When he was younger, he had imagined that as he grew up, he would become progressively less shallow and women's looks wouldn't matter as much. Now that he was, more or less, grown up, he realized it wasn't going to happen. He wasn't even particularly shallow.

Nate wanted to argue, if only he had someone to argue with, that women want to be in relationships because on a gut level they don't like being alone. They aren't noble, high-minded individuals, concerned about the well-being of the nation or the continuity of the species. They simply swoon at images of cooking dinner together, of some loving boyfriend playfully swatting their ass with a dishtowel while the two of them chop vegetables and sip wine and listen to NPR (preferably in a jointly owned prewar apartment with an updated kitchen).

Nate had often been dismayed not by Francesca in particular but by the vast number of women whose legs, like the doors to an exclusive club, parted only at the proof of a man's success.