The Ideal Man (or why women know what they want)

I must have been 13 or 14 years old, barely a woman yet, when I was told that women don’t know what they want. It was my first boyfriend’s favourite line. “You’re a woman. You don’t know what you want”, he used to say. I don’t know if he really believed that, if he used it to justify his own ineptness in pinpointing my wishes or if he said it just to annoy me. Either way, women do know what they want. In fact, they are quite clear about it. And here’s your proof:

 

Women want love. We want the kind of love that feels as easy and serendipitous as it does in Before Sunrise and yet as real and romantic as in Pretty Woman and La La Land. We want a tall, dark stranger, whom we know better than anyone else in the world.

We want him to either play football, basketball or the guitar. We want him to be good with cars. To switch gears like a pro. We are not talking Schumacher here, but Hamilton will do a wonderful job.  We want him to own a big watch or a bracelet that he never takes off (you get bonus points for both).

We want him to smell manly, the way our grandfather did after shaving or remind us at least in some distant way of our father. It could be in the way you carry yourself, or the way you care for us. And most times we won’t even be aware of it.

We want a man who can do all the things that we are clueless about. Like fixing IKEA furniture, explaining the score of a tennis match and barbecuing stuff. It would be ideal if he came with a pack of screwdrivers too.

 

We want this man to care about the way he looks and the way he dresses. There’s a small twist though. He needs to behave like he actually doesn’t. So when it does happen (which should be all of the time) it just happens to be accidentally, you see?

We want a man who goes to the gym, but not one who checks himself in the mirror more often than we do. Your biceps and abs need to be a bonus, not the main deal. We would love a man who cares for his diet, but we wouldn’t want a man who needs to go home halfway through our date because it’s #gains o’clock.

 

We want this man to be in the political zeitgeist. You can read the newspaper, or listen to the Economist podcast, or absorb all the knowledge from your conservative family, it’s completely up to you; as long as you are able to sound well-informed at dinner parties and fill our knowledge gaps. We want to be challenged intellectually.

We want a man who lives and breathes a variety of music – whose Spotify can seamlessly swing from ‘Blood on the Tracks’ to ‘808s and Heartbreaks’. We want a man who likes to read. You don’t need to read a 100 pages every day, but to at least have read 1984, The Count of Monte Cristo or know your favourite author.

 

We want you to geek out on something. And honestly, we don’t care if it’s Harry Potter, or reducing plastic consumption or cacti. We just want you to have a passion that makes your eyes lit up. We  also want a man who can be self-sufficient. In that you can pay your own bills, butter your own toast and not ask mommy to wash your shirts. Ambition is always a plus, but we want to know that deep down, you too know, that the world was built for two. And if you’re building an empire, we’d be the empress.

 

We want a man who does the right thing at the right time. This includes anything from hugging us from behind when we are cooking in the kitchen to not labelling our current situationship when it’s obviously too early to do so.

We want a man who can appreciate the beauty in the little things. Who knows how to enjoy a sunset, and who notices when we’ve died our hair or when we’ve cried. One who doesn’t always need to take us rock-climbing, squirrel-hunting but is perfectly happy to just sit with us and talk for hours on end. And he’d know it’s not a waste of time because it’s these moments that time was made up for.

 

Contrary to popular belief, we don’t want you to spend all the time in the world with us. We want you to have a group of guy friends and do guy’s stuff with them. Like grab beer after work of play FIFA or go fishing. It’s ok to have your own inside jokes with them. But we do want to feel that you’ve somehow let them know that we’re the special one. That it’s always been bros before hoes, but maybe not this time round.

We do want a man with whom we can show off. Who can get along equally well with other blokes, with our girlfriends and with his mom. Who knows how to be social at parties. He will meet and greet all, and rush off to the far end of the room and yet always ricochet back to us. He will exchange distant glimpses that say —“I am enjoying this, but I cannot wait to go back home and be alone with you”.

 

We want to feel like we have found a partner for everything. Someone with whom we can eat in bed and spill orange juice down our clothes. But also someone with whom we can get dressed up, go to gala dinners or book a spontaneous backpack trips to Ljubljana. We want our relationship to feel the way it did the very first day over and over and over again (Bonus tip: flowers are always a good idea).

And last but not least we want a man who can make us laugh. I never fully understood why a sense of humour is so important, but honestly if you can make us laugh all other things on the list seem to disappear.

Since I can remember the perfect sleepover with my girlfriends always included writing out the description of the “ideal man”. And I know, I know, it isn’t very deep and open-minded. And besides, chances are, when you do meet your true love he will most often make your list doubt itself and the only thing to matter will be how he makes you feel. But I was just trying to prove a point here. Women do know what they want. Just about everything 😉