Published Articles
By Dr. William R. Morrow

“A Woman’s Desire is Complex”

For men, Valentine’s Day is like a trick question on your driver’s license exam: You could miss the point and end up getting your privileges revoked. Because if you respond the wrong way, and fail to send flowers and a card, your woman will think you lack romantic intentions. On the other hand, if you send flowers and a card, she may accuse you of doing it for some sneaky reason, like sex. Although most women would claim to want a man’s romantic attention, their response is widely varied and unpredictable. What DO they want?

I realize I am putting myself in jeopardy with the female gender, by presuming, as a male marriage therapist, to understand how women’s desires and lusts really work. Call me “sexist “(one who promotes stereotypes based on gender), but someone has to educate the general public about these intimate and sometimes taboo things. I confess, Valentine’s Day does not bring out the professional best in me because I believe it is difficult for couples to find the right Valentine to express their love. The Big Day raises a challenge for committed partners who have moved beyond courtship in their years together. Still with the help of scientific research as well as some unscientific survey, I will try to be impartial about love and sex, and bring down some stereotypes. It is nice to see that much of today’s research in understanding the female mind and body is being done by women behavioral scientists and sexologists.

Female scientists have in fact come up with the use of some high-tech equipment called the plethysmograph (rhymes with “gizmo-”) in researching what women want. I kid you not this little machine cleverly takes on the job of intimate photography, and in parts of the body you don’t want named in print. The researchers, as reported in the NY Times (Jan 25, 2009), claim, as a result of many intimate pictures and questionnaires, to bring all of us out of the old cultural morass of misunderstandings about women. Their data are supposed to reveal to us the “real” inner workings of the female mind and body. Maybe and maybe not, because, as it turns out, the researchers don’t always agree among themselves!

What does SHE want in love, in bed, or in a Valentine? I have concluded that I don’t know for sure either. One thing that does stand out from the research: The male frame of reference for evaluating female sexuality fails to give a true picture of a woman’s flexible responses to a man’s attempt at romance. In other words a woman’s sexuality is relatively more mysterious (and complex) than a man’s, which most of us just knew by intuition all along. Men: write this down: Female sexual desire is even more mysterious than we thought when we read the book “Why Men Don’t Get Enough Sex and Why Women Don’t Get Enough Love” (Kramer and Dunaway). Women’s romantic sensibility and sexual desire, according to the agreed-on new research, are likely based on their personal perception of intimacy and emotional desire. Along with this, their awareness of faithful attachment and of being desired influences their sexual behavior.

So what is the bottom line in a Valentine verse, if we men, who can spend more time warming up our motorcycles than our mates, are trying to be appropriate? What can we say or do, if we want to rise above instinctual behavior, which often gets us in trouble? It is difficult to figure out, but if we commit as much energy to affection as to sex, we might be surprised!

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