It took 18 years of marriage for David C. Wright to decide there was nothing wrong with being single.
Now this 65-year-old divorce is trying to help other unmarried people embrace their lifestyle and shed the stereotype that they're lonely bachelors or cat-loving old maids.
A serial entrepreneur, Wright recently launched Singular, a Los Angeles magazine for singles that doles out advice, travel suggestions and profiles of unmarried people who travel to Tonga, collect vintage sex manuals and play polo when not performing acupuncture.
"We want people to not feel stigmatized," said Wright, who has started eight businesses in the areas of wealth management, real estate and technology, but never before in media. "Whether it's a chapter of your life or longer, it's all right to be single."
Call it a reflection of our times -- or a response to them -- Wright's new enterprise might strike a chord with the growing number of Americans who choose to marry later or not at all. About 42% of people over the age of 18 are single, according to the Census Bureau, and the proportion of one-person households increased to 26% in 2005 from 17% in 1970.
Los Angeles seems particularly ripe for a magazine aimed at the single community. More than half the adults living here are single, Wright said.
Of course, now is not an easy time to start a print publication, even an upscale one such as Singular. As advertisers retrench in an ailing economy, magazines across the country are cutting staff and pages. Some are even closing their doors.
In October alone, magazine giant Conde Nast announced it was reducing budgets across all of its titles and laying off employees at Portfolio and Men's Vogue. Upscale magazines Radar and 02138 folded, and Hearst Corp. said it would close CosmoGirl magazine.
Upscale magazines are reporting revenue figures that are down 10% from the previous year, and the slide will be worse next year, when advertisers rejigger their budgets, said Michael Kong, chief executive of Modern Luxury Media, whose publications include Angeleno, Manhattan and Dallas Interiors.
Industrywide, advertising revenue for the first nine months of 2008 fell 5%, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
Worse news lies ahead, according to Forrester Research. In an online survey, the firm found that 18% of U.S. consumers who subscribe to magazines plan to cut back their subscriptions in the coming year, said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester media analyst.
Singular also is considered a controlled-circulation magazine because it is sent free of charge to people with a certain income and makes money from advertising rather than subscriptions. Those publications are having an especially tough time in the current climate, said Samir Husni, chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi.
Advertisers are skittish about whether people who receive magazines they didn't sign up for actually read them or just toss them into the recycling bin, said Husni, who also created the MrMagazine.com industry website.
Wright, however, says Singular will attract advertisers because of its readers' earning power. It is circulated only to those making $150,000 or more, about 70,000 people so far, and they are solely responsible for deciding how to spend their money.
Wright and his unmarried editorial director, Kim Calvert, said they have a source of funding with deep pockets -- Wright -- and produce the only magazine in the country targeted at the single audience.
They'll need the funding. Husni said a new regional monthly magazine would cost about $1 million in its first year of publication and that most new magazines don't break even for three to four years.
Wright said $2 million was a more accurate price tag but that he expected to break even in six issues because "we've got a very unique concept."
The magazine, which launched in September, comes at a time when the stigma around staying single is disappearing, said David Popenoe, director of the National Marriage Project.
"Times have changed," said Ivy Lazar, 51, a Century City writer and Singular reader. "My friends who are married are jealous of me and my freedom."
Some Smug Marrieds, as fictional character Bridget Jones calls them, didn't get the memo. They still barrage singles with questions about why they haven't married and suggestions about how to find a date, said Bella DePaulo, a social scientist and author of "Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After."
Singular's creators said the magazine was an outlet for people sick of hearing that they're not complete until they're married.
"We're creating a community of people who want to have their best life now," Calvert said from a plush red chair in the airy Westside living room that serves as the magazine's headquarters. She lives upstairs, with her parrot and three cats.
