Of course it's a particularly offensive thing to suggest that every young woman in this country is whoring herself. Nor is it a bright idea to fuck your boss' wife: It can get your ass fired.

The real deal is that there is no shortage of young, bright, creative single women in the big city. The thing is, young, bright, creative single people tend to move to the city for one purpose: Their careers. If we would have been content as housewives and assembly-line workers, we would have stayed in Buffalo or Brooklyn or Shermer, Illinois or wherever the hell we came from. Our self-images are intimately tied up with our jobs—too intimately, so much so that we clock in hour upon hour at the office in excess of what we have to, and then take on freelance work or private projects on nights and weekends. And then after work, so that we can live the illusion of a rich and fulfilling life, we run to the gym or dance class or grad school or the theater or tai chi class like so many hamsters on one big wheel.

We labor like computerized slaves, afraid to slow down our productivity or be seen to be slack in our post-industrial make-work, because to do so would mean we would be euphemistically "let go," and the loss of income, in the overpriced Big City, would mean that we would have to move back to Mommy's couch in Buffalo or Brooklyn or Shermer. If they would have us, that is: I seem to have noticed that couch-squatters are also an appreciable demographic.

This, plus the daily maintenance of modern life, and who has the time or energy to pursue the relationship? My feeble attempts at courtship have been rebuffed, not because of my own hideousness or lack of personality, but simply because my potential love interests were too busy. It's sad, really: the women I'm interested in re unavailable precisely because of the qualities that make me interested in them in the first place. And, meanwhile, we all live in a state of perpetual sexual frustration.

Things haven't been this way for too long. When my father was my age, he had already been married to my mother for two years. My friends and acquaintances, for the most part, have similar stories. The average age of marriage a generation ago seems to have been in the early 20s; today, I work in an office filled with unmarried 30- and 40-year-olds. For the sake of our careers, we put intimate relationships and having children off to a previously unheard-of age. As a result, the best and the brightest in our society, the ones who are arguably the most qualified to become parents, are also the least likely to do so. What this will mean for future generations, I hesitate to speculate.

Perhaps what we have to blame, then, is the sexual revolution itself. Back in the '50s, you knew what the rules were. Sure, you usually wound up transgressing against them, the schools weren't integrated, you couldn't get a decent burrito, and Old Man Johnson was building a bomb shelter in the back yard, but you knew what the rules were. We all know the scenario from Meatloaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light": Men were men, women were women, and a little bit of hooch stolen from Dad's liquor cabinet got you a long way. Today, though, nobody knows what the fuck is going on. Maybe all this nostalgia with the Buddy Holly glasses and is a cry for help: We want rules again.

What we are imploring all of you is not to let life pass you by while you do someone else's work in a cubicle, plugged into a machine like one of the Borg. We are not machines. We are human beings. We need to sit in tapas bars and drink sangria and laugh about how we thought we'd never lose our virginity in high school. As the dead white male Horace said, "While we live, let us live."

And, for Chrissake, would one of you come out to dinner with me?

About the writer: Ken Mondschein is the most eligible bachelor outside of Jane Austen a novel.

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