What does a woman want?

I am no expert on women and don’t think there are a great many people who can claim to understand the female being. Even the founding father of psychoanalysis was befuddled by them. Freud once said, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”. I myself have had very limited experience, if any at all, regarding women. And words like ‘relationship’ and ‘love’— which are being thrown around everywhere as Valentine’s Day approaches—are quite near to the incomprehensible to me.

For a boy like me, who’s never quite fallen in love—the ‘deep’ and quite pointless kind that every other person seems to profess these days—science and sports were the only things that mattered, or even existed, before I came to learn and I suppose even understand to a certain extent, that loving another person is a part of life. The fact that I’ve hardly ever talked to many girls is a major factor. I grew up in a boy’s hostel and don’t recall wanting to talk to any girl while in school. Maybe it was all down to the way I was living. I never felt the need for ‘love’.

But I also see and understand that a fantasy world of one or another kind exists in the mind of every boy. Most boys won’t admit to it, but I’m sure I’m not the only one. An adultery of sorts always exists in the minds and hearts of young men, but they’ll argue with you for hours before accepting defeat and admitting reality.

The reason I do not understand women is also the reason I do not understand Valentine’s Day. If I like a girl and she likes me, I don’t think Valentine’s Day is necessary at all. The concept in itself is mere formality. Perhaps it’s just that the red-rosed, cupid-arrowed, heart-shaped everything Valentine’s Day makes a woman feel special. And that, I suppose, is what boys ultimately have to learn; how to make girls feel special.

And this: Making a woman feel special is easier said than achieved. It is something you try to do, but things that are special to me are not necessarily so for the fairytale princess kind of girl. Watching a man hit a hard cricket ball right from his eye lines to the grand stand is not interesting enough for them. Playing cricket without a box-guard is not exactly ‘vulnerable’ in their dictionary. The truth, as I’ve come to learn it over the years, is that girls think differently and expect you to think like them.

It’s not that I don’t have girls for friends. It is from the experiences I’ve had with my friends who are girls (not ‘girlfriends’) that I’m telling you all this. They say you’ve got to be humorous, but they also tell you that your jokes are boring. They say you need to be different, and I see no one around me who looks quite like I do. And what’s more I’ve seldom had people tell me that before; that I need to be different, that my habits and my nature match those of someone else.

Nothing of my choice would ever amuse a woman. My taste in music, for instance, is very different from that of most girls. Every man’s finger print is different. Every man’s DNA code sequence is different. And yet all men are the same, in many ways, or so the women say.

‘Earning’ a woman is difficult when your demeanor is not quite polished, when your speaking is always bad. This becomes a lot more difficult when the contents of your brain are too narrow for a girl. And if you have the habit of swearing, you might as well stop thinking about girls.

Swearing in my opinion is not bad. When the early man spoke his first swear-word, he laid the foundation of civilisation by virtue of the fact that he did not bash his rival’s brains out with a club. You don’t need Valentine’s Day if you already have the person you love by your side, and flirting...it’s an art; an innate quality that some of us simply do not possess. It takes a lot of planning and exercise to flirt with a woman.

Different women like different approaches, and a man could spend his entire life trying to figure out what exactly is ‘special’ to a woman. I’ve tried to flirt a few times myself, but I’ve always ended up boring the women I’ve had these ‘flirtatious conversations’ with.

I am not proud of the fact that I’ve flirted. In fact, flirting with a woman only because you think it is inevitable is one of the worse things any man can do. But that’s life. Life is no bed of roses, and you will never end up with someone you might eventually learn to love if you do not know how to make girls feel special. “You’ve got a lot of practice ahead of you,” I tell myself.

The entire process of falling in love has been exaggerated to such an extent by Bollywood that it is very difficult for boys to make girls fall for them. If boys could only dance to the beats of a Hindi song with their female counterparts, the process of ‘falling in love’, as they call it, might have been a lot simpler.

Losing your heart to someone is easy. Earning one in return is very difficult. The only thing the heart does is pump blood, and it pumps faster when women are around.  As a matter of fact, the heart decides nothing. It does not decide whom to love. It is just a lump of muscle hanging in a tangle of blood-vessels. Like witchcraft or the biblical theory of evolution—which were only ever true in the minds of human beings—losing your heart to someone is nothing more than a myth.

This is what science has taught me to do; kill a beautiful myth, with the help of an ugly truth.

- Abheeshu Dhungana