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."