'What we need is a new meaning for the word 'spouse,' "says Dr. Olga Silverstein, a psychotherapist and training supervisor at the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy in Manhattan. "The old standards are obsolete. In the 1950s, a boy married the girl next door, and if she didn't fit his fantasy, he used his imagination. People didn't have the luxury of wasting years searching for the ideal mate. They faced enormous pressure to settle down."

A study conducted in 1957 revealed that 53 percent of the American public believed that single people were "sick," "immoral," or "neurotic." The fifties emerged as the most family-oriented decade of the century, with 96 percent of the child-bearing population married. By the sixties, however, these values were overturned, creating tremendous conflict for the baby-boomers, who were then reaching maturity. Caught between two different philosophies, they approached their social life with a great deal of uncertainty.

SELECT, DON'T SETTLE: "The women I get involved with," says one man, "are intellectually stimulating but unstable, or stable but boring. But I'm not willing to compromise my dreams."

Andrew Roth, 34, considers himself a "victim" of the counterculture. The owner of a manufacturing company, he has made enough money to afford a house in the country and six cars, including a Ferrari, two Mercedeses, and a stretch limousine. Roth blames the sixties for setting him on a social wild-goose chase. "I've come full circle," he says. "When I was fourteen, I loved going to the country club with my parents. I used to look at all the cute girls and say to myself. 'Maybe your future bride is right here on the tennis court.'

"By the late sixties, everything I was expected to do went out the window. I dropped out of college. I refused to go into my father's business. I just ran around the country having fun. Somehow I knew I wasn't going to settle down with a lovely hippie woman and live in a commune. In my heart, I still wanted the girls from the country club. Now they're all married to investment bankers from Goldman Sachs."

Like Andrew Roth, 34-year-old Winston Carter spent much of his twenties rejecting his roots. An independent TV producer, he was raised in a Main Line Philadelphia family, and despite his plaid shirt and blue jeans, he looks aristocratic, like a young George Bush. "I did not have a typical childhood," he says. "My parents and grandparents had divorced and remarried. Any time I had a crush on a girl, she'd turn out to be a relative." Carter left Philadelphia to go to college, where he majored in philosophy and religion and experimented with drugs and transcendental meditation. "After college, I was really confused," he explains. "I couldn't relate to the women in my own society because I hated cocktail parties. But I couldn't relate to the women I met through T. M. because they were too weird. I even thought of becoming celibate."

In 1979, Carter fell "head over heels" in love with a woman he met in a hot tub while on vacation in Florida. "She was perfect," he says. "We jogged together. We did yoga together." Within a few months, Carter moved to New York to be close to his new girlfriend, a free-lance writer. "I loved her a lot," he says. "One day we went to see a Phillies doubleheader and The Empire Strikes Back, and it was such a perfect day that I asked her to marry me. She said yes."

The invitations were in the mail when things began to unravel. "Both sets of parents were on their second marriages," says Carter, "so we had eight people to please. It became a huge battle of egos. I kept saying, 'Let's just get through the wedding and have a happy life together.' But she couldn't." They broke up just weeks before the ceremony.