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The Bridget Jones Economy The
Economist - December 22, 2001
Singles and the city - How young singles shape city culture, lifestyles and economies
ONE of the funniest films of 2001, "Bridget Jones's Diary", depicts the life of a young woman who fails over and over again to keep the new year's resolutions that open the book on which the film is based. "I will not", Bridget promises herself: Bridget may be a caricature, but only just. Her creator, Helen Fielding, has drawn someone much more human and recognisable than the elegant and wealthy young New York singles in the TV shows "Friends" and "Sex and the City". Yet all three portray the people who now dominate and shape the rich world's city life, not just in New York and London, but increasingly in Tokyo, Stockholm, Paris and Santiago: well-educated, single professionals in their 20s and 30s. Bridget and her friends have begun to show up in the census figures. Spotting them is tricky: many of those who live alone are not Bridgets, and many Bridgets share a pad with someone else. However, the evidence adds up. In America's 2000 Census, one-person households outnumbered for the first time married families with children. Many of these households consist of divorced, widowed or elderly people. But the biggest rise in the 1990s was in the proportion of young people who are living alone. In the past three decades, says Jason Fields of the US Census Bureau, the proportion of 20-24 year-old American women who have not married doubled from 36% to 73%; and that of 30-34 year-olds more than tripled, from 6% to 22%. Some of these singles - but again, not all - are single mothers, another fast-growing group. And many others (and their male equivalents) are Friends, not Bridgets: they share with other youngsters. The 1990s saw a rise in the proportion of households in which people live with someone to whom they are not related, either by blood or marriage. What explains the trend? The key seems to be the higher education of women. In most rich countries, more women than men now go to university; in particular, women make up more than half the students taking professional qualifications in subjects such as law and medicine. As new job opportunities unfold, they often earn as much as similarly qualified men. They find work is fun and it pays well, so they put off marriage. Husbands and babies can wait. "Today, people know that they are going to be married till they are 80. So 40 is the new 30," says Marcus Matthews of Kaagan Research, a market-research firm. Up to now, that has been a strategy that makes sense. More people marry today - at least once - than ever before. Thus fewer than 7% of Americans in their early 50s have never married. Compare that, says Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, with America in the late 19th century. Then, the marriage market was far less efficient and 20-25% of women never married. The result, he says, has been a sort of democratisation of marriage and motherhood, where almost all women marry and most have at least one child. But the longer women delay, the bigger the chance of failing to do either. Bridget sums up the problem. "The trouble with trying to go out with people when you get older is that everything is so loaded," she grumbles. When you are partnerless in your 30s, the mild bore of not being in a relationship - no sex, not having anyone to hang out with on Sundays, going home from parties on your own all the time - gets infused with the paranoid notion that the reason you are not in a relationship is your age. The whole thing builds up out of all proportion, so finding a relationship seems a dazzling, almost insurmountable goal, and when you do start going out with someone it cannot possibly live up to expectations. The odds are further stacked by the fact that the cities which attract Bridgets are also inevitably places where a disproportionate number of the men are gay. In "Boiler Room", a film about life in New York, a group of beefy stockbrokers teases the gay men at the next table. "You guys ought to find your own island," jeers one. "You're on it," retorts one of his targets. No wonder young New York women, already a majority, fret so much about the difficulties of finding a partner. Meeting
and mating The boyfriend-hunt is a big part of Bridget's life. And so it is with real-life Bridgets, many of whom find the big cities to which they flock lonely places. In competitive New York, the problem is at its worst: the Machiavellian brutality of office politics makes it hard to form friendships with the folk at work. Besides, many young New Yorkers live alone in tiny apartments. Their counterparts in London typically share, finding a flat through the pages of Loot, a newspaper in which the ads lay down in great detail the desirable qualities of "third woman to share non-smoking mixed house in Kentish Town". In London, the third woman could expect to meet the friends of her flat-mates in front of the television in the living room, or scavenging in the fridge in the communal kitchen. In New York, the only way to meet people is to go out. So location becomes everything. As with other efficient markets, geographical clustering thrives: "You want to be where the potential partners are, not stuck out in the suburbs," argues Robert Beauregard, professor at the New School for Social Research. A few corners of Brooklyn, such as Park Slope, or Hoboken, New Jersey, may pass muster. But mainly that means Manhattan, and especially quarters such as the Flatiron district or "Alphabet City": Avenues A, B, C and D on the Lower East Side, where Bridgets rub shoulders with Dominican immigrants. The aim is to find somewhere affordable and fun. When Ruth Bienstock of the Corcoran Group, a New York estate agent, finds homes for young professionals, she tells them: "This exorbitant rent is because you are joining a club. God knows it's not for the space. The privilege of being part of this energy is what you're paying for." If you are a single woman, you want access to eligible men included in the price. In July 2001, the New York Observer published a helpful article on "Where the Boys Are", with colour-coding to show which neighbourhoods had more men than women. In general, the boys tend to be in neighbouring bars and restaurants. New York restaurants typically have a large and welcoming space in which groups of women can feel comfortable drinking together. The tone at Lot 61, a fashionable nightclub run by Bruce Leggett-Flynn on West 21st Street in New York, is set by expensively groomed young women who arrive for the evening in predatory groups. In Prada denim jackets and Jimmy Choo shoes, they expect to buy their own drinks with their own money. "The women are in complete control," Mr Leggett-Flynn observes. For those who dislike staying up past midnight on "school days", bars are not the only bet. Fashionable food shops have become hunting grounds in the mating game. In New York, grocery shops such as Fairway and Zabar are packed after work with singles. Not long ago, one couple celebrated their meeting in the cheese section of Fairway by getting married there. An enterprising shopping mall, the Trafford Centre in England's Manchester, has taken this to its logical conclusion and runs a singles night. "I'm single, let's mingle," urge the stickers that shoppers receive. If the cheese counter fails, there is always the gym. After work, America's young singles head for the rowing machines, the workout and the juice bar. All those pounding, straining figures are not in pursuit just of the body beautiful. Gyms and health clubs are sexy places. Finding Bridget a mate has produced all sorts of entrepreneurial solutions. Lots of them are on the Internet, allowing the hunt to continue through working hours. Adam Klein, a consultant with Booz-Allen & Hamilton who was until recently running a search site called Ask Jeeves, says that over two-thirds of those who came to search were women, mainly aged between 18 and 35. That contrasts with sites such as Google, used mainly by men. Half an hour before people leave work for home, the site regularly sees a surge in seekers. Lots of women are hunting for dating sites, he says, "one of the fastest growing sections of the Internet". Among them are Match.com, which claims to be "the web's largest community of discriminating eligible singles". Another site, Its Just Lunch, is a "specialised dating service for busy professionals" offering browsers a low-commitment chance to meet. Several enterprising companies run "speed dating" services: a group of would-be partners chat to each other for precisely six minutes in a bar: then a bell rings, and all move on to the next person. All this partner-hunting is stressful - and stress can be costly. Psychoanalysis, reports Jennifer Senior, a successful journalist on New Yorker magazine, is a big expense for many of her colleagues and friends. "Psychic maintenance" easily costs as much as rent. She pays $1,700 to share a flat with another woman in the East Village; therapy, which she recently stopped, cost her $1,200 "and I was getting the bulk rate". Almost everyone in her office, which is full of young singles, and most of the men she has dated have tried therapy at some stage. There is a cheaper option. When it all grew too much for Bridget, she picked up the telephone and rang her friends, Jude, Shazza and the gay Tom. "I know we're all psychotic, single and completely dysfunctional," says Tom at one point, "but it's a bit like a family, isn't it?" Others have the same thought. In an article in the magazine of the Sunday New York Times in October, Ethan Watters, a writer living in San Francisco, described life "In My Tribe". As he moved into his 30s, he found that he had become part of a group of friends. "After a few years, that group's membership and routines began to solidify. We met weekly for dinner. We travelled together, moved one another's furniture, painted one another's apartments, cheered one another on at sporting events. One day, I discovered that I belonged to an urban tribe." Many singles are part of these tribes. Their intertwined lives have become more flexible thanks to the mobile telephone, which allows plans to be set and changed in a matter of moments. The tribe provides the support and security that the fragmented families of these young singles frequently fail to offer. Markets
for one Because young singles have so much disposable money and because they set so many trends, they are a market that many companies long to sell to. But their independence and unpredictability make them hard to define and capture. "Targeting Bridget Jones is like trying to nail Jello to the wall," says David Copper, a marketing specialist at Bain, despairingly. Bridget's taste for booze makes her prime quarry for companies such as Allied Domecq, where Matt Wiant, head of American marketing, argues that the drinking tastes of young women are the key to creating a market for various spirits that were once drunk mainly by middle-aged men after dinner and with a cigar. Courvoisier brandy is a case in point: his company is trying to reinvent it by persuading young women to order it mixed with Cointreau and cranberry juice. Young men, he argues, look to their girlfriends for suggestions on what is and isn't fashionable to quaff.
Marks & Spencer took rather longer than Ms Fielding to notice the part that it plays in stuffing calories into British singles. But the store recently realised that its portions-for-one of pre-prepared food were designed for the bird-like and conservative appetites of the elderly, and not for young women (let alone young men). It now does a good trade in large one-person helpings of ethnic goodies such as noodles and lamb tagine. But the main thing that distinguishes Bridget from her married sisters is the amount of time and money she spends on simply having fun. Most of that fun happens outside the apartment. Scott McDonald, head of marketing research at Conde Nast, publishers of Vogue and other Bridget mind-fodder, is impressed by how much single professional women in their 30s spend on holidays, art classes, music lessons, health clubs, concerts, yoga classes, movies, eating out - and, of course, shopping and shopping. DDB's study found them especially likely to jog, play tennis and take exercise classes. Even more than marketing men, though, cities in need of economic revival have their eyes on young singles. Many of them have grasped that these are the shock troops of creativity and culture; that they drive gentrification because they are willing to live in the lofts of inner cities and that they bring with them lots of restaurants and night life. They lead what Allen Scott, director of the centre for globalisation and policy research at the University of California, Los Angeles, calls "the aesthetisation" of the city, and the evolution of "the city as spectacle". Here, it is not just Bridget who counts, but also her gay friend Tom. Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon University argues that the most creative cities in the United States are also those with the highest proportion of gay households. The reason is partly that gay households have the hefty spending power of two earners without the expense of children. But, in addition, their presence goes with the sort of open, diverse city culture in which creative industries thrive. So the key components of urban growth, he argues, are "technology, talent and tolerance". To measure their presence, he has constructed a "gay index" which turns out to be highly correlated with a "coolness index", measuring the hip and the trendy. Surveying 50 cities, he found that the leading indicator of high-technology success is a large gay population, followed by a high concentration of artists, writers, musicians and actors. Happily
ever after? What happens to Bridget and her friends in the wake of September 11th, an event that may subtly but irreparably change the life of the young? Thomas Miller of Roper ASW, a market-research organisation, argues that the polls which his organisation has conducted show that the group whose confidence has been most undermined by those horrific events is people in their 20s. "It has had a profound effect on young people who grew up in a period of affluence," he says. Many felt that one of life's main purposes was to have fun. Perhaps that will now change. Maybe the need for companionship and the comfort of a durable relationship will become more important. In future, Bridget Jones may be more willing to settle sooner for marriage and less eager to find self-fulfilment at work. Young women reared to believe that a career is their birthright have done better in the job market than the marriage market. At the end of her day, Bridget is hugely relieved to find that Mark Darcy really loves her. Could that really be what matters most to single women in their 30s?
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