Single Persons

A few summers back, Newport Beach resident Michael Liacko was sorting through two major changes in his life style. First, his 11-year marriage had just come to an end. Second, he had left his job as a vice president of Bell & Howell computer company to open his own high-tech business--or so he thought. One evening at dusk, the disoriented bachelor and his friend, Bessie Baskin, took a pitcher of margaritas to the beach to contemplate the murky future.

You eat a light lunch and get home late from work. You're tired and famished, so you grab dinner--cheese, crackers and a couple of glasses of wine. And since you live alone and nobody's looking . . . well, what the heck, why not polish off the pint of Cherry Garcia? Many people who live by themselves find it difficult to shop, cook and pay attention to good nutrition.

Six years go, Audrey Chapman, a therapist specializing in male-female relationships, asked a man she had been dating if she could park a suitcase in his apartment. "He started hedging, giving me all these strange stories," she remembers. Finally he said, 'Look, I've had a friend here all weekend. It would just not be comfortable for you to do that, and I'm sorry.' " It wasn't her first encounter with man-sharing, but she was "shocked . . . frustrated and then angered. I should have known.

In 1965, Cindy Shacklett, then a middle-class student from Los Angeles, confessed to her parents that she was pregnant. To save face, her angry father and weeping mother sent her to a home for unwed mothers in Phoenix and told friends and family she had gone away to college. To ensure no one would find out, her parents paid the home with checks made out to the fictitious "Jane Adams." Today, that sort of shame has largely gone the way of saddle shoes and sweater clips.

On many cruises, the single supplement--the surcharge solo travelers must pay to get a cabin of their own--can equal what two people would pay for the same cabin. Some suggestions for beating--or at least reducing--it: * Ask about guaranteed single rates. With these, you pay a fixed price, which is set in the cruise brochure and usually is close to the per-person, double-occupancy rate. The caveat is that you do not have a choice of cabins and probably will be assigned an inside cabin.

Some of The Bachelors like to say that even if bastions of L.A. society such as Chasen's are disappearing, they aren't. That's Bachelors, not bachelors. The upper-case single guys are the kind of men who know the distinction between a cotillion and a ball. (Cotillions are chaperoned events, Bachelors president Chip Donnelly, 33, patiently points out.) And they're also retro enough to never let a woman pay for her own cappuccino.

The percentage of Americans in their early 30s who have not yet married has more than doubled since 1970, and it appears that a growing minority will be single all of their lives, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday. Men between the ages of 30 and 34 who had never married accounted for 23.1% of males in that age group, according to estimates made last March. The figure was 9.4% in a 1970 Census Bureau report. Among women in that age group, 14.

It was July in the Caribbean, and we were freezing. Five new friends and I, all of us solo travelers, were in the Ice Bar aboard the Norwegian Cruise Line's Epic, shivering beneath silver ponchos with furry hoods. We had paid $20 each for the privilege of having two drinks while sealed inside this 17-degree freezer at sea. We peeked out from our hoods to take in the bar made of ice, the 7-foot ice sculptures — a Viking and a bear — and the ice benches with their white faux fur throws.

THE best-matched married couple I know, other than my wife and me, are a university professor and a psychological therapist. They met at an Appalachian music camp where each had gone on vacation to pursue an interest in regional folk songs. I'm not suggesting travel as a means for meeting your future spouse. But for single people searching for an interesting way to vacation, I always suggest -- as I did in a recent column -- a tour that focuses on a special interest, theme or cause.