THE PLEASURES & PAIN OF THE SINGLE LIFE

THERE is a new, privileged, spotlighted, envied group in the U.S. It is composed of "the singles"--the young unmarried whose label connotes, as in tennis, an endeavor more vigorous, more skilled and more fun than mere doubles. Proportionately, there are fewer singles in the population than there were 20 years ago, because young Americans are tending to marry at an earlier age. But they are the focus of a major part of advertising and salesmanship, the direct target of new approaches in housing and entertainment, the considerable despair of some established institutions, and the apostolate of a freer code of mores for the young. In some quarters, they are called--or like to call themselves--the "swingles."

Not every single, nor perhaps even a majority, participates fully in the subculture. To enjoy it to a considerable degree, a single must be relatively young, relatively well-to-do, and live in a big city. Participation begins with graduation from college, which represents both in symbol and reality an end of dependence on family. The new graduate takes off for the big city, looking for a job and an apartment of his or her own. And he begins determinedly to swing. In the ultimate, this means buying the highest of hi-fis, the deepest of modern sofas, the heppest of pop artifacts, the most seductive of lounging pajamas or sports jackets. If sooner or later a prospective mate moves in, the big city does not mind. Few landlords would dream of objecting, and sophisticated married friends ask coupled singles for a weekend with no thought of separate rooms.

Power as Well as Freedom

The new freedom is the more radical for the single girl. Because of her increased economic competence and society's more permissive moral standards, today's swinging single is free in a myriad of ways her mother never dreamed of--freer morally from the restraints of home and the strictures of religion, freer economically from dependence on family allowance, freer geographically from the confines of the home town, and freer sexually through her increased security against unwanted pregnancy. Today's maiden is often assumed to be less concerned with being chaste than being chased--and caught, perhaps often--before she marries.

For the male, the impact is more obvious if less real. In magazines devoted to his interests, the happily unmarried man is seen surrounded by elaborate hi-fi speakers (which he may never be able to afford), appealed to by makers of Great Books and good booze (which he may never read or drink), praised by haberdashers and hairdressers for his swinging singularity (which he earnestly aspires to), and pursued by indefatigably seductive girls. Once a docile follower of the style of his elders, the new bachelor finds himself the mold of fashion, with his mating plumage studied and envied by beaten-down husbands who, in comparison, begin to feel as tired and scruffy as a suburban lawn in a dry summer. The late John F. Kennedy, himself a swinging bachelor until 36, neatly framed both the stimulating and debilitating aspects of bachelorhood in a wry note that he wrote to Paul Fay in 1953: "I gave everything a good deal of thought--so am getting married this fall. This means the end of a promising political career as it has been based up to now almost completely on the old sex appeal."

Sex appeal aside, market analysts agree that the singles have more "discriminatory buying power" than any other group. "They are not tied down by mortgage payments and insurance policies," points out Advertising Executive Kenneth Gorman. Thus they offer a rich bonanza for sellers of sports cars and flowered vests, stretch pants and elaborate lingerie, costume jewelry and queenly cosmetics, ski weekends and Florida vacations, and other amenities that, without being absolutely essential, contribute to the joy of living.

The statisticians, in their computerized wisdom, figure the singles as a $60 billion market. To those who object that the young marrieds after all buy more of the solid things of life, from houses to dishwashers, the merchandisers briskly point out that the young marrieds are an ephemeral market, imagewise. As soon as they conceive a child, they become conservative and budget-minded, and "disposable income" suddenly evokes not vacation trips but diaper service. While the young wife is still working and before the baby is born, they are, in effect, "singles together."

While the image to sell is singledom, the real focus is on youth and glamour. This idea' was classically exploited by Ford's highly successful sales strategy for the Mustang--aiming at the single as a way of bagging many a married. "Youth is the key to the market," says Grey Advertising's Murray W. Gross. "Everything is on a youth trend--even products for the man or woman of 65." Dean Acheson, 74, former U.S. Secretary of State, touched neatly on another side of this point recently when he said that "today only the blunt" refer to the middle 60s as "old age."

Where to Meet

Along with their freedom, the singles have discovered that their habitat--the big city--is an assembly of strangers. As strangers, they need a place to meet, some social mechanism that is the equivalent of the high school dance or the corner soda fountain or the church young people's group, where boys and girls can meet, measure, consider, examine, sample, negotiate. Across the nation, entrepreneurs have found a demand for housing complexes catering specifically to the singles, with organized cocktail parties, dances, fun and games. Chicago's Sandburg Village comprises six high-rise buildings, offers a single-minded supermarket of activities: bridge and ski clubs, touch football, excursions, painting classes and parties on the sun deck. The Los Angeles area's South Bay Club apartments, which started with $1,000 capital three years ago and is now capitalized at $11 million, has 933 apartments jammed with singles and a waiting list, will add 1,500 apartment units next year. Atlanta's Peachtree Apartments puts out a Towne Crier that advertises the merry events in the life of "PTA" dwellers, reports marriages among the clientele, and invites newcomers to parties where, says the Crier archly, "prizes are awarded to the drunkest" and "we never call the police."

In some cities, Friday's newspapers are studded with ads offering the single a pub, a pad or party or anyway a place to meet. Many of these offers mean simply that the promoter has hired a hall. But even with admission charges at the customary $2 or $3 each, the singles flock there in desperate numbers and with such dependable persistence that a promoter can count on as much as $2,000 for one night's work. Some operations remain sleazy reruns of the '30s dance joints, where lonely out-of-town girls gather in groups of twos and threes while guys on the prowl case the merchandise. But most have evolved from the primeval sludge of the lonely-hearts club, and owners now consider themselves a smooth amalgam of mogul and psychiatrist.

The Young College Graduates Club, which meets every Friday, usually in the Moderne Ballroom of Manhattan's Belmont Plaza Hotel, requires all applicants to show proof of college attendance--even though this proof may be as questionable as a college ring that fits. House Party, a New York organization that provides "warm, cozy," homelike places for singles to meet, is so austere that it serves no liquor and thoroughly examines the credentials of its primarily professional clientele. "We strive," claims President Ronald Garretson, "to create an atmosphere for people who don't care to sit on a bar stool or get tapped on the shoulder at a dance." The atmosphere seems to be irresistible. Fourteen thousand members pay $10 a year to belong, another 6,000 pay up to $3 apiece to drop in on weekends, and House Party ("If you are looking for a date or a lifetime mate House Party is for you") soon hopes to have franchises in Philadelphia and Chicago. The comparable Never on Friday Club (never a date, that is) of Los Angeles has gone from 7,000 members in 1964 to 64,000.

Computer services, which were once treated as a joke, have turned into a solid business. Typical is the Compute-A-Date division of the American Compute-A-Service Co., Inc., of Chicago, which started only a year ago but already has some 6,000 names. Vice President John Damijanic, 28, says that a girl applicant can expect an average of one dinner from each of her five computer-chosen dates; at an entrance fee of $6, she is ahead almost as soon as she fills out the little card specifying preferences (white, Negro, Oriental, Indian, Arab, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, nonreligious, other, divorced) and gets a match with her own card of self-analysis--which includes such questions as whether she believes sexual activity is healthful. Most popular answer: "In some ways yes, other ways no."

In city after city, run of the ginmill bars have been turned into "dating bars." What converts an ordinary bar into a dating bar is a weekend admission fee (usually $1), a large welcome for single girls, and a good neighborhood. In Manhattan, the neighborhood is along First Avenue in the 50s and 60s, an area well populated by airline stewardesses and young career women, converted brownstones with quaint apartments that attract upwardly mobile young executives. Nearly every night, there are lines of singles, male and female, waiting to get in to Mr. Laffs, Maxwell's Plum and Friday's. In Chicago it is The Store, in San Francisco it is Paoli's. In Dallas, it is the TGIF (Thank God It's Friday).

The travel and resort business puts on special promotions for the singles. There is the beach or travel party club--a solution to traveling alone--such as the Club Mediterranee, which has built a 500,000-member clientele in Europe and is successfully offering equal opportunities to Americans. The Mediterranee's basic gimmick for togetherness is that you always sit at a table for eight--but you can change tables for any meal. This spring Hilton Hotels launched a special tour to Puerto Rico aimed at the singles market: "What can you expect for $133 on your Hilton Swingles Week in San Juan?" A welcoming cocktail and plenty of action, "fashion shows, cinema, horse racing, free feature motion pictures and a souvenir photograph of you and your new friends...Sound like your line of fun?" In the first four months, Hilton reported happily, it had 1,200 applicants--even if it was the off season.

At a Clear Disadvantage

So coddled and cosseted, the single in America, it would seem, might be the happiest of men or women. But on closer examination, despite the frivolity and freedom, the swingers' velocity is not quite as rapid as it at first appears.

In fact, the unmarried in America are in many respects at a clear disadvantage. The single male who goes to the hospital stays there an average nine days longer than the married man--presumably because there is no one at home to take care of him during convalescence. The married man gets more out of life--in years, that is--because the single man tends to die earlier. A study at the Mental Research Institute of Berkeley, Calif., of men and women, nearly all of whom were 23 years old or more, found that the single male ranks highest in severe neurotic symptoms. Whether he is neurotic because he is single, or single because he is neurotic, is not clear. The study did find that the least unhappy person is the married man.

For business careers, singlehood has its liabilities. As Vance Packard reports in The Pyramid Climbers: "In general the bachelor is viewed with circumspection, especially if he is not well known to the people appraising him." If he is still in his 20s, the personnel manager worries whether he is too busy with his love life to devote full attention to his job. "The worst status of all is that of a bachelor beyond the age of 36. The investigators wonder why he isn't married. Is it because he isn't virile? Is he old-maidish? Can't he get along with people?" Maybe he can't. "Failure to marry in either sex is the consequence of a fear of it," says Psychiatrist Irving Bieber. "There is increasing recognition that bachelorhood is symptomatic of psychopathology and that even though women may yearn for a husband, home and family they withdraw from fulfilling their wishes because the anxiety they associate with marrying is more powerful than their desire for it."

No Sexual Watershed

As for the sex revolution, it is not all that it is gossiped to be. For one thing, only a relatively small proportion of the total single population participates. John H. Gagnon of Indiana University's Institute for Sex Research points out that 50% of all brides are still virgins, and another 25% have slept with only their prospective mate. Says Gagnon: "The bulk of intercourse continues to be oriented toward marriage. We haven't passed any sexual watershed." For every modern swinger, there is an untold number of the merely forlorn. The ratio is as old as mankind, unrecorded and unrecordable, but it is roughly the ratio of glamour girls to plain Janes. Today's plain Janes have opportunities their spinster aunts never did--trips to Europe, a Peace Corps assignment in Asia, interesting jobs in research or government. And in all of these places, they have a chance to display a mettle that may attract a man who might otherwise have been addled by a momentary attraction to a dumb blonde. But many of them end up living lives of quiet desperation, punctuated by pathetic sorties to dating clubs or organized dances or singles weekends. Despite the frenetically gay ads, these are often exercises of last resort. An ad for a weekend at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills offers an insight into the dark side of the single life. Promising a phantasmagoria of pleasures, the ad saves its ultimate weapon for the end. "This," it says, "may be your last 'singles party.' "

The side that this approach appeals to is well analyzed in quite familiar terms by Judy McKeown, at 23 a TV personality in Chicago and still single: "You can go out every night with a different guy, but after a while you're bound to get tired of it, because all the running around you're doing is in a circle. Really, you don't get anything. You don't get to learn anything about people. You'll find six months of it is a very long time. After that, you're asking yourself, 'What's going on? What's it all about?' " The more lasting relationships that the singles develop are based on their own standards, even if they contrast sharply with those upheld by, say, the late Dorothy Dix, who told a young girl asking for advice: "Why should he marry you after six months if he can get what he wants now? Do you really believe he will marry you after he's had you for a while?" The modern single's answer is yes, and if he does not, there is something wrong with the relationship and it is just as well that he doesn't.

The greatest pressure on the singles is the classic one--loneliness. In prosaic terms, this is coming back to an apartment where the breakfast dishes are still unwashed, the morning paper exactly where it was dropped, where nothing has moved. Mayo Mohs, a freelance journalist still single at 33, puts the unmarried's problem in a frame of reference that is more romantic and more telling: "The lack a single person feels most acutely is when he leaves his group to go off somewhere on a trip, one of those trips that his single status lets him enjoy. It can occur in front of a castle, on the quiet deck of a boat going up the Rhine, or on any overlook anywhere, looking at a sunset. Faced with such a sight, the natural tendency is to want to turn to someone to say, 'Isn't that beautiful!' and to enjoy it together. And when you turn, there isn't anyone there."

Most singles know that a single man cannot be a thing of beauty and a boy forever and that a single girl is like a single letter in the alphabet, waiting to mean something to someone. Even the most swinging single, who has been insisting "Not yet," inevitably crosses a watershed when the question becomes a panicky "Is it too late?" Ultimately, the singles devoutly wish that they weren't.

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