The desire to get married, which - I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women - is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge - which is to be single again.

Ephron’s line is a characteristically wry, self-aware jab at romantic ideology and the social scripts surrounding heterosexual marriage. By calling the wish to marry “basic and primal,” she mimics the language of biological inevitability often used to naturalize women’s supposed marital destiny—then punctures it by asserting an equally “primal” counter-impulse: the desire to reclaim autonomy. The humor depends on the quick reversal, suggesting that the fantasy of marriage and the reality of being married can collide, producing ambivalence rather than fulfillment. The quote also reflects Ephron’s broader comic project: treating intimate life as material for skeptical, observational wit rather than sentimental uplift.