According to Billy Vera about the inspiration of the song:

“I was living still in New York, and I met a young college girl, about 20 years old. We started dating – she told me she had just broken up with her boyfriend, and she described what he went through when she gave him the bad news. And she was very descriptive. So I went home and I was impressed by what he must have been feeling. I wrote the first two-thirds of the song based on my imagination of what this guy was feeling. And I couldn’t finish it, I just couldn’t figure out how it ended. And then about 9-10 months later, when she broke up with me, I had gotten very emotionally involved with her, and then I knew how the song ended. And that was the famous line that everybody remembers: ‘I’d subtract 20 years of my life.’ We stayed in touch for a long time. She was one of these sort of narcissistic girls that like the idea of somebody mooning over her for years, and I did.”

Originally, when the song was released in 1981, it peaked at #79 on the Billboard Hot 100, but after the song was featured on the NBC sitcom Family Ties as the love song of Alex P. Keaton (portrayed by Michael J. Fox) and Ellen Reed (portrayed by Tracy Pollan), the single was re-released & topped the Billboard Hot 100 in January of 1987.