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The greatest pressure on the singles is the classic one—loneliness. In prosaic terms, this is coming back to an apartment where the breakfast dishes are still unwashed, the morning paper exactly where it was dropped, where nothing has moved. Mayo Mohs, a freelance journalist still single at 33, puts the unmarried's problem in a frame of reference that is more romantic and more telling: "The lack a single person feels most acutely is when he leaves his group to go off somewhere on a trip, one of those trips that his single status lets him enjoy. It can occur in front of a castle, on the quiet deck of a boat going up the Rhine, or on any overlook anywhere, looking at a sunset. Faced with such a sight, the natural tendency is to want to turn to someone to say, 'Isn't that beautiful!' and to enjoy it together. And when you turn, there isn't anyone there."
Most singles know that a single man cannot be a thing of beauty and a boy forever and that a single girl is like a single letter in the alphabet, waiting to mean something to someone. Even the most swinging single, who has been insisting "Not yet," inevitably crosses a watershed when the question becomes a panicky "Is it too late?" Ultimately, the singles devoutly wish that they weren't.