I hope you haven’t forgotten that you can bet low even if you’re taking a straight bet. It’s not a must that your bet has to be insanely high before you can bet on a straight bet.
If you genuinely want to have fun and don’t like going for parlay or you feel you won’t do well with parlay then you simply just have to reduce your stake to something you are comfortable with, and you should be able to enjoy it and not have regrets too much if the game goes haywire.
Parlay will always remain the most popular bet among bettors, because players want to get a bigger win and are ready to risk for it. Single bets can have a higher probability of winning, but this does not cancel the fact that you can get to a match in which some unexpected result will happen. And then the loss may not be justified because it makes no sense to risk for low odds. I like it when players share their big parlays that they won, and I think that nothing prevents us from sometimes playing such bets for small money, if you are lucky, it will bring good profit.