Ambitious career-active women are slowly realising that marrying for security is a price they don’t necessarily have to pay anymore.

All women complain about men but we can’t seem to live without them. Is this ranting about the inadequacies of the male sex just an exercise in futility, wonders Nayantara Kilachand

An evening spent in the company of ten men, three bottles of Jack Daniels and a few hundred Marlboro lights and this is what I discover about the intrinsic nature of Indian men:

• They all have a cradle-born desire to sleep with a DD cup 6 feet 2 inch, reed thin blonde called Heidi from Sweden with severely limited English language skills. Though during a drought of aforementioned Heidis, other Scandinavian nationalities will suffice.

• Perseverance is the key. The motto, ‘if at first you don’t succeed try, try again’ was coined in desperation by a certain young man when the charmingly frigid object of his affections had yet again shot him the evil eye.

"It figures," snorted a friend of mine when I told her. "But you know why men choose good-looking women over intelligent ones? Because they can see better than they can think." In the absence of a member of the male sex to defend his species against this bitter raillery, I felt obliged (to avoid criticism of sexual bias) to offer a rebuttal argument. "Surely there have been several instances of a woman choosing a fetching young Narcissus over his plain Paul nerdy kin?" I asked. "Of course," the friend retorted. "But these women usually act on a whim and then a few years down the line when they have to take a lot of crap from their husbands, they inevitably regret it."

Trouble is all women complain about men but we can’t seem to live without them, so all this ranting about the inadequacies of the male sex is just an exercise in futility and one that is tiresome and exhausting at that. It’s just one of those ineluctable life stereotypes that is unfortunately as trite as it is true. So why fight it? "Well, we need them for sex and lifting heavy objects. Obviously," one 28-year-old single woman states incredulously as if I have asked the daftest, most patently obvious question in the world. Of course. Men: can’t live with ’em but need ’em to carry the luggage.

A quick poll of women in various stages of relationships and non-relationships later and I discover that these days most, but not all, women are less willing to settle for a sub-standard three-star version when it comes to choosing a life partner, boyfriend or husband. Whereas before, marriage was a decidedly pragmatic means to financial security, companionship and family, today a career, friends and Mum and Dad offer a similar and comparatively less parlous road to stability and freedom. Ambitious career-active women are slowly realising that marrying for security is a price they don’t necessarily have to pay anymore. And with this newfound realisation comes the liberty to stick it out for someone, dare I say it, ‘special’.

If it’s children that you want, more than one woman informs me, then buy a dog. But not a cat because that leaks into the spinsterhood category which is grisly territory best left uncharted in the presence of unmarried 20-something women.

Though in trawling through our collective experiences we find that almost each one of us knows someone, in most cases a woman, who has married for money. So times are a changing but not, apparently, for everyone. Women we deduce can be mercenary creatures but even the most brutal cold-hearted ones know what they want well in advance. "On a very basic level, men are pretty stupid. They don’t really have deep thoughts and usually they have no idea what they want in a woman. And when they do, 50 per cent of it is completely unreasonable," a 23-year-old girl in a three-year relationship told me. And, to bolster her point with proof undeniable, she tells me the story of a certain girl whose husband made her give up non-vegetarian food once they got married. "You know what he told her?" she asks me darkly. "He told her she could eat meat if she wanted to, but then he wouldn’t kiss her. So obviously she had to choose his lips over the lamb korma."

Example in point: The same guys who regaled me with their Heidi from Helsinki fantasies also demanded to know why we women are so fickle, why we tend to complicate everything and why it is we prefer to bottle up our grievances, expect men to somehow telepathically sense what’s wrong and then get hopping mad when they don’t. "We don’t get women," they all told me mournfully, three sheets to the wind by this point. "Tell us some insider secrets," they then demanded, convinced that there was a crucial secret key to figuring us out that we deliberately kept, well, secret.

A few days later, I wondered if in our collective quest to find and then figure out our dream member of the opposite sex, we were all overlooking the most basic and fundamental tenet for wanting to commit to another human being: love. "Oh! That thing," one 28-year-old woman said gloomily when I mention this to her. "Well, that’s just down to luck and fate. And some of us are luckier than others." Luck indeed.

Well gentlemen, here’s one secret about the fairer sex that I bet you never knew — what most women really want is a man, emotional warts and all, to fall in love with and to preferably have that same man fall back in love with them. When I tell this to the guys they all sigh. "Well, that’s exactly what we want as well," one guy ‘crazily in love with his girlfriend’ says. "Even if we act like repressed 15-year-olds some of the time."

With no immediate plans for an improved male-female system of communication, it only remains to quote the clever and, I imagine, quite resigned Frenchman (or woman) who once said, "Vive la diffrence."