Not long ago, in a Starbucks in Evanston, I eavesdropped on a
couple breaking up.
It couldn't be helped. We were wedged together, the unhappy
couple and me, in a corner of the coffeehouse, so tightly that
we might as well have been commuters on a rush-hour train. I had
a newspaper open and every once in a while would try to read a
sentence or two but could never get far. My attention kept drifting
to the love affair being terminated next to me.
I had thought I was familiar with all the major categories of
breakup: The I've-Met-Someone-Else breakup, the You've-Never-Even-Introduced-Me-To-Your-Friends
breakup, the I-Can't-Be-With-Someone-Who-Thinks-Celine-Dion-Is-A-Great-Singer
breakup. But this one was new to me. These two people seemed to
be breaking up over scheduling problems.
"My life is just really crazy right now," the young woman was
telling her boyfriend. They were holding hands, and he was nodding
sympathetically. She said her classes were harder than she thought
they would be and her boss was asking her to put in more hours.
She just didn't have time for a relationship right now.
Her boyfriend was all empathy and understanding. He told the
woman not to feel bad. In fact, he said, he, too, was feeling
stressed. His busy season was approaching, and there would be
a lot of travel, and who can be in love under that kind of pressure?
I looked over quickly, and they were smiling, maybe because the
impossibility of their relationship was the first thing they had
been able to really agree on.
And so that was the end of it, as far as I know -- another romance
lost to the calculus of career. I'd like to tell you that the
couple shared one last tender moment before their PDAs started
beeping to remind them of their next appointments, but I lost
sight of them when the man went outside to get a better signal
on his cell phone. The woman just packed up her laptop and left.
And what better place for it to end, really, but at Starbucks:
the high church of the overscheduled, overcaffeinated, Type-A
American.
Maybe you've been privy to a similar scene playing out in a
coffeehouse or on a crosstown bus or at a college library workstation
near you. The federal government doesn't keep statistics on breakups,
as far as I can tell, but there is this fact: Since the 1950s,
men and women have been waiting longer and longer before getting
married. The median marriage age has climbed from 22 to 27½ years
old for men; and from 21 to 26 for women. All over America, people
just like the couple I sat next to in Starbucks are not getting
married. At least not yet.
What are they doing in the meantime? A lot of them are going
to graduate school, piling up degrees and tending to their careers.
Consider this confluence of statistical trends. As marriage age
climbed, so did the number of graduate degrees earned and the
average number of hours spent on the job. Over the last 30 years,
the number of people earning bachelor's degrees has increased
dramatically, as have the numbers completing master's and doctoral
degrees. Once they enter the workforce, those people have helped
turn the United States into what Boston College's Juliet Schor
calls a "workaholic nation." Singles represent 44 percent of the
American labor force. The average number of hours Americans spend
at work rose nearly 12 percent between 1971 and 2000. Americans
are, quite literally, putting their education and career first.
Love and marriage can, and does, wait.
That represents a significant development in the way we think
about work and love, but it's one that's been largely overshadowed.
For at least 15 years now, the focus has been on how work-related
pressures shape marriages and family life. In 1989, Arlie Hochschild's
groundbreaking book The Second Shift explored how dual-career
households navigate the tensions caused by spending more and more
time at work and less and less at home. More recently, an Atlantic
Monthly essay by journalist Caitlin Flanagan noted how working
parents depend on child-care options to sustain their careers,
effectively creating a new kind of "serfdom" of overworked and
underpaid child-care pros that, Flanagan argued, allowed working
women to escape the domestic roles to which they had once been
limited.
But work and career concerns aren't just changing family and
married life. They're also shaping the intimate lives of people
like the couple I encountered in that Starbucks in Evanston: highly
educated, highly motivated young people who are not married and
who may not be all that interested in marrying anytime soon. Having
spent their 20s building impressive resumes -- a couple of master's
degrees here, a prize fellowship there, a job on Wall Street,
but not until after those two years in Teach for America -- they
end up applying their career acumen to their relationships. Not
surprisingly, those relationships -- messy, irrational and unpredictable
-- don't always go as smoothly as their careers.
"In a relationship, you have to sacrifice," is how one Notre
Dame student explained it to me. "And I don't want to sacrifice.
I've got all these goals and plans, and I don't want to limit
myself by being with another person."
If love and work are at war, love is losing badly.
* * *
I came late to the battle between love and work, because for
the longest time I did my best to avoid both. In the years right
after college, I would have had trouble telling you which notion
seemed more stifling to me -- getting married or starting a career.
I've since come around on marriage, but work -- the daily grind
of meetings, memos and cubicles -- still looks to me like something
to be avoided.
Almost everyone likes to bitch about work, so it's a bit of
a surprise to find out how much time we spend there. Americans
average just under 2,000 hours at work each year, one of the highest
totals in the world. In the last decade, middle-class married
couples added 135 hours of work to their schedule each year. And
they might be considered slackers compared to most young single
people I know, who tend to be still sending me emails from work
when I'm trying to pack my 4-year-old son off to bed.
Why all this work? Well, most of us feel, if not squeezed, at
least a little economically anxious. And we suspect that if we
don't put in the extra hours it won't take the boss long to find
someone who will. But there's something else, too, something illuminated
most convincingly by Hochschild in The Time Bind. One
reviewer called it our nation's "dirty little secret": We like
going to work. One of the reasons we spend so much time there,
Hochschild suggests, is that we like it there more than being
home with the family. She showed that even when companies offered
flex-time and other innovative solutions to the work-home conflict,
working parents often neglected to take advantage of them. They
chose to put in the full day at the office, and often more.
It's really not hard to understand. Work at least offers a clear
job description and goals -- a chance to use the problem-solving
and communication skills we spent all those years polishing in
school. Home, whatever its comforts and satisfactions, is seldom
so rational, seldom so readily gamed. If you do a good job as
an account executive, your boss gives you a glowing review and
a raise. If you do a good job as a parent, your kids might call
you cruel and unfair.
As if the effects of all those years of education and all those
extra hours at work have seeped into our very hearts, a creeping
professionalism has begun to manifest itself in even our most
intimate relationships. This has been true since at least the
Reagan years, which is about when an old girlfriend informed me
that our relationship was no longer "meeting her expectations."
It was the first time I had ever heard the jargon of Human Resources
deployed in quite that way. Now that sort of pragmatic approach
to romance is almost commonplace. When marriages go bad, couples
are sent to a counselor who gives them homework assignments: Spend
five minutes each night complimenting each other, and have sex
on Tuesdays. It's hard to believe that such an approach would
work, but even if it did, one would be left with a marriage sapped
of any semblance of surprise or mystery.
But the resort to therapy is of a piece with our emotional professionalism.
We have been trained well. We don't just try things: We study
them; we master them. In her book The Year of Magical Thinking,
Joan Didion writes of the impulse, when faced with the loss of
a loved one, to turn to the Internet and to books, to "read, learn,
work it up, go to the literature." She recognizes that she shares
"a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful": a surpassing
faith in the power of information and the ability to navigate
crises by dint of management skills.
Love and marriage comes in for this treatment, too. Marriage
classes, intimacy retreats and romance workshops have become a
common feature of middle-class coupling. And that's to say nothing
of the big business of advice books, like The Purpose-Driven
Marriage and The Seven Principles for Making Marriage
Work. It sometimes seems we're all dutifully studying up
and staying current on the latest literature, as if pursing advanced
degrees in intimacy.
The ultimate goal of all this self-improvement, for the overwhelming
majority of us, is a successful marriage. Fully 90 percent of
Americans over 35 have married -- though, of course, not all have
remained married. And, as David Klein, an associate professor
of sociology at Notre Dame, pointed out to me, the University's
basilica is booked solid every summer with Domer weddings. In
fact, he says, "A ring by spring," that seemingly anachronistic
battle cry of the eager-to-wed undergraduate, is still in currency
in some residence halls.
Klein teaches a seminar on dating and courtship, and he says
that the urge to marry is the one reliable constant in student
attitudes. "Almost all my students say they expect to marry."
What has changed is the path they take to get to the altar.
According to Klein, classroom discussions reveal a greater orientation
toward career goals than ever: The first big decision for his
students is not who they will spend their lives with but where
they will find jobs. "Students say the first thing they have to
decide is where to live, and that decision is based on where the
job opportunities are," Klein says. "They're hesitant to consider
marrying while in graduate school or while getting started in
their careers. They're interested in having things all lined up.
Find a job, get financial stability, then start thinking about
a family."
Indeed, the highest achievers often end up having the hardest
time sustaining much of an emotional commitment. It's their very
mobility, the variety of options open to them, that can create
dilemmas. Recruited by employers from coast to coast and spending
much of their energy angling to get into the best graduate programs,
they don't have much incentive to settle into a stable domesticity.
And even if they did, they may find themselves in academic exile
in Ann Arbor or Austin while their significant other is climbing
the ladder in Boston or San Jose.
My last time in South Bend, I met a Notre Dame graduate student
who told me how troubled she was about her current love interest.
The problem wasn't the guy; she had nothing but good things to
say about him. But he was in Boston, in another graduate program.
They would like to be together, but it just wasn't possible now.
The more they talked about making a commitment to each other --
which, to be practical about it, meant one or the other giving
up the plan he or she was operating on -- the more she felt like
she was turning her back on professional options she hadn't yet
explored. The result: She felt pushed to reach conclusions about
the relationship before she was ready to do so.
"Relationships can't just naturally evolve under these kinds
of circumstances," she explained. "If I follow my career goals,
I may not be near him geographically. I love him and he loves
me, but I don't want to be the kind of woman who gives up her
personal goals for the sake of a relationship. I just can't imagine
a future that revolves around a relationship instead of my goals."
Most of the 20-somethings I spoke to for this article mentioned
similar cost-benefit analyses. Like their older and already married
counterparts, they're weighing the professional against the personal,
the practical against the emotional. For many of them, their careers
are taking precedence, at least for the short term. (Things may
change once children enter the picture. A much-hyped recent New
York Times account tells of recently graduated female Ivy
Leaguers opting out of the career path and choosing to stay home
and raise their children.)
If the cost-benefit approach sounds surprisingly calculating
and rational, Klein welcomes that rationality as a refreshing
change. "It wasn't 10 years ago that I was regularly questioning
their rationality," he says, laughing. "They wanted it all. They
wanted to be brain surgeons and to have eight kids, everything.
But I think more and more they recognize that they need to make
choices."
"It's a zero-sum game," is how Notre Dame sociologist Andrew
Weigert describes the kind of economic decision-making that shapes
relationships. "Your gain is my loss. To maximize careers, you
rationalize everything, including your family."
Those choices can be hard ones to make, but that's surely better
than having no options at all. The problem with any critique of
careerism is that it is too easily misread as a reactionary defense
of "family values" or a plain insistence that women belong at
home. To allow one kind word on behalf of careerism, it has at
least given more people more choices about what kind of life they
wish to live and given them the tools needed to live it.
* * *
Our increasingly pragmatic approach to dating, marriage and other
forms of intimacy has not escaped the notice of academic theorists.
Since at least the 1970s, some academics have been applying rational
choice economic theory to modern relationships. The resulting
vision is of a new kind of commodified, corporatized and commercialized
intimacy. Social economist Gary Becker and other proponents of
exchange theory suggest that marriage is best understood as a
choice made by rational consumers. "Persons marry," Becker has
written, "when the utility expected from the marriage exceeds
the utility expected from remaining single."
That's not exactly sweet talk, but for exchange theorists the
poetry of romance is nothing but a kind of marketing campaign.
Ultimately, potential partners are measured by the commodities
and resources they can offer to the marriage market: social standing,
good looks, money, to name a few.
There is, clearly, not much room in exchange theory for the
more irrational and self-effacing aspects of love. But neither
is there in other, more recently developed schools of thought.
The sociobiological perspective, for example, emphasizes evolutionary
factors in choosing partners. Driven by our genes' urge to survive
and replicate, our relationships become arenas in which we compete
for control and power. Our weapons are deception, cunning and
will. In this scenario, power males are driven to succeed in their
careers so that they can select from a wider field of trophy wives,
while cunning females scheme to catch a dominant male. For all
its cartoonish simplicity, the sociobiological mode will be readily
understood by those young people who have spent most of their
lives working to gain admittance to, and thrive in, the best schools,
the best companies, the best clubs. For that matter, it will make
sense to anyone who regularly watches reality TV.
Close relationship theory, on the other hand, is less interested
in marriage and procreation than in the ways relationships provide
personal meaning for those involved. The emphasis is on serial
coupling or, to use the term introduced by Kenneth Gergen, "microwave
relationships" -- partnerings designed to be heated up quickly,
consumed, then discarded. In close relationship theory, romance
is episodic and rapidly changing, and from each successive relationship
the individual emerges reinvented. This scenario is not such a
long stretch from the professional world that most of us recognize
-- a world of rapid change and insecurity, with employers dumping
workers and employees jilting bosses just as quickly as lovers
change partners. The beauty part is that once we've moved on,
each old job -- or each old relationship -- can be written off
as an opportunity for personal growth. A learning experience.
The connection between economics and intimacy is hardly a new
one. In Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America,
historian Ellen Rothman quotes a late-18th century American man
named Silas Felton who is so ashamed of his meager financial resources
that he cannot bring himself to propose marriage to the woman
he loves. Felton, in his reluctance to wed until he has his financial
house in order, may have been a man ahead of his time. Or is that
we have turned back the clock to an era when marriage was more
likely to be a frank business transaction than a love match? Is
the dowry about to make a comeback?
Of course, if you're looking for evidence of the growing professionalization
of love, you cannot overlook the workplace romance. In survey
after survey, about half of the people asked own up to having
dated, slept with or otherwise coupled with colleagues at work.
In a 2005 survey by the career consultancy the Vault, 58 percent
of respondents admitted to workplace romances, up from 48 percent
in 2003. Another 22 percent said they had met their spouse or
significant other on the job. We've all heard the cautionary tales
about the perils of emotional entanglements on the job; few of
us appear to be paying much attention.
In a Kansas City Star survey, singles bars and workplaces
finished tied for second place on the list of top places to meet
mates; only fix-ups from friends rated higher. Even employers
are growing more comfortable with workplace romances, relaxing
some of the rules that long restricted them.
There is an obvious explanation for the boom in on-the-job love.
As we spend more and more hours at work, our professional lives
are increasingly seeping into the other spheres of our existence
-- the parts that we used to quaintly call our personal lives.
A friend of mine, a veteran of a high-powered Chicago accounting
firm that demanded long hours and total commitment of its young
hires, says that one of the consequences of such a corporate culture
is rampant workplace romance. "Our jobs were our lives. We hardly
knew anybody on the outside," he remembers. "So we dated the people
we worked with."
"We do it because work has replaced family as our main society,"
another Notre Dame alum, a New York magazine editor, told me.
"We used to have ethnicity or religion or neighborhood in common.
Now it's work and career that drives us. Where else will we meet
people? And co-workers already understand how tough our job is.
They're built-in empathizers."
It's no longer just a matter of possibly having to relocate
for the sake of your career. Now your career path helps determine
who you'll marry, when you'll marry and if you'll marry.
Even our vocabulary betrays our coolly professional attitude
toward intimacy. The word relationship has become the all-purpose
descriptor for most kinds of coupling, having replaced such antique
terms as fling, flirtation, romance and, God forbid, love affair.
We're squeamish about these old words, maybe because they fail
to do justice to our hypereducated, utilitarian stance. Relationship
is a more rational word, but also tamer and less exciting. Love
has always suggested a kind of unguarded madness. A relationship,
well, that's something that can be managed.
We may not have much use for a word like romance anymore. When
I used it in passing in my conversation with that grad student
in South Bend, she visibly flinched. She said she didn't like
using that word to describe her relationship.
The last I heard, she and her long-distance boyfriend were still
seeing each other once a month or so. It took some doing to find
the time in their schedules to get together. Both work hard, both
are looking ahead and both have a lot of commitments. They're
both serious long-distance runners, as well, with several marathons
apiece to their credit. Their long training runs take up a lot
of time, too.
They don't train together, though. The woman told me she prefers
to run alone.
* * *
Andrew Santella (www.andrewsantella.com) has written for
The New York Times Book Review, Slate, GQ and other publications.
(April 2006)
