Since Eve beguiled Adam men have been struggling to answer the question: “What do women want?” Today, however, men have largely concluded that the ancient feminine riddle is a paradox. Even that ultimate ladies man, Frank Sinatra, professed, “I’m supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I’ve flunked more often than not. I’m very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don’t understand them.” And the man who invented psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, opined, “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?’” 

     Despite mans’ recent declaration of surrender, back in the 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer actually did a pretty good job of answering what women want. 

    “The Wife of Bath,” one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, spins a yarn about a knight in King Arthur’s court. The knight, explains the wife, raped a woman and was subsequently caught. He would have been killed for the crime, but the queen interceded by asking the king to turn the knight over to her for judgment. The king complied and the queen gave the knight a year and a day to find out what women really want. She told him if his answer fails to satisfy her, she’ll have him executed. So the knight searches all over England for a year, but every woman he finds says something different. Some say women want riches, others flattery, some say beauty, others security . . . . 

    After a confusing year, the knight reluctantly heads back to see the queen all the while fretting that his head will be lopped off. But then he sees 24 dancers. As he watches them they suddenly disappear, leaving behind an old hag. The knight thinks what the hell, and asks the hag what women want. She says she’ll tell him if he promises to grant her one request at a time she chooses. He agrees and they go together to the castle. When they get there the hag whispers her answer to the knight, who then says that what women want most is “to have the sovereignty as well upon their husband as their love, and to have mastery their man above.” In other words, women want to be in charge.

    The queen is as delighted as she is surprised by this perfect answer and so pardons the knight. But just when the knight’s jumping in the air and clicking his metal heels together, the hag cries out she saved the knight and her reward will be for him to marry her. He protests—a dashing knight can’t marry a hag, after all—but loses the argument when the queen makes him fulfill his promise. The marriage takes place the next day. But then, on their wedding night, the knight just can’t bring himself to consummate the deal—the hag is so ghastly he goes limp. So she sighs, okay, I’ll make you a deal, you can choose whether I’m ugly and faithful or beautiful and unfaithful. 

    He’s perplexed. On one hand she’d be revolting, on the other she’d force him to fight every knight in the castle, so after a lot of bellyaching he wimps out and begs her to decide. The hag then glows with delight because this capitulation to her will signifies the complete domination of her husband; as a result, she becomes both fair and faithful and lives with him happily ever after.

    Now, Chaucer really doesn’t deserve credit for the revelation that women want men to concede defeat in the battle of the sexes; after all, the tale was simply a variation of the “Loathly Lady” story, a yarn popular in Chaucer’s day. But whatever its origin, the answer that women want to rule their men has since symbolically, if not literally, been realized. Just consider the evidence: Since the Middle Ages, Western men have been ritualistically conceding they want women to be in charge every time they fall on one knee to beg a woman to marry them. And, to woo women, men have long been required to blush with daises in their calloused hands, to procure boxes of candy on Valentine’s Day, to write love poetry, and to perform other rituals designed to temporarily effeminize their masculinity and thereby demonstrate they’ll do anything for a woman. 

    Which leads us to the root of the modern dilemma: when those chivalric rituals originated, the European feudal system was a comprehensible set of rules, because, after all, men wrote them to make women seem understandable. Men liked this societal arrangement because gentlemen could chase women, and then marry ladies (or at least tell themselves they were marrying ladies). 

    But then the whole snobbish, bigoted, sexist, class-structured charade came crashing down as middle-class societies crushed much of the class system in the 18th and 19th centuries and women’s suffrage struggles in the 20th century continued to stomp out sexism across the civilized world. As a result, modern societies are now as close to equal opportunity between the sexes as people have ever come, yet this positive change hasn’t made things simpler. This is because today’s women still cling to most of the tenets of the old chivalric ideal, a code that requires men to treat women as ladies. Women adore chivalry even though feminists often deem it to be sexist because condemning male chauvinism while cherishing chivalry allows them to have it both ways: They get men who are required to open the door for them yet who must consider them equal in all ways.

Women, you see, still want the fairytale of the valiant knight in shining armor freeing them from a stultifying life of waving hankies from a tower. And they want it even as they compete with men in the workplace. Though women want the dashing knight or the cowboy in the white hat, they understandably would rather not have that recently dead patriarchal system’s sexism, male chauvinism, lack of rights.... This, naturally, is confusing to men who often want something equally difficult to find, as Edward Dahlbert crassly explained: “What men desire is a virgin who is a whore.”

     These competing—albeit overly simplified—points of view show why today’s men have given up uncovering what women want. And it’s why men now shrug as women declare they want to be both ladies and women at the same time (and sometimes even men). This is why back in 1933 Compton Mackenzie wrote, “Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen.”
Indeed, women now have membership into every segment of a “man’s world” but don’t always have to adhere to mans’ chivalric code.

    So, given this rigged arrangement, how does a man navigate today’s feminist minefield and come out the other side with some working notion of what women want? First realize that the modern spin on the Wife of Bath’s tale is that what women want are men who are strong, yet supple to their wills—even when their wills are whimsical. Women want to be in charge, except when a spider crawls up the wall, there is a bump in the night, or a calamity strikes—though they may or may not want to take charge then, as well. So to be an old-fashioned romantic with a modern sense of equality, first, as Sigmund Freud advised, gird your loins with the realization that “a woman should soften but not weaken a man.” Next, as stupendous as this notion at first seems, come to understand that women don’t see any contradictions in their viewpoint. To women it seems reasonable that they don’t want their men to be shallow, yet they want their men to tell them they’re beautiful at all times, even though a man can’t possibly tell a woman she’s beautiful without being superficial.

    So to navigate such dilemmas, men need to embrace the idea that the only concrete thing we can say about romanticism is that’s the affirmation of what a man is fighting for; that it’s the acknowledgement of a heart. And without a heart a man becomes the Tin Man wandering the Land of Oz, a hollow man with brains and bravado, but no human compassion. This is why every male icon from Ancient Greece’s Odysseus to the Middle Age’s Roland to the American West’s Wyatt Earp to contemporary heroes like James Bond and Superman have been romantics. And why every Hollywood action hero is a cliché without humanizing scenes such as when Martin Riggs cries at the grave of his dead wife. So the lesson here is that men shouldn’t fret too much if they don’t know what woman wants; instead they should just know that a man who isn’t a romantic isn’t a complete man; he’s, at best, the Terminator, a brawny, courageous, heartless machine.

    So be a romantic by, as much as you can, becoming the strength behind her will. And when you’re wrong—and you will be—reaffirm their power over your heart with an honest romantic gesture.