If his relative success hadn’t made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy.

He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction.

When you’re single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they’re like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.

Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you. It’s meritocracy applied to personal...

People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart — but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on...