What Do Women Want? What Do Men Want?
I received an interesting email a few months back, the essence of which was this: "All we're asking from you is a paragraph highlighting the ONE thing women want and the ONE thing men want . . ."
Oh, that's all? And should I perhaps add the solution to the mystery of the Sphinx and the present whereabouts of D.B. Cooper in a footnote? Perhaps for publication in the next issue of Cosmo?
This simple request happens to echo the question that Freud himself admitted he was stumped about: "What do women want?"
All right. I was a little sarcastic, but then I calmed down. Since I like a challenge, this was my response:
IMHO, the ONE thing women want (which is a bit like deciding right now which ONE food you will happily consume for the rest of your natural life) just happens to be the same ONE thing men want. (!)
I believe women -- and men -- simply want to be wanted. We want to be desired, and not only sexually. We want our opinions, our wishes, our needs and our yearnings to be solicited and taken to heart. We don't need slaves or servants, but we do relish the thrill that comes when our Beloved looks at us in that certain way that communicates his/her genuine interest, their fundamental acceptance and that tad of loving skepticism that keeps us honest.
The stereotype is, of course, that men only want Sex and women only want Love, and that is why there has been trouble for millennia, probably since way before Aristophanes penned Lysistrata. Therapists add their twist to this myth by opining that men want to have sex in order to feel loved, and women want to feel loved in order to have sex.
I submit that these are but two sides of the same coin -- that what we all really want is to be really wanted -- for who we truly are.
I'm quoted in Chapter 4 in the new eBook He Said She Said: What's the One Thing That Men and Women Want in the Bedroom? by Liberty Kontranowski, available as a Kindle from Amazon.com.
