Fay Weldon - What Makes Women Happy

Women can be wonderfully happy. When theyre in love, when someone gives them flowers, when theyve finally found the right pair of shoes and they even fit. I remember once, in love and properly loved, dancing round a room singing, They cant take this away from me. I remember holding the green shoes with the green satin ribbon (it was the sixties) to my bosom and rejoicing. I remember my joy when the midwife said, But this is the most beautiful baby Ive ever seen. Look at him, hes golden!

The wonderful happiness lasts for ten minutes or so. After that little niggles begin to arise. Will he think Im too fat? Are the flowers his way of saying goodbye? Do the shoes pinch? Will his allegedly separated wife take this away from me? Is solitary dancing a sign of insanity? How come Ive produced so wonderful a baby did they get the name tags wrong?

Anxiety and guilt come hot on the heels of happiness. So the brutal answer to what makes women happy is Nothing, notfor more than ten minutes at a time. But the perfect ten minutes are worth living for, and the almost perfect hours that circle them are worth fighting for, and examining, the better to prolong them.

Ask women what makes them happy and they think for a minute and come up with a tentative list. It tends to run like this, and in this order:

Sex

Food

Friends

Family

Shopping

Chocolate

Love tends not to get a look in. Too unfashionable, or else taken for granted. Being in love sometimes makes an appearance. Men seem to surface as a source of aggravation, and surveys keep throwing up the notion that most women prefer chocolate to sex. But personally I suspect this response is given to entertain the pollsters. The only thing you can truly know about what people think, feel, do and consume, some theorize, is to examine the contents of their dustbins. Otherwise its pretty much guesswork.

There are more subtle pleasures too, of course, which the polls never throw up. The sense of virtue when you dont have an clair can be more satisfactory than the flavour and texture of cream, chocolate and pastry against the tongue. Rejecting a lover can give you more gratification than the physical pleasures of love-making. Being right when others are wrong can make you very happy indeed. Were not necessarily nice people.

Some women I know always bring chocolates when theyre invited to dinner and then sneer when the hostess actually eats one. Thats what I mean by not nice.

We are all still creatures of the cave, although we live in loft apartments. Nature is in conflict with nurture. Anxiety and guilt cut in to spoil the fun as one instinct wars with another and with the way we are socialized. Women are born to be mothers, though many of us prefer to not take up the option. The baby cries; we go. The man calls; Take me! we cry. Unless we are very strong indeed, physiology wins. We bleed monthly and the phases of the moon dictate our moods. We are hardwired to pick and choose amongst men when we are young, aiming for the best genetic material available. The love of a woman for a man is natures way of keeping her docile and at home. The love of a man for a woman is protective and keeps him at home as long as she stays helpless. (If high-flying women, so amply able to look after themselves, are so often single, it can be no surprise.)

Or that is one way of looking at it. The other is to recognize that we are moral creatures too, long for justice, and civilized ourselves out of our gross species instincts long ago. We like to think correctly and behave in an orderly and socially aware manner. If sometimes we revert, stuff our mouths with goodies, grab what we can so our neighbour doesnt get it (Been to the sales lately?) or fall upon our best friends boyfriend when left alone in the room with him, we feel ashamed of ourselves. Doing what comes naturally does not sit well with modern woman.

And so it is that in everyday female life, doubts, dilemmas and anxieties cut in, not grandiose whither-mankind stuff, just simple things such as:

Sex: Should I have done it?

Food: Should I have eaten it?

Friends/family: Why didnt I call her?

Shopping: Should I have bought it?

Chocolate: My God, did I actually eat all that?

But you cant lie awake at night worrying about these things. You have to get up in the morning and work, so you do. But the voice of conscience, otherwise known as the voice of guilt, keeps up its nagging undercurrent. It drives some women to therapists in their attempt to silence it. But its better to drive into a skid than try to steer out of it. If you dont want to feel guilty, dont do it. If you want to be happy, try being good.

Men have their own list when it comes to sources of happiness. The love of a good woman is high in the ratings. Shopping and chocolate dont get much of a look in. Watching porn and looking at pretty girls in the street, if men are honest, feature large. These fondnesses of theirs (dismissed by women as addictions) can make women unhappy, break up marriages and make men wretched and secretive because the women they love get upset by them.

Women should not be upset. They should not expect men to behave like women. Men are creatures of the cave too. Porn is sex in theory, not in practice. It just helps a man get through the day. And many a woman too, come to that.

Porn excites to sex, sure. Sex incited by porn is not bad, just different. Tomorrows sex is always going to be different from todays. In a long-term partnership there is room and time for all kinds. Sex can be tender, loving, companionable, a token of closeness and respect, the kind women claim to like. Then its romantic, intimate, and smacks of permanence. Sometimes sex is a matter of lust, release, excitement, anger, and the sense is that any woman could inspire it. Its macho, anti-domestic. Exciting. Dont resist the mood try and match it. Tomorrow something else will surface more to your liking. Each sexual act will have a different feel to it, the two instincts in both of you being in variable proportions from night to night, week to week, year to year. Its rare for a couples sexual energies to be exactly matched. But lucky old you if they are.

I have friends so anxious that they cant let the man in their life out of their sight in case he runs off with someone else. Its counter-productive. Some girls just do stop traffic in the street. So its not you so what? Men like looking at pretty girls in the street not because they long to sleep with them, or because given a choice between them and you theyd choose them, but because its the instinct of the cave asserting itself. Pretty girls are there to be looked at speculatively by men and, if they have any sense, with generous appreciation by women. Its bad manners in men, I grant you, to do it too openly, especially if the woman objects, but not much worse than that.

This will not be enough, I know, to convince some women that for a husband or lover to watch porn is not a matter for shock-horror. But look at it like this. A newborn baby comes into the world with two urgent appetites: one is to feed, the other is to suck. Because the nipple is there to satisfy both appetites, the feeding/sucking distinction gets blurred for both mother and baby. If you are lucky, the babys time at the breast or bottle is time enough to satisfy the sucking instinct. If youre not lucky, the baby, though fed to completion, cries, chafes and vomits yet goes on sucking desperately, as if it were monstrously hungry. At which point the wise mother goes to fetch a dummy, so everyone can get some peace. Then baby can suck, digest and sleep, all at the same time, blissfully. (Most babies simply toss the dummy out of the cot as soon as theyre on solids and the sucking reflex fades, thus sparing the mother social disgrace.)