Jillian Straus, a successful TV producer, dated many men, but she couldn’t find Mr. Right. She wasn’t alone. Her single girlfriends had the same problem. So Straus, who now lives in New York City, decided to research a book on why it was so hard for singles to settle down. She interviewed 100 men and women in their 20s and 30s around the country about their dating habits—and disappointments. In “Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We're Still Single,” Straus, who was invited to appear on the “Today” show, reveals why singles remain single. Here’s an excerpt:

First comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes the baby in the baby carriage.
— children’s rhyme

It was half past eight on Friday night in New York City. Here I was, on yet another first date with an “interesting” thirtysomething accountant named Jeremy. He had a square jaw and a mane of black hair. We were sitting in a candlelit restaurant in Tribeca packed with hipsters, drinking a bottle of white wine and talking politely about our jobs. I was thinking to myself, tiredly, could this be the man I spend the rest of my life with? But even though the conversation was engaging and clever, I found I could not help checking my watch. I knew already that chances were it was just another evening, in what felt by then like a lifetime of first dates. It had been three years since my last relationship. I wondered how many more dates I had to go on before I found “the one.”

My thirty-four-year-old friend Drew, a newspaper reporter in Chicago and a serial monogamist, has a string of failed relationships behind him. Blessed with a striking visage and charm, Drew has no trouble finding dates. He dated Audrey, a petite blonde, for two years before she moved in with him. Prior to Audrey, it had been Suzanne for two years, and before her it had been Terry, on and off for four years. Women fall hard for Drew, and in turn he falls in love easily; but ultimately his relationships break up because—even though he says he desperately loves each of these women at the time he is with her—he can’t get to the next level with any of them.

My friend Michelle, twenty-eight, an Atlanta elementary school teacher with offbeat good looks, is afraid to give love another chance after having been dumped countless times. She often calls me crying, asking: “What is wrong with me? Or is something wrong with the guys I am choosing?” When her friends meet somebody new, she waits for the axe to drop on them, too. This once easy-going woman has become quite cynical.

Ian, thirty-one, a Los Angeles lawyer, is also having trouble in his romantic life. He was engaged at twenty-five, but his fiancée called off the wedding. She said she wasn’t sure she wanted to get married; her parents had had a “bad marriage” that had made her too suspicious of marriage in general to take the ultimate step. It took Ian six years to get serious with someone again. About a year into his new relationship, he and his girlfriend Clara discussed living together and getting engaged. But when they started to look at apartments, things became tense between them; Clara had gotten a new job and was becoming more independent in the relationship, and Ian was anxious. With every fight, he questioned whether the relationship was right. Before a lease was signed, the two had broken up. Clara says now, “It just wasn’t perfect enough for him.”

By the time I myself had turned thirty, I was realizing that I had spent hours on the phone with both my male and female friends all over the country discussing their relationship troubles. The conversations with men were anguished, and the conversations with women were tearful. These people have full lives—busy jobs, close friends, and passionate interests. Yet I couldn’t help noticing that the topic of our failing relationships dominated almost every conversation. Though they lived in different parts of the country, came from different kinds of families, and worked in different professions, so many of my friends were echoing the same sentiment: they were frustrated, confused, and even depressed about their romantic lives. Some had turned to their parents for guidance. But the older generation, no matter how sympathetic, didn’t seem to truly understand our plight or to have advice that was really applicable to us. It was as if the two generations were speaking a different language.

These conversations made me wonder what was going on with my peers. I started to ask myself: Do we just talk more about our unhappiness with relationships than other generations tended to do? Or could it be that our generation is indeed having a particularly difficult time in the search for love and commitment? When I began to ask that question out loud, my life changed completely. Men and women both would practically pin me to a wall to talk to me about this issue: they spoke of lonely years between serial relationships, painful breakups, and bad dates.

At the time, I didn’t have any of the answers they so clearly craved. I didn’t have a clue about how to find love and commitment myself, despite the fact that my own parents had seemed happily married for forty-two years. But I began to understand that something unusual was going on with us; this issue seemed to resonate so widely and deeply. What was happening? How hard could it be, after all, to court and pair up? Generations had done it since time immemorial. Were we immature, or just unlucky? Misguided, or just appropriately picky? Were there pressures on us, perhaps, that were a greater hindrance than the pressures that had borne down on other generations before us?

I decided I would have to try to find out, if I could, what was going on with our generation—and whether there were any answers out there for us when it came to our search for love. This book explores why so many of us face a rocky, detained, or pit-fallen road to long-term commitment. Why is the search for love so difficult for us, and what can we do about it?

First I will take you through my own story as a typical thirtysomething single, urban professional. Then I will examine the cultural factors uniquely affecting this generation, what I call “The Seven Evil Influences,” that undermine our relationships every day. Through the stories of single men and women I will explore how these influences make us look at potential partners, how they confuse the dance by which we court each other, change how we perceive commitment, and pose real obstacles on the path to romantic fulfillment. Throughout this book you will see particular terms highlighted, many of these terms.

Gen-Xers will recognize and laugh at, other terms I have coined to give a name to modern dating approaches and scripts that are also unique to this generation. (See the dictionary at the end of the book for a complete list of terms.) Finally, I will take you through the stories I discovered of actual, real-life, happy couples. I will tease out the lessons they learned and show you how we can all, ideally, share in the joy of these insights about long-term love.

To get a fuller picture of our dilemma, I decided to interview one hundred single people living in various cities throughout the United States. I focused on Generation X — the first generation after the baby boom — because no other generation has faced the same set of choices and concerns. Some generations are defined by war or depression; absent these events, generational identities are arbitrarily defined. I decided to look at men and women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine because it is the cohort that at its oldest was born just after the boomer era, and at its youngest is now old enough to date seriously.

This book is not a broad sociological study. I did not seek to pin down a breadth of data, but rather to identify a generational atmosphere and attitude. I started asking questions of my own network, which is mostly composed of people who are younger, urban, and educated. Word spread; networks alerted other networks; responses started to pour in — and I made a concerted effort to widen my reach. I decided to interview people in six cities in different geographic regions of the country: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, and New York. I put the word out in these cities through Internet postings, ads in local newspapers, Web sites such as Craigslist (which connects people in urban areas to jobs, apartments, and dates). The queries I sent out varied but essentially asked for respondents who were looking for a partner. I also randomly scouted men and women in places in which single people congregate. I interviewed one hundred singles, ranging from middle to upper middle class, most of whom had some college education or had completed their BAs. About one quarter had some graduate education. Thirty percent were people of color. Why did I focus on these younger, mostly urban, educated singles? Because these were the people who had the same questions I did.

The identities of everyone in this book have been disguised. I have changed names and altered personal features and locations to gain the most candid accounts possible. However, the experiences and the words that appear in the pages that follow are rendered just as these men and women spoke them.

Excerpted from "The Unhooked Generation" by Jillian Straus. Published by Hyperion. Copyright © 2006 Jillian Straus. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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