mandalay

The Big R

In December, my friend Shelby and I decided that, rather than trying to find dates to our office Christmas parties, we would go with each other and take advantage of the free drinks and food. The night of Shelby's, we were discussing our respective problems with relationships. After much whiskey and gin (and a few snakebites and apple martinis) on the company tab, we finally got down to the question: what is it that the other sex wants? While, naturally, there's no one solution to this question, I think that there are some that come close. For Shelby, his answer to me was that, when it came down to it, guys want a girl who will feed them, sleep with them, and live their own lives. Intelligence and personality are givens.

I'm not sure exactly what I told Shelby at the time concerning what a woman wants in her male partner, but this is precisely what Sophia and I have been conversing about in the months since. Stripping everything else away, this is what I think most women want in a man: we want a guy who wants something besides us and is willing to figure out what it is and work to get it -- in other words, ambition. Also, and this is one that could be super-easy, we'd rather have no expectations than unfulfilled ones. For example, we don't want a guy to say "I'll call you tonight" and then not call till 11 pm. Nor do we want to hear "Would you like to go to dinner sometime?" without any kind of follow-up. The best approach would be for him to either call without warning or to say he's going to call around a certain time and then do it. Same goes for dinner. No plans are better than vague plans. As I told Shelby back in December, a girl would be elated to have a guy call her up and say "What are you doing Friday? Would you like to go to dinner at 7:30? How 'bout Madre's?" Beyond that, we want him to show that there are times when he isn't with us that he's thinking about us: showing up, calling to ask how our day has been, etc. While many men seem to think that being in a relationship means having a woman take over their life, we really just want to be allowed a little space in the life he already has. In other words, we want to be a natural thought he has, we want to be considered.

Four years ago, I ended my longest relationship (of 2+ years) partly because he didn't have the ambition necessary to make himself happy. But I've now realized that he did have a lot of other things that I haven't been able to find in the many short relationships I've had since then, several with very ambitious guys. He was completely supportive, willing to make room for me, loved me, desired me and never freaked out about the fact that he was in a relationship. What I'm starting to think is that, often, when guys are particularly ambitious, they think of a relationship as a roadblock to getting where they want to go. But for women, we see a relationship as a means of support that allows us to pursue our ambitions, our other passions. If an equation were possible for this, the woman's version would be:

passion + passion = fulfillment.

whereas I think (at this twenty-something age) the male version would be:

passion + passion = failure.

Labels: passion

posted by amanda @ 4:17 PM