While Dunne is still struggling with the issue, some women have given up. Kate Brandon, 37, who works for a publisher, is resigned to being single. Warm and articulate, with a delicate, sweet-looking face, she doesn't like being alone, but prefers it to the transient nature of dating. "When you get older, it's harder to bounce back from rejection."

Brandon spent most of her twenties engaged in what she calls adventures. "I traveled all over the world and met interesting people," she says. "But I was always looking for that one special man who'd be there when I needed him." Her first two serious relationships were with men she couldn't have settled down with. One was a philanderer; the other was dependent on drugs.

Brandon maintains that her third boyfriend was the "perfect man," at least initially. "He turned into a Peter Pan," she says. "He even started referring to himself as 'the kid.'" They shared an apartment in New York for a year, and eventually planned to move to the West Coast, where he owned a business. "Just as we were about to leave," Brandon says, "he told me he had another girlfriend back home. So we broke up, and he went to the Coast by himself."

Ten months later, he flew back to New York and proposed marriage. "I said, 'Are you crazy?' I mean, how could I trust the man ever again? But he begged and apologized. We sat on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for five hours, crying."

Six weeks later, Brandon had a change of heart. She had just returned from Europe, where she'd had an affair with a married man, and she longed for some stability in her life. Her West Coast boyfriend still pleaded with her to marry him, so she flew out and announced that she would. By then, he had changed his mind. "I came back to New York and fell apart completely," she says.

Now Brandon directs her emotional energies toward her job, her friends, and her health club. She still sees the married man. When she's not staying late at work or working out on the Nautilus machines at the "toughest gym in the city," she attends Off Broadway theater with her female friends. According to Brandon, they, too, have given up looking for a spouse. "We're old enough to know what level of intimacy we need in a relationship," she says. "And frankly, most of the men out there can't give it to us. I'm very sad that I won't have a child. But women like me have to realize we're alone. Today, the real challenge is to find fulfillment as a single person."

Even though the shortage of men is a serious factor, many experts believe there are alternatives. "Some women limit their choices by adhering to an outmoded value system," says Pepper Schwartz. "Traditionally, women married 'up' on the economic ladder, while men married 'down.' But as a woman becomes more successful, the pool of men diminishes. And many women refuse to marry anybody who makes less money than they do. So they're trapped between two roles. They want a career and a family, but they want them on traditional terms. Well, that may not be possible."

Nobody ever told the men and women of the baby-boom generation that you can't always get what you want. "But what will happen," says Schwartz, "is that age will catch up with them. They'll get lonelier. They'll slowly realize that someone may not be the 'ideal' mate, but he or she will be a good mate. They'll learn to compromise." If they don't, says Arlene Saluter of the Census Bureau, "some of them may remain single forever."

*Names of single people have been changed to protect privacy.