MARTIAN AFFAIRS: Author John Gray's international bestseller Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus has spawned a global industry which this week came to Cairo. As workshops opened in the city purporting to help you find your perfect partner Al-Ahram Weekly took to the streets to discover exactly what it is Egyptians seek What men want Fun and games, Reem Nafie discovers, but other things too Men, like women, find the opposite sex unfathomable. While women are on their guard against commitment phobes, men recoil at the first whiff of the M word. "I hate it when a girl starts discussing marriage," explained Mohamed Gaber, a 26-year-old engineer. "When a man is in his twenties he wants to enjoy his freedom, and if he meets a girl she will probably want commitment. Some men aren't ready for that," he continues. "I want a woman who will go with the flow, if we fall in love marriage may come and it may not, I don't want her to nag me about commitment 24-hours a day if I don't propose." Besides, men say, if the only thing on a woman's mind is marriage then something is wrong. A good relationship, they argue, has nothing to do with signatures on a piece of paper. "The person I want has to have a sense of humour," says Peter Hanna, a second-year computer science student at the American University in Cairo. "If she can't make me laugh then she's not the one." A good sense of humour, he explains, enables a woman to "take life lightly" and helps alleviate problems. Humour saves women from being over-emotional, over- sensitive and neurotic, all things men say they hate. What they want is a woman like them: caring, and "fun, fun, and more fun". They ask themselves, as Henry Higgins asked in My Fair Lady, "Why can't a women be more like a man?" Next to marriage, if there is one thing men steer clear of, it is emotions. "I was in a relationship a year ago, I loved my fiancée very much but she was too emotional," says 30-year-old businessman Tamer Hosny. "She cried constantly and it was like I could never make her happy enough. In the end, she was wearing me down. I couldn't go on and we broke up." Emotions, to men, imply helplessness, the biggest "turn- off" of all. "Women shouldn't always be down," Hosny believes. "It's terrible to see a woman crying all the time, it gives you the impression that she's weak." Hosny's friends agree. "No one wants to be with a woman who is weak and dependent on a man," 29-year-old dentist Ahmed El-Meligui pitches in. "But we also don't want someone who is a control freak, because that hides her feminine side." And she needs to be smart and stable too. "My kind of lady is someone who knows when to cry and when to stand up for herself," El-Meligui says. " If she has a problem I want to be there for her, but she has to be able to make her own decisions most of the time." Men don't want to have to play Dad. "I want someone that is strong and responsible," computer engineer Mahmoud Reda, 28, offers. "I want someone that can take care of me as well. Who said that the man has to take care of a woman all the time? I want my partner to share the responsibility." The young men agree that being taken care of is not such a terrible thing. "Maybe he is right," one of the gathering says, "our mothers used to be responsible for us and we didn't hate it, but unfortunately," he adds, "no one could ever be like our mothers." Caring yes, clingy no. It's a fine line. Ahmed Tawfik, a 25-year-old musician explains that his job requires him to work long hours. "Many girls don't understand that this is the nature of my job," he explains. "I can't be with someone that always wants me to be around and isn't grown up enough to realise that work is important," he laments. "And most girls are like that now." Naturally it is not just a case of work. Men also like "boy time". Mohamed Hassanein, a 22-year-old mechanical engineering student, explains that his ideal woman would respect his "quality-time". For that read football, play-station needs and daily male gatherings. Without space for quality time and work time, a relationship is destined to flop. They need to have fun, and they need their women to have fun too. But that, like most ideal combinations, is not so easy to find. "A decent, polite, well-bred woman who isn't boring and depressing," Omar Abdel-Aziz, 31, says matter-of-factly. "But you can't find these qualities in a girl these days," he adds. "Their greatest problem is that they turn the smallest arguments into huge disappointments, and I can't take that." Under the bracket of polite and decent comes another aspect men take seriously, namely "friendliness". Men do not appreciate a bubbly, friendly, popular woman who steals their thunder. "I want my girl to be liked by my friends and able to converse with them, but I don't want my friends calling her instead of me," says Mohamed Alaa, 24. "There has to be a limit." And then of course, there is that one other thing that men absolutely abhor -- paranoia. When a man tells a woman she looks good, they advise, then accept that as what they really mean. When they say she looks "fine" and does not need to lose weight, it means just that. Not "fine" but could lose some, not "fine" because it's easy to say. Perhaps men, like women, are not quite sure what they really want or need. Psychiatrist Mohamed Abdel-Fattah has no doubts on the matter. "Men don't know what they want," he writes. "Their needs and desires do not mature until they are 35. Before that they are only describing an illusion they have built in their heads -- usually someone that resembles their mothers in many ways. If you ask any man what he wants," he continues, "he will probably tell you that he wants everything and nothing at the same time. Anyone that says anything different is probably lying."
