“Listen.” One word that stood out in 108 women's answers about what they need from men

“Listen.” That single word stood out to Suzanne Degges-White, a licensed counselor and professor at Northern Illinois University, in the answers of 108 women asked what they most need from the men in their lives. She set out the results in a Psychology Today column updated on October 11, 2026. The women focused, she wrote, “not on status, grand gestures, or wealth” but on emotional availability, respect, trust and open communication.

A survey that grew out of a 2018 column

The survey has a history. It grew out of a Psychology Today post Degges-White published in 2018 about what women want from men in romantic relationships, after which readers were invited to share their own views. Between 2018 and 2023, 108 women completed it.

That 2018 column, dated June 4, 2018, drew on a separate study in which women aged 18 to 75 were asked what they need from the men in their lives. It concluded that what women seek in a male partner is not all that different from what they seek in a friend, and it sorted the traits into three areas: moral integrity, relational sensitivity and satisfying intimacy.

The 2026 column sorts the newer answers under headings of its own: emotional support, respect, trust and honesty, communication, love and affection, safety, partnership, friendship and authenticity. Each heading carries a line from a respondent.

What listening costs

The quotation that opens the emotional support section is “Understanding and empathetic listening without trying to fix things”. It describes a gift with a precise price: time, attention, and the restraint of keeping the repair kit in the bag.

Degges-White draws a line between being loved and being understood. Many respondents, she writes, did not simply ask for love, they asked to be understood. Her formulation: "Love can be spoken; understanding must be demonstrated."

She also teases the dating profile, gently. A charming smile, an adorable dog and a well-placed bestselling book can make an appealing profile, she writes, but they are “unlikely to build a lasting connection”. The dog, in other words, wins the glance and loses the decade.

The respondents asked for something slower than a profile can show. Feeling understood, in her words, creates emotional safety, and emotional safety is often the foundation on which intimacy and trust are built.

Respect, trust and the team

If one word appeared again and again, Degges-White says, it was respect, with a respondent's wish “To feel heard and respected”. On trust, one line reads: "Women most need loyalty, honesty, and accountability."

The partnership section is where giving becomes practical. Degges-White writes that women want a partner who shares responsibilities, decision-making, and emotional labor, and she adds: "They don’t simply want someone who can provide; they want someone who will participate." The respondent's phrase is “To work together as a team”. Another Reflets brief looked at a survey on who carries the mental load of a household.

A passage in the 2018 column concerns favors done in the expectation of a reward in return, and it is blunt: "Your good behavior should not be viewed simply as a means towards a particular end." Doing so, it said, turns a potentially romantic encounter into "more of a business deal". Her point there is narrower than a theory of giving, but it fits the rest: attention offered with an invoice attached is not what the respondents describe. A separate Reflets brief covers a study linking regular helping of others to slower cognitive decline.

What the women rarely mentioned is as telling as what they did. In the column's words, very few emphasized wealth, status, prestige, social influence or physical attractiveness as their primary needs. Those, Degges-White writes, may be nice to have, but they are not going to be enough on their own.

Safety, friendship and being oneself

Three further headings round out the picture. Under safety, the respondent's line is “We need to feel safe in our own homes”, and Degges-White reads safety broadly: physical and emotional, stability, consistency and security within the relationship.

Under friendship, the line is “Acceptance, support, friendship, love”. The columnist's comment is that friendship may sound like a tame ask of a partner, but that "genuine friendship is the glue that holds relationships together over the decades". The 2018 column made the same link, saying that being a friend to a partner means treating her in the patient, accepting manner in which you treat other close friends.

Authenticity closes the list. The quoted wish is for "An opportunity to be ourselves" in the activities women enjoy or have always wanted to try, "without being judged or held back". It is the one theme that asks a partner to hold back from correcting, which sits oddly beside the old advice to polish a profile. The 2018 column went further and said "no dating-site algorithm can accurately predict the human heart", a sentence that spares the matching industry no flattery.

All three themes ask for steady behavior over months rather than a gesture on one evening, and the respondents' words, as quoted, contain no price tag.

What the survey cannot show

The column is open about its limits, in one sentence: "Although the respondents do not represent a scientific sample of all women, their responses offer a revealing glimpse into the characteristics many associate with healthy, satisfying relationships."

The reference list is blunt as well. The data is cited as "Unpublished survey dataset", authored by Degges-White herself. The column gives no percentages, only the count of 108 and the words "overwhelmingly" and "very few", and it does not say where the respondents live, how old they are or what kind of relationships they are in. For readers in the United States and the United Kingdom, the safe reading is that this is a set of themes from women who chose to answer a columnist's online questions.

There is a second caution, about the headline. It promises that what women want may surprise you. The 2018 column had already listed respect, open communication, honesty and trust. What changed is the sample, not the finding.

The survey also asks what women say they need, not whether getting it changes anything. The research below speaks to that question, with its own limits.

What research on feeling responded to adds

Social psychologists have a name for the thing the respondents describe: perceived partner responsiveness, which is the sense that a partner understands, validates and cares for you. A study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, published on March 19, 2021 by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tested what follows from it. Using four couple samples totalling 824 individuals, recruited around Chapel Hill through Craigslist ads and emails to university staff and students, the authors found that couples who saw each other as more responsive also reported more affectionate touch, and that daily reports pointed the same way. The measure behind it is plain: an 18-item scale with statements such as "My partner understands me".

The authors state their own limit: the data are correlational, and showing causation would need experimental evidence that greater perceived responsiveness leads to more touch. All the couples came from one North Carolina area, and in the combined sample 56.8% were dating exclusively rather than married or engaged.

A second line of work is better known and comes with a different caveat. A blog post on the Gottman website, written by Houston psychotherapist Caroline Sweatt-Eldredge and published on September 27, 2024, describes John Gottman's finding on emotional bids, the small attempts one partner makes to get the other's attention. In a six-year study of newlyweds, it says, couples who stayed together turned toward each other's bids 86% of the time, while those who went on to divorce did so 33% of the time. The figures come from this summary, not from the original paper.

The same post lowers the price of the gift. A bid can be as obvious as a request for cuddling at bedtime or as subtle as a remark about the weather, and the post says "You don’t have to deliver endless energy, attention, and focus to be a relationship master." Often a simple acknowledgement is enough.

A new survey is open

Put together, the sources point the same way without proving one another. Women's own words ask for attention that costs little in money and a fair amount in patience, and the university study finds that feeling understood travels with warmth between partners, within the limits of correlation.

The column ends with a dated next step. As of the October 11, 2026 update, Degges-White says a new survey is open for readers who want to share their perspectives, which means the next set of answers will come from the same kind of volunteers as the last.

Sources

• What Women Say They Want From Men May Surprise You, Psychology Today, Suzanne Degges-White, updated October 11, 2026
• Perceived Partner Responsiveness Forecasts Behavioral Intimacy as Measured by Affectionate Touch, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 19, 2021