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confident, aggressive, and totally comfortable asking for what she wanted; nimble and responsive and full of surprises, suggesting things he wouldn’t have thought to ask. She seemed to want it more than he did. “I was always the one to be in control in that scenario, so I wasn’t used to it,” he said. He kept describing her as “unique” and “one of a kind,” although they had broken up several months earlier. “You’ll see when you meet her,” he said, and so I sought her out.
    I tracked her down several days later in a classic single-girl-in-a-sitcom pose. Sabrina, who is thirty-one, was hanging out with a girlfriend, drinking wine and not eating the crackers and cheese on the table. In a few hours she was going to meet a guy she had just texted with, a trader they refer to as “the hot guy” she’d met at work that summer and slept with a couple of times. (After the second time, she’d texted him, “I’m just not feeling it” and—miracle—“he was cool with it. He didn’t take it personally.” So theystill hang out occasionally as friends, even though they don’t have sex anymore.)
    But for the moment, the two women were talking about things they like: red wine, Lady Gaga concerts, Angela Merkel, and their favorite advice book of the moment,
Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office
, which advises women how to stop sabotaging their careers by being excessively deferential. Things they don’t like: short men; FDBs; men who, when you reject them, send texts saying “shouldn’t you be thinking about your eggs?” Also, their friend Anna, “who sits on the couch all day obsessing about finding
The One
”—that last phrase drips with sarcasm.
    Sabrina had met her share of Annas in business school, the girls who microanalyze every text and phone call, who wait, wait for the phone to ding or beep or pirouette out of their hands or whatever it does when they get a text from a boy. And who, when it doesn’t, when it just sits in their lap obstinately like a permanent stain, moan, “Why isn’t he texting me? What’s going on?” (this she says in a mock idiot-girl-who-reads-
Cosmo
voice). “Well, because we all need affection sometimes, and he just happened to get it from you that night,” she barked at the imaginary Annas. “Retard.”
    Did she ever wait by the phone? “Never.
Never.
” At least not since college, when she was not as good at reading the signals. “I started to think about it,” she said, lounging back on her friend’s couch, putting her socked feet up on the coffee table. “What do I need a man for? I don’t need him financially. I don’t need him to do activities. I have lots of friends here. So fuck it.”
    One problem I had with our conversation was the cognitive dissonance produced by the difference between the voice and the person: The distinctive thing about Sabrina is her effortless, naturalbeauty. It’s hard to describe her physically without resorting to Nancy Drew–era clichés such as “youthful” and “fresh.” She is half Asian, with creamy skin and long black hair and clear green eyes. On the day I met her she was wearing an outfit that Katniss, the heroine from
The Hunger Games,
might wear to go hunting: jeans and what looked like a boy’s flannel checked button-down shirt, with no makeup. (She made no wardrobe adjustments at all when it was time to meet “the hot guy” at the bar.) “In both cases I think I’m a hunter, a killer,” she said, musing on how her dating style echoed her favorite negotiating tactics.
    But my larger problem was my inability to judge how much of what she said was bluster and how much was real. And even if it was all real, whether Sabrina was an unusual case, or whether there was a little bit of Sabrina in every woman of this generation. I couldn’t say. But what I wanted to know was whether her years in the hook-up culture and on Wall Street had landed her in an extreme and untenable place.
    We’ve been taught