Carter is now involved with a woman in her mid-twenties. He says it's a "troublesome" relationship. "She's wonderful and kind," he says, "but I get annoyed because she doesn't have a sixties mentality. All she cares about is her career and me. Sometimes I ask, 'Don't you worry about famine, disease, and the end of the world?' And she says, 'Why should I?' How could I marry someone who is so uncommitted?"

Commitment is a difficult concept for many baby-boomers to understand. In the 1950s, it signified family responsibility, but later its meaning broadened to include larger social issues, such as civil rights and the anti-war movement. With the advent of the human-potential movement, which promoted self-improvement through psychological growth, people began to think of commitment in terms of "me."

Dr. Arthur Parsons, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Smith College, has done an extensive study on the 1960s and believes that much of its predominant ideology hampered the development of long-term relationships. "Marriage requires self-sacrifice," he explains. "But that concept was alien to the baby-boom generation, which was more interested in discovering the true essence of life within. Also, there was the general feeling that marriage, like most institutions, was designed to destroy individual freedom and self-expression."

Yet the quest for self-fulfillment, Parsons believes, was ultimately unfulfilling. "Marriage provides intimacy that people crave," he says. "But it also carries responsibilities, which interfere with self-fulfillment. At the beginning of a relationship, the intensity of self-revelation is at its highest peak. When the infatuation level begins to wear off, there is a major letdown. But instead of taking the relationship to the next step, they proceed to the next relationship."

LIFE ENDS AT 40: A woman, 38, says she doesn't stand a chance. "I've gone out with 55-year-old guys who tell me I'm too old."

While many singles have followed this pattern, they still cling to the belief that marriage is the ideal. The vast majority of people interviewed for this article said they desired and expected a marriage that would last forever. Yet they were highly critical of their parents' relationships, even though most of them were still together after 30 or 40 years. "My parents are non-intimate companions," a 37-year-old fashion stylist explains. "I want more than that, only I don't know what that is, and I don't know who can give it to me."

Writer Tom Elliot, 35, lives by himself in a sprawling seven-room apartment on the Upper West Side. He readily admits he has never had to sacrifice anything and leads a life of few restrictions and no rules. "I've always enjoyed complete freedom of choice," he says. "I've been a jeweler, a sculptor, a screenwriter, a radio-talk-show host, and a game designer. I was never cubbyholed into a boring nine-to-five job, so why should I settle for the equivalent in a wife?"

When Elliot was eighteen, he fell in love with a girl who lived upstairs in his parents' building. "In another generation, we would have gotten married," he says. "But when I asked myself if she was everything I wanted, the answer was no. She was bright and beautiful, but much too high-strung." After five years, they split up. Next, Elliot became involved with an English nursing student. "I was looking to get married," he says, "and she was sweet and traditional. But in the end, she wasn't my intellectual equal. I'd want to talk history and politics, and she'd want to make Yorkshire pudding." The couple lived together for three years. But then they, too, broke up, and she returned to England.

"It's the story of my life. The women I get involved with are intellectually stimulating but unstable, or stable but boring. But I'm not willing to compromise my dreams."

Other singles aren't willing to compromise their bank accounts. Raised in an atmosphere of post-World War II prosperity with the many options it provided, baby boomers are now faced with the prospector restriction. People talk about "downward mobility" (New York, August 16, 1982), and many singles are afraid they can't afford to support a family.

"The baby-boomers were brought up to think they could have a huge piece of the pie," says Nile Rowan, marketing consultant for the Values and Lifestyles Program at SRI International, a California research institute. "But in the late seventies, they realized that something was wrong. They said, 'Wait a minute! We were promised these great jobs, and we're not climbing the corporate ladder fast enough. And inflation is really cutting into our salaries.' As a result, many people think, 'Being single means more for me.' " Some experts link this narcissistic attitude to the emergence of a new breed of unmarried adult: the perennial adolescent. This syndrome tends to afflict educated urban singles who refuse to face the psychological and financial demands of growing up. The "Peter Pan syndrome"—so called by psychologist Dan Kiley, who wrote a popular book on the subject, affects mostly men, but women suffer from many of the same problems. "Maybe I'm a victim of arrested development," says a 32-year-old female TV executive, "but I don't feel old enough to be married. Right now I just want to concentrate on my career and enjoy my life."