Labor of Love (21 page)

“When you're ambitious in the business world, your day does not end at 5 o'clock,” Rubin told Greene. His parties were invitation only. Guests had to pay $8 and deposit their business cards at the door, to be sorted later and ranked on a scale of networking value that ranged from A to D. The lights stayed on, and the sound track was soft classical music.

“This is not a singles bar,” Rubin emphasized. “It's a way for businesspeople to meet other businesspeople. It's an extension of the business day.” In March 1983, he had plans to franchise in thirty-six cities. Someone at the party that Greene attended quipped that Rubin had gone from being leader of the
yippies
to spokesman for the
yuppies
—young urban professionals. In the process, he had also converted one of America's most famously debauched places to go out to into a place to network.

Rubin was not the only one who recognized that yuppies presented an enormous opportunity. In the early 1980s, political pollsters and market research firms became fixated on the emerging demographic. A study conducted by the California think tank SRI International in 1984 found that there were four million Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine who earned at least $40,000 per year in professional or management positions. Between 1979 and 1983, 1.2 million of them had moved to the cities that their parents had fled for the suburbs. They bought up Victorian brownstones and co-ops in factories and warehouses, which had fallen into dereliction as America deindustrialized, and developers were now racing to renovate.

One million–plus was not enough to command serious attention from national politicians. But when pollsters lumped together all baby boomers with college degrees who were working in white-collar or technical professions, the number came to more than twenty million. As the companies aimed to capture the growing incomes of this market segment, the media obsessed about them, producing taxonomy after taxonomy of their peculiar traits.

The main mythology that grew up around yuppies concerned not how much they bought, but
what
they bought. Armed with credit cards, they spent high sums on things that would have seemed absurd even five years earlier. Gourmet mustard. Espresso machines. Gym memberships. They did not want it all. They wanted very specific things. To train their triceps, not their deltoids. Not a Labrador, but an Akita.

When the bestselling satire
The Yuppie Handbook
came out in January 1984, it established that the foremost trait of a yuppie was an obsession with
particular
products. The cover depicts a white couple standing side by side, with each item they are wearing and holding clearly labeled, as in a high school physiology diagram. He has a pinstripe suit, in the pocket of which there is a Cross pen; a Rolex watch; and L. L. Bean Maine Hunting Duck boots. He is carrying a Gucci briefcase and a Burberry trench coat is slung over his forearm. She sports a Ralph Lauren suit, a Cartier Tank Watch, and white running shoes. With a Coach bag on one arm, and a bag of gourmet fresh pasta on the other, she is listening to her Sony Walkman.

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 quickly, 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.”