COMMITMENTS : Single Minded : After a Breakup, Creating Cartoons About the Ups and Downs of Dating Seemed Like Good Therapy to Peter Kohlsaat

Like most longtime singles, Peter Kohlsaat had honed his after-the-breakup ritual to perfection.

While other heartbroken halves swear by shopping, imbibing or obsessive reading of old love letters with sappy background music, Kohlsaat took another approach.

When he was feeling particularly miserable, he’d haul out his journal and write down his deepest, darkest, most vindictive thoughts. He’d work quietly, all alone, often well into the night.

But when a 3 1/2-year relationship ended in the early ‘80s, the Minneapolis-born dentist-turned-cartoonist tried to draw away his despair.

Kohlsaat’s expertise was editorial cartoons, but drawing about the ups and downs of single life suddenly seemed like good therapy. With just one college art class to his credit, Kohlsaat had given up his Duluth dental practice and plunged into cartooning full time in 1983, selling his work at one time to more than 100 Minnesota papers through his own syndicate.

Once the cloud of breakup despair lifted, Kohlsaat stepped back and liked what he saw. In early 1986, he bundled up his best singles cartoons and shipped them off to six newspaper syndicates.

“Within a week, I had heard from three of them,” he says. Not that all of them had kudos. One syndicate, he recalls, told him he was a very angry man.

But “Single Slices” got picked up by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and now appears in 35 newspapers. The panel depicts and dissects the type of crucial dilemmas and decisions that plague singles, whatever their age, hometown or income bracket. To go on that blind date or veg with the dog? To break up in person or lean on technology? (“Thank God for voice mail,” says one character.) To spill your guts early or withhold your life story? (“I should probably warn you right off the bat,” says one man to his dinner companion. “I’m a strict Darwinist.”)

If regular readers surmise that Kohlsaat has a soft spot for the crosses his own gender must bear, that’s true. But the bias is not without basis, he insists.

Men, in his view, are the skewered species. You can poke fun at them, he complains, without fear of reprisal. “I think men got pretty mad, a year or so ago,” he says. “Women were getting very mean-spirited. There were a lot of men jokes.” Now, he notices the male-bashing barbs have subsided, but he still rises to the defense of his gender. “Men try,” insists Kohlsaat, 43 and never married. “Men are not basically evil people but sometimes they just don’t know. . . .”

Not that Kohlsaat lets men off the hook. One recent cartoon ridiculed the seemingly genetic inability of men to stop and ask for directions even when hopelessly lost. Another shows a woman breaking up with her beloved using language any guy can understand (“You punt, I walk.”)

Readers might suspect Kohlsaat is a man-about-town, ever on assignment to collect material for his next cartoon. But for the past eight years, he’s had a committed relationship, sometimes long-distance, with a Minneapolis waitress. And he and Cindy have a deal: no personal stuff in the paper.

Ever?

“Unless I can disguise it so much that even she wouldn’t see it. Once in awhile, I’ll slip and she’ll say, ‘Why did you do that?’ ”

For material, he’ll turn to friends, friends of friends and women’s magazines, reading them cover to cover. Cosmopolitan and New Woman are his favorites.

Accompanied by Zelda, a mutty mix of shepherd and border collie, Kohlsaat holes up for months on end in out-of-the-way places to work. Hawaii is a favorite spot. This winter, he’s in Baja California, writing and drawing from a hotel in tiny San Jose del Cabo.

His characters are nameless and ageless--the better, he hopes, to reflect the Everyman and -woman nature of the dilemmas.

After this many years of portraying the agony and ecstasy of single life, Kohlsaat is constantly asked for advice. Since he has gathered too many pointers to ever fit in his single-panel cartoon, he dispenses them freely. Here are a few of his rules for relationships--which he emphasizes do not apply to marriages:

* If you really want a relationship, give yourself every opportunity. That means accepting blind dates. But impose a 60-minute time limit, telling yourself that anyone can put up with anything for an hour.

* Let people know you are looking. People love to match-make.

* If it’s too much work, re-evaluate the reasons you want it so badly to work. Maybe it would be best to cut your losses, get out and start over.

* Think twice about falling for breathtakingly beautiful, knock-down gorgeous people. They come with their own unique problems.

* If everyone has been honest, there is no reason that after breaking up you shouldn’t remain friends.

The Stories Behind the Cartoons “I have a problem with jealous couples,” says Peter Kohlsaat. “Jealousy is the worst thing that can happen in a relationship. If she’s going out with an old boyfriend, there’s nothing you can say. You have to trust her.

“Here’s a guy who’s a little jealous. He wants an explanation and the woman isn’t making it any easier.

“I think a lot of guys don’t know what’s proper, what’s right, what’s expected. It’s hard. It used to be simple. . . .”

*

“What is it with men? Stubbornness? Genetics? A pride thing?

“I don’t have that problem. Soon as I don’t know where something is, I pull over. It means a lot more just to get where I’m going. You read some of these self-help books, and they say, ‘Women, you just have to be quiet and put up with it--because this is just being a man.’

“If I were a woman, I would have no patience. I’d say, ‘As soon as we see something twice, you’ve got two minutes. Then we are pulling over.’

“Or, I’d say, ‘I won’t bug you about getting lost, if you don’t bug me about getting out of the bathroom faster.’ ”

*

“Most guys don’t have a lot of shoes, and I think you can tell a lot by them.”

For instance?

“If a guy’s shoes have, say, duct tape, it shows he’s kind of in a holding pattern. A guy who wears penny loafers looks a little too spiffy; tassels are even worse.

“You can often trust a guy in tennis shoes--depending on the style. Shoes with broken laces reflect a down-to-earth guy with his ego in check.”

But beware of sneakers that cost more than $200. “This guy doesn’t know the meaning of a budget.”

Also of shoes with Velcro straps. These hint the wearer is too lazy to tie shoes--and may even buy pants with elastic waistbands.

“Women have so many more shoes, they serve as mood indicators. How tall are those heels? How narrow are those toes? I think men should pay attention to women’s shoes, gain some expertise into how they’re feeling that night.”