Labor of Love (22 page)

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 “everyone'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.

Print classified ads already required daters to do this. They forced you to boil down yourself and your desires into sound bites—and to know your audience. You could expect different people to read the personals at the backs of
The New York Review of Books
versus
New York
magazine, in the African American paper the
Los Angeles Sentinel
versus the beefcake glossy
Exercise for Men Only
. You had only a few words to catch the right eyes. Jeff Ullman, the Great Expectations founder, traveled the United States offering motivational lectures and seminars to anxious singles. When I reach him at his home in Colorado, he recounts how he used to boost the confidence of attendees by telling them they should not feel ashamed to be selling themselves.

“‘What is advertising?' I would ask. ‘Let's look it up in the dictionary.'” Then he would pull out a dictionary.

“‘
Advertising.
Taking a product or a service and promoting it.' I believe that is what you're doing. You're a product, you're a service, you're a thing—you're a bag of carbon and water—and you're here because you want to mate, date, procreate. Every one of you is advertising for yourself.”

As more and more dating services began using computers—creating databases of clients and cross-listing them—the imperative to
go niche
would turn from being a good strategy to a technical requirement. You had to be able to express your personality in
exactly
the right keystrokes. Daters quickly learned to convert themselves to code.

Until the early 1980s, dating services had been seen as slightly pathetic. You can tell by how adamantly the pioneers of video dating insisted that their customers were
not
pathetic. Jeff Ullman, the Great Expectations owner, actually sued a local bank in Southern California whose billboards joked that its generous interest rates offered clients “more zeros than a dating service.” “When I saw it,” Ullman fumed to the
Los Angeles Times
, “I almost drove off the road!”

“These aren't losers, you understand,” Joan Hendrickson assured
The Washington Post
of the clients she served at the branches of her upscale D.C. service, Georgetown Connection. “On the contrary, these are people who are confident and willing to take a risk.” In a business piece on the spectacular growth of the People Network and several other New England video-dating companies between 1981 and 1983,
The Boston Globe
concurred. “Once viewed as the alternative for love's losers, they appear to be gaining a new image of respectability, especially among singles who are busy career professionals.

Yuppies had made work itself glamorous. In doing so, they had made it admirable (rather than pitiful) to be too busy to have a social or romantic life.

The way people talked about video dating reflected a new level of comfort with the idea that courtship was simply another part of the economy. Today, controversial dating services frequently invoke the existence of demand for their services as a moral justification that needs no further explanation. Before the August 2015 data breach that made Ashley Madison, the dating site for cheating spouses, infamous, the founder, Noel Biderman, defended it by saying that it simply facilitated interactions that would take place anyway. SeekingArrangement describes the “sugar dating” it brokers as “relationships on your terms.” It promises convenience—“find a relationship anywhere, anytime on any device”—and advertises “ideal relationships” that are “upfront and honest arrangements with someone who will cater to your needs.”

Of course, the market does not always offer happiness. The idea that new technologies could create a perfect delivery system for human desire set many daters up for disappointment. For some, it inspired unrealistic expectations.

In a video-dating tape that is still floating around on YouTube, a thin man with a mullet describes what he is hoping for: “a figure that is sexy … slim, tight, excellent legs.” He pauses to look up into the camera and literally smacks his lips. “Mmmm.” His was the problem that still confronts daters on many apps and services: The specter of infinite possibility and choice creates hopes that only can be dashed, again and again, in a search that never ends.

Article after article related how brutal video dating was on women. A headline in the
Chicago Tribune
joked drily that “For a 4-Figure Fee, You Get Rejected Regularly.” The story focused on the plight of an attractive, professional forty-something-year-old woman, recently divorced, who was roped into paying $1,450 for a membership from which she never got one single date. “Video dating services are great,” the authors joked. “Just as long as you're either (a) A gorgeous woman, under 35, with a glamorous career, or (b) An average-looking man, under 65, with an ordinary job.”

Even the proprietors of dating services admitted that it was hard for them to help female clients who had passed middle age. Bob Greene, the columnist who had coined “yuppie,” told the heartbreaking story of a seventy-year-old widow named Nancy who drove in from the Chicago suburb of Berwyn to sign up for a service called Sneak Previews Inc.

“My husband died seven years ago,” Nancy told the owner, Joseph De Bartolo. “You get so lonely when that happens. Every year you get lonelier.”

De Bartolo told Greene that he had not wanted to take her money. He warned the septuagenarian, “We really don't have a lot of people who it might be appropriate for you to choose.”

“That's okay,” she replied. “I don't expect to walk out with a date today.” When Greene followed up several months later, he found Nancy at home, alone.

*   *   *

Like the bars, speakeasies, and school dances that came before them, computer-dating services were platforms. Only the technology of courtship was supposed to have improved. Computers promised to rationalize the dating market—to clear up inefficiencies that kept the supply of yuppie singles from finding its demand. When online-dating companies began to take off in the mid-1990s, they assembled larger and larger databases and deployed automated processing power. As more Americans got online, and it became possible to delegate the work of a Cookie Silver to algorithms and a webcam, dating services would become affordable and available to virtually anyone who wanted to use them. You could belong to two or three dating services at once. By the turn of the millennium, the numbers of members of sites like Match.com and PlentyOfFish had climbed into the tens of millions.