BACK in the day, Granny and I would meet on the subway platform most mornings. She was off to look after the last clients remaining from the printing and engraving business she and my late grandfather had built, while I travelled to my first grown-up job with a commodities exchange in the World Trade Centre.
Frequently she'd give me the gimlet eye, purse her impeccably glossed lips and say: "You'll never meet a nice man dressed like that." Managing to convey that "nice" was spelled J-e-w-i-s-h.
I rarely challenged her belief system. She was born in 19
10, and most of her views were fixed by the time this pipsqueak arrived in 1959. Thus I vividly recall one telephone call that, as usual, found her complaining that I was single, not earning much, and running with a posse of homosexual – ie, unmarriageable – men. It was about time I found someone to support me.
"You make it sound as though it's all economics," I snapped. "Don't you hope I find love, or do you only care about my moving into a so-called good neighbourhood?" A moment's silence, and then the old flatterer explained that she took my lovability for granted. The bills were another story. Decades later, gazing at her diamonds sparkling on my right hand, I "get" what's so appealing about affluence.
But in the 49 years between my birth and hers, the landscape of femininity weathered earthquakes. I also "got it" when Lucy Porter told me, last summer, that her original goal was to become a comic's consort and muse – until realising that actually she wanted to be the comic. I had similar fantasies and an identical epiphany about doing rather than enabling.
Which is one of the reasons the red haze descended when I read the headline: "At least 5ft 10 in, clean-shaven and driving a silver Mercedes: The 20-point guide to what women really want in their Mr Right." Not again with this pish!
The points were culled from a study of 40,000 women by UKdating.com, and include criteria of such specificity that it's no wonder so many are still single. Mr Right must weigh precisely 12 and a half stone; must own a £300,000 home; must be a lawyer or doctor earning more than £30K. (Somewhere in heaven Grandma's saying: "And what's wrong with that?") Plus he should have a wacky sense of humour, which conjures such frightening images of mid-Nineties Jim Carrey that I'm ready to take the veil.
Are my fellow females really that shallow? Don't they realise they can get the car and the house and the career for themselves? I pray the poll consisted solely of multiple choice questions and these answers represent the best of a bad bunch of options. Because this is the list a 15-year-old writes. If you're curious about what women want, read the novels we write. They're not hard to find and lay it out plainly, but for the fiction-phobic, here's a hint: Whatever men want, women want, too.
We want intellectual and sexual stimulation. We want companionship. We want respect. We want attention. We want encouragement to chase our dreams and a safe haven to return to if they don't quite gel. We crave security and safety, both physical and emotional. And secretly, we yearn to be unquestioningly, lavishly adored and indulged, though we know that's unrealistic except maybe in honour of the bigger birthdays and every third Valentine's Day.
As every great romantic knows, you can't wrap that up in a single neat package. Love takes many guises. That's what makes it so endlessly fascinating.
The full article contains 626 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
