'What women want' is supposedly something that has befuddled men through the ages.

But will I be pricking too many bubbles if I say that in reality most of us don't really care? Instead let's talk about what men want. Apart from good old sex. Which is also something we want as much as any average woman might.

Parents are parents for a reason. They’ll never completely agree with you. And that’s fine. But what do you do when your parents behave like puritans out of the past century?

A couple I know, who have been engaged for a year now, complained the other day about not being allowed to meet in private without their parents’ consent. So how do they cope? “We just lie to them.”

Why do we find it so hard these days to keep up a steady relationship with a partner? 

It’s not so hard to find couples who fell in love at a very young age, got married, had children and grandchildren, and have grown old together. They make sticking together for a 60 years of marriage look easy. But times have changed and so have people.

“No matter where you are on the attractiveness scale, there’s always someone out there who finds you attractive,” says Danish researcher Gert Martin Hald.

He stumbled upon this finding in a study on how people respond when strangers chat them up. Hald told Love Matters about his surprising unpublished discoveries at the World Congress for Sexual Health.

Is the number of guests at your wedding reception directly proportional to the longevity of your marriage – or inversely?

Hollywood and Hindi movies alike have taught me that most girls spend their youth planning their grand weddings. While the men are writing scripts on these cheesy events. So are weddings the actual battleground for the proverbial Mars-Venus war?

Q: My boyfriend moved to another city for a job three months ago – should I stay in a long-distance relationship?

We’ve been dating for almost a year. But now it feels like he’s putting his job, friends and family before me. I love him with all my heart but I’m getting virtually nothing from the relationship now. Should I hold on to him or just end it? Preeti, Surat

Q: I’m very jealous of my boyfriend’s best girl friend. I’m not sure if they’re ‘just friends’.

He hugs and kisses her more than he would do me. I've been with him about 10 months now. I love him so much. I always knew he had a lot of female friends. I didn’t think I’d get possessive, but now I am. What should I do? Seerat, Jaipur

“Hi there! Would you go to bed with me tonight?”

A guy who tries this chat-up line on a girl is heading for a big brush-off. Yet reverse the roles, and the guy will probably seize the opportunity (as well as the girl) with both hands. Sounds obvious? Danish researchers set up a ‘sexual invitations’ experiment to test the theory.

“Always check on how old your man is,” a friend of mine told me last week. She was of the opinion that men are like wine – the older they grow, the better they get.

It made me wonder if age really matters. “It’s like asking, ‘Does size matter?’” she said. “You might want to believe it doesn’t, but get down to business and you know it’s important.”

Like it or not, relationships can go stale. What would you do if yours was deteriorating?

How long would you keep fighting? When would you give up? And when does love end?
A friend of mine was having a rough time with his girlfriend recently and he told me there are no rules: “Gut feeling y’know, it’s gotta end when it’s gotta end.”