On the surface, there is little to suggest that Mr. Bowe, who came to New York from Minneapolis in his early 20s “to be a famous musician or filmmaker,” isn’t the last great catch.

Image Mr. Bowe, who has a sentimental streak, collects flower paintings. Credit... Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

On a recent afternoon, he was well groomed and neatly dressed in a pressed oxford and jeans, his bright studio equally tidy: an assortment of cookware carefully arrayed on a kitchen wall, records and files stacked neatly under his bed. In the cotton-candy-colored bathroom, there was none of the hair or dust one might expect to see in a bachelor pad. And nearly every wall of his apartment was decorated with paintings of flowers, a collection he has spent more than two decades amassing.

“When I was a little punk rocker on a motorcycle when I was 18, I went to thrift stores, and I just noticed how many amateur paintings there are out there of either flowers or Jesus. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to collect all the different ones?’ ” he said. “I realized I didn’t want 100 visages of Jesus staring down at me.”

Mr. Bowe’s domestication extends to cooking: even though it was the middle of the day, he had already begun preparing dinner — a pork dish with a homemade spice mix inspired by a jar of crushed sweet peppers brought back from a recent trip to Portugal. Offering his guest some mint tea, he reached into a cupboard and pulled out a bag full of dried mint leaves that he grew over the summer at a friend’s house in Dutchess County.

His résumé would impress any woman with a soft spot for social issues: After graduating from film school at Columbia University and co-writing the movie “Basquiat,” he traveled the world for a decade, working as a cowboy in Argentina and as a bargeman on the Amazon River. Along the way, he wrote a series of magazine articles on modern-day slavery — one of which won a Hillman prize for fostering social and economic justice — and later published a book called “Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy.”

Ask him about his work as a journalist and he holds forth like a modern-day Marxist, railing against injustice and criticizing the mainstream news media for focusing on the ruling class instead of “regular people.”