On Exit Interviews

In the world of Human Resources, you usually have a sit-down interview with your departing employees to find out why they're leaving.

You ask them about how their needs were or weren't met, determine whether there was a breakdown somewhere along the way, and basically give them an opportunity to give very frank 'feedback' about the dissolution of the relationship. The idea is, I guess, that since they don't have to be there anymore, that they'll be brutally honest and that you'll gain insight on how not to make the same mistakes again.

When one is in love and that love ends, and one is struggling through the painful haze of rejection, there is, at times, an overwhelming urge to find out just why that person tendered their resignation.

I wonder, when it comes to finding out what exactly happened...

...do we ever really want to know?

Sometimes knowledge means power. Sometimes an ex will tell someone, who tells you, that he's still not quite over you. Sometimes you'll find out from an old coworker that the person who took over your job never connected with people the way you used to. And sometimes a friend will tell you that the reason you fell out of touch was because they just absorbed in a new relationship and that they sure do miss those times you used to clink Cosmopolitans and discuss what to do when the bill sits too long on the table on a first date.

But when the emotional stakes are as high as they are after a breakup, is it ever a good idea to get the pure, unvarnished, and sometimes splintery truth?

Certainly there is a temptation to think that there might have been a simple equation that we just missed in the delicate dance of finding the right person in the big, mean city. That there was a simple need there that we didn't meet, some misstep along the way that could be rectified by a simple and heartfelt conversation over a bottle of very good Shiraz. That if we could only figure out the fatal flaw, that we could resolve everything and go back to sharing overpriced dinners and underclarified relationship status. Or if it couldn't recover, that at least we wouldn't risk another relationship with our clinginess, distance, or other imagined failings.

But I guess that assumes that we're able to work on ourselves in love the same way we do in our jobs, and I suspect it might be a little more tricky than that. After all, I know that I've myself initiated breakups for some pretty capricious reasons. But it wasn't so much about the person themselves as where I was, or what I thought I wanted at the time. I've broken things off because they never wanted to have "the talk" and with others for being too clingy. I once broke up with someone because he was a 'loose kisser'; another time I decided that I had to break things off because the man in question didn't support women in the military, and I figured that meant my future would necessarily include humping TV dinners and twist cap domestic beer out to the rec room every night of our married life. Another girlfriend of mine broke up with someone because he insisted on wearing a down vest with everything to regulate his body temperature, and to her, it symbolized a fundamental incapacity to deal with life's challenges.

The thing is, there wouldn't have been anything that they could have done. It wasn't really about face tautness or feminist repression or inappropriate outerwear choices. Those were cosmetic reasons that were much easier to explain than tackling the more challenging notion of "they're just not the one." Our paths not taken are inevitably someone else's down-filled Romeo, so perhaps it's best to let sleeping vests lie.

And another compelling reason for leaving the rocks unturned might be to preserve our hopes, at least for that tender stage when you're bursting into tears at the sight of the extra toothbrush in your bathroom. I think most of us have looked back on a romance long abandoned, for reasons known only to us at the time, and wondered what might have been. For a moment, we miss the way their cologne used to smell, or the way they heard us tell the same story at a party three times and never said a word, or the way they used to let us curl up into the nook of their arm until we feel asleep even when they were lying awake semi-paralyzed. It's comforting to think that the people who broke our hearts might be falling asleep somewhere, possibly with a photo of someone new on their nightstand, but thinking about how cute it was that we used to pretend to be asleep on the couch when they got home late just for the sheer pleasure of getting carried to bed. I'd love to think that.

Despite our deepest impulses, our dark and insatiable urge to know the real story, the truth is that sometimes there isn't something that we could have put our finger on and fixed. We may call our weaknesses "areas for opportunity" in the workplace, but in the realm of the heart, a performance review may never be the path to enlightenment. So I say forgo the exit interview. We may not be great analysts, or time managers, or team players, but we are all great at being brave enough to love again after being left.

Knowledge may give us bargaining power, but trust gives us resilience, and that will hold us in good stead even when the deal goes bad. And our memories, I think, no matter how fallible, are just too precious to ever negotiate with.



For my very brave, very best friend, K, who is still looking for that puffy vest that fits her just right.

On Secretly Being a Yuppie

“Yuppie stands for "young upwardly mobile professional". Nightclub flunkie is not a professional category. I wish we were yuppies. Young, upwardly mobile, professional. Those are good things, not bad things.” ~ Des McGrath from Walt Whitman’s The Last Days of Disco

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how social monikers have become anathema? There were days when people would proudly declare themselves hippies, when feminists didn’t politely preface any opinion with “I definitely wouldn’t call myself a feminist,” and when people didn’t shrink from announcing themselves as Republicans for fear of being taken for a gun-toting anti-abortionist happily strafe-bombing Middle Eastern daycare centers. In simpler times, identifying with a group was reassuring; it served as a guidebook of how to dress, act, think, and whether or not one should ever buy a Volvo; and also to neatly distinguish neighbors in the daunting sameness of suburban life. ("Darling, of course we should have the Smiths over for dinner, but I heard they have their children home-schooled, are we quite sure they're not Communists?")

The neologism “yuppie” was coined, according to those sources that define such inane things as these, during Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. The term was used to describe his strongest supporters: socially liberal yet fiscally conservative young professionals. When Newsweek proudly proclaimed 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie,” the delight once taken in simple social categorization came under sudden and vicious attack by the emerging Generation X. Caught up in the orgy of apathy towards conformity, the title quickly tumbled from grace, absorbing all the negative connotations we can quickly recall by leafing through an issue of The Sharper Image, and its use today has dwindled to the point of near-extinction.

But have the yuppies themselves? I say no.

One defining quality of yuppiedom that has clearly not died with the label was single-minded devotion to career. According to The Yuppie Handbook (1984), “career had to be personally meaningful, emotionally satisfying, and a vehicle for self-expression;” in other words, people took their jobs far too seriously. Take a look through the titles in the corporate section at your local bookstore or at the ridiculously aggrandized vision and mission statements of any company’s website, and you’ll see that little has really changed.

(“Our guiding mission is to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities through leadership, innovation and partnerships. Our vision is to be the quality leader in everything we do.” Name the organization? Tim Horton’s. Yes, folks, that lofty statement is the aim of a company that makes donut holes.)

Even job titles are morphing to keep pace with the need for us to imagine ourselves as deeply and emotionally fulfilled by our nine-to-fives; call me cynical, but it doesn’t make bothering people at home any more fun by calling myself a Outbound Customer Advocate rather than a telemarketer, and Ken Blanchard must be completely unfazed by his co-worker’s snickers to call himself the 'Chief Spiritual Officer' of his unimaginatively named Ken Blanchard Companies.

Yuppies were also highly discriminating (or at least highly self-conscious) about their social markers. No Danish minimalist glass coffee table would have dared be unadorned by a copy of The New Yorker, high-end food brands became the rage, and beer was snubbed in favor of wine, even by men (somewhat understandably – this was before the age of the microbrewery.)

Sound familiar? I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be thrilled to find something other than Maxim in their potential date’s apartment. Capers and other high-priced “whole life” markets are popping up all over the place like the scrappy little organic veggies they sell, and “wine bar” has now entered our common lexicon just as “pub” goes on the wane. Those who pointed at the yuppie smugly and laughed at their slavish dedication to brands such as LL Bean and Mercedes should be cautioned; those who live in Apple or Lululemon houses best not throw stones.

What else did a yuppie make? An obsession with health and fitness, designer vodka, stainless steel appliances, cocaine, exposed brick, cocktails with silly names, and pasta. A quick spin through the trendy district of any urban center – and I point squarely at thee, Yaletown – shows that while carbohydrates have gone out of style, little else has. Politically speaking, I can't recall a single conversation I've had in the last few years where the person I was speaking to didn't say that they were "in the middle." "How so?" "Well, I mean, I'm socially liberal, but I don't believe in how overrun the government is by special interest groups." Right. In other words, be a whale-saving feminist minority rights supporter all you want, just don't ask me for any money for it. Socially liberal but fiscally conservative.

And now we're back to Gary Hart.

So, I am sad to say, we may in fact still be yuppies; it’s just that a label tends to fade very quickly until the group it defines eventually expropriates it. (I suppose that’s why honky never really caught on.) The yuppies may have shed their label in shame because the hippies and hipsters made fun of them, but they quietly went about consuming anyway. Now after a twenty year hiatus whereby we were scolded by Greenpeace, enlightened by the Body Shop and cautioned by Enron, the yuppie is back. And we are he.

Look on the bright side; a yuppie, at least, would have never been caught dead shopping at Walmart.

For my friend C, who is the only other person besides me who would admit to being a yuppie.

On Right and Wrong

Why is it so hard to make the right choice? Very simple.

The wrong choice is always as much fun as you wish the right one was.