the best companies, these libraries were large.

  After you had made your recording, your matchmaker ran the answers you had put on your questionnaire through a computer database, which generated a list of prospective matches for you. You could make an appointment to pull the videos these singles had made, so that you could screen them in a private room. If you liked what you saw, you told the service; the service contacted the person on the tape and offered to show him your video. If you both were interested, you would be introduced. At most companies, these services would run you between $500 and $1,000 per year. Some also offered more expensive “lifetime” memberships, which were valid as long as you remained unmarried.

  The first video-dating company in the United States, Great Expectations, was founded in Los Angeles in 1975 by a mother and son team, Estelle and Jeff Ullman. It expanded quickly, franchising all over California and the West; in 1990, Jeff claimed that Great Expectations was responsible for six thousand marriages. (A current Facebook page for couples who met through the service fondly remembers Estelle as “everyo
ne’s Jewish mother.”) In the meantime, the company had inspired a lot of copycats. The first IntroLens office opened in 1979. Between 1980 and 1983, similar services rapidly started multiplying in cities across America.

  Eventually, video-dating services would cater to daters at almost every price point and in every demographic. There was Soul Mates Unlimited (for Jews in California) and Soul Date a Mate (for African Americans in or around Framingham, Massachusetts). In Boston there was Partners (for gays and lesbians) and Mazel Dating (for Jewish singles). Washington, D.C., had Today For Singles Inc., which served daters with herpes.

  In 1988, an exhibition at the Chicago Zoo called ZooArk even let visitors play a video-dating game on behalf of animals that belonged to endangered species. Using a computer connected to the International Species Information System—the resource that professional zookeepers use to do this—the exhibit let visitors browse prospective mates for one of the zoo’s “bachelors” and two “bachelorettes.” These were a white, black, and Asian rhinoceros.

  * * *

  In personal ads, computer databases, and video-dating tapes of the 1980s we can see contemporary online dating technologies struggling to emerge from their analog chrysalis. If yuppies had not invented the Internet, their personal assistants would have had to invent it for them. These text and VHS predecessors of online dating prepared us. For one thing, they taught busy singles to focus their romantic expectations—to spell out what they had to offer, what they were looking for, and where they might be likely to find it.