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Daily Inspiration Quote by Jennifer Love Hewitt

"There's a difference between wanting to be respected and being a strong female and being known for being able to do things, but still very much wanting guys to open the door, wanting them to ask us out, still bringing flowers and stuff like that"

About this Quote

Jennifer Love Hewitt is staking out a third lane in a culture that loves forcing women to pick a side: either you want respect or you want romance. The sentence tumbles forward in a breathy cascade of qualifiers ("and... and... but still..."), which is the point. It sounds like someone trying to make a lived, contradictory reality fit into a debate framed as a clean binary. The rhetorical move is less manifesto than plea: stop treating "strong female" as a costume that requires renouncing softness, ritual, or being pursued.

The subtext is early-2000s gender politics, when post-feminist pop culture sold empowerment as a brand while punishing women for asking for anything that looked traditional. Hewitt's examples are deliberately small and cinematic: doors, dates, flowers. They're not policy; they're symbols. She isn't arguing for dependence so much as for choreography - a desire to be competent in public and cherished in private, without having to apologize for either.

Her wording also reveals the tightrope. "Guys" and "us" signals heteronormative assumptions, and "being known" hints at celebrity pressure: women are reduced to a single headline trait, "strong" or "girly", as if complexity is bad PR. In that light, the quote reads like a defense of agency disguised as nostalgia. She wants the right to choose courtesy without it being mistaken for submission, and to demand respect without being cast as unromantic or intimidating.

Quote Details

TopicRomantic
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Hewitt, Jennifer Love. (2026, January 16). There's a difference between wanting to be respected and being a strong female and being known for being able to do things, but still very much wanting guys to open the door, wanting them to ask us out, still bringing flowers and stuff like that. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-a-difference-between-wanting-to-be-102389/

Chicago Style
Hewitt, Jennifer Love. "There's a difference between wanting to be respected and being a strong female and being known for being able to do things, but still very much wanting guys to open the door, wanting them to ask us out, still bringing flowers and stuff like that." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-a-difference-between-wanting-to-be-102389/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There's a difference between wanting to be respected and being a strong female and being known for being able to do things, but still very much wanting guys to open the door, wanting them to ask us out, still bringing flowers and stuff like that." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-a-difference-between-wanting-to-be-102389/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Jennifer Love Hewitt (born February 21, 1979) is a Actress from USA.

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