On the subject of what women want, I was told by an intelligent and articulated female friend of mine that "we just want someone to protect us".
Put bluntly, she was saying that women want a replacement father.
What do men want? A replacement mother? That doesn't ring true to me. Men don't seem to crave a replacement anything. Rather, the man offers protection to the woman and gets intimacy, which he does crave, in return.
2) This protector role that the man is expected to fill means that displays of vulnerability are risky, because they put his ability to protect the woman into question, making him less attractive to her. Similarly, being less intimate with a partner than usual is a risky proposition for a woman, because it makes her less attractive to him.
@thor
When I was about 30 and still not married, a man in his 50s told me that marrying is a convenient thing because when you lose your mother you still have your wife. He was neither educated nor articulate and he put that in a simple way, but I think there's some truth in what he said. Men too need some support and comfort.
(I never married and my mother died a couple of years ago. But I'm a loner, and if I had a wife and children, I fear that I could just not bear them.)