I ran across some information a couple of days ago that sheds a little light on the question:  “What do men and women want?” Researchers at the University of Iowa have conducted a study every decade since 1939 that asks participants to rank a list of 18 characteristics they would want in a partner on a scale ranging from “irrelevant” to “essential”. The data increasingly shows men and women are mostly interested in same things:  attraction, love, character, stability, intelligence and ambition. 

Discernible differences between the sexes in the research last done in 2009 are:  1) women’s desire for men who care about home and children, 2) men’s hope for financially competent women and 3) men’s importance placed on looks.  However in the latter, male preference about a woman’s looks was rated only marginally higher than the importance women place on men’s looks.  For both sexes over the 70 years of this research, looks have come to matter less and less. 

It’s important to note that ‘mutual attraction and love’ was an overwhelming top choice for both sexes in the data.  In 1939 when this research began it was not even in the top three.  Also, worth noting, chastity is unimportant to men and women.  Today’s adults are not particularly looking for virgins or angels.  Political beliefs don’t matter either.

For more than four years previous to this last March I lived on a street of nothing but duplex’s owned almost exclusively by old people who lived in one side and rented the other for income.  Living around and getting to know some of my mostly 70 and 80-something neighbors was enlightening. 

Clear in memory is a conversation at an informal Christmas gathering when I talked to an 80-something untraditional ‘couple’.  I knew each had their own place catty-cornered across the street from each other and they spent a lot of time together.  Bill and Evelyn told me they were what they called a “committed couple” and loved each other.  I learned both had been married to other people twice in their long lives, but had no intention of getting married to each other.  It was just too complicated they explained because of their families and the separate long lives each had lived.      

Each time Bill and Evelyn looked at each other their smiles and sparkly eyes told easily how much they cared for the other.  Before our conversation broke up, they told me they spent a few overnight’s together each week,  much to the disdain of some of their family members.   There is no cloudiness in my memory of Evelyn’s comment “I’m old enough to do whatever the hell I want to do.  Bill and I love each other and that is all that matters”.  Even writing those words today they sound like something young lovers might say.  In the love department I think that’s exactly what this couple is in their hearts.

As long as I live I will remember one more thing that came up in my conversation with Bill and Evelyn near Christmas in 2009.  Their blunt explanation about sex embarrassed me a little at the time. I learned age and infirmity kept them from sharing sexually, but was told they had found something both thought was even better.  Evelyn said something like “we just lay down, kiss a little and then hold each other very close for a long time”.   What a beautifully sweet thought and one I am grateful to have logged away in memory. 

Do I love you because you’re beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella