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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