Several years ago there was a movie with Helen Hunt and Mel Gibson titled What Women Want. As with most romantic comedies, it involved discovering how to make a relationship out of a chance encounter, only in this case, it included Mel Gibson's character gaining the supernatural ability to read the minds of women. This brought with it both extreme benefits and extreme challenges.
What do women want? On one level, you may get just as many answers as women that you ask. However, I do agree with the bevy of writers, speakers, advocates, and believers who claim that women want to be desired, cared for, adored, supported, and above all things, loved. Women want to be seen as an integral part of the story, and seen as unique, beautiful, necessary, and both a warrior and a princess.
The hearts of women are more complicated than men. Whether we are looking at the saints, archetypal feminists, radical traditionalists, or Mary the mother of Jesus, women can at least agree that we are complex, and we resist any one dimensional definition. This complexity may be interpreted as fickle or indecisive because we may seem to have contradictory thoughts; however, this is not the case. We are both a warrior and a princess, an advocate and a supplicant, a gentle mother and a Mama Bear. The 1970's commercial about bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan may have been an attempt to describe all that we are as women, but it also created in women the curiosity about what we should really want. What if I can't cook? Does that mean I am not a full woman? What if I don't want to have a career outside of the home? Does that make me only half a woman? If the answer from every woman is not a resounding, "NO!" then we still have a ways to go in answering the question what do women want.
Women want to be seen and heard for their unique contributions to both the work force and the home. A woman wants the choice to pursue what she feels called and equipped to pursue with the full support, encouragement, and belief of those in her life, especially the other women. Women want to be heard, but sometimes I find the extreme poles are yelling their opinions so loudly that we find it difficult to remember that every voice matters, and so does every woman's journey toward her wholeness as a woman, wife, daughter, mother, or business owner.
Ultimately, the purpose of each human to glorify God through the process of becoming the best version of themselves and using their gifts in the service of others, and how each individual woman achieves that is her unique journey. However, as a gender, as a group, as women and sisters, we need to stop proclaiming
that we don't want love, protection, and romance because we think we must choose power over gentleness, and we must stop making those women who do voice those desires to feel that they are somehow weak or selling out. We are beauty made by Love for love, and to the extent that we are celebrated as we live that out is the extent to which we will thrive. What women want is simple. We want to be known and loved, cherished and lifted up in whatever path we choose to follow.
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