Читать книгу What Makes Women Happy - Fay Weldon - Страница 14

You can take the proud and defiant path through life, of course. Some do and get away with it. You can decide you have problems because you let yourself be trampled on and go to assertiveness classes.

It has never seemed to me, however, that assertiveness classes have done anyone any good. My friend Valerie went to one, complaining that other people walked all over her. My own feeling was that she was the one who normally did the trampling, while worrying about her self-esteem and tendency to self-effacement. When she returned after her two-week course she bullied more, smiled less and her self-esteem was sky-high. It’s true she got a rise, but she lost her boyfriend. Justice was on her side, but life wasn’t.

The fewer the mini-nastinesses we do – and we all do them – the better able we will be to deal with the real, great, imponderable areas of unhappiness when they come along. Which they do, unasked, in everyone’s life.

Moral

If you haven’t anything nice to say, don’t

say anything at all. Smile though you want

to spit. When in doubt, do nothing.

This flies in the face of contemporary wisdom, I know. Valerie was told to give voice to her anger (or she’d get cancer), speak emotional truths (it was only fair to herself), claim the authenticity of her feelings (‘I feel, therefore I’m right’) never fake orgasm (it’s a lie, an indignity) and in general claim her rights and seek justice in the home and at work. Above all she must never be persuaded into making the office coffee, because she was worth more than that.

Valerie sounded off at her boss when he said it would be nice to have a cup of coffee, and he said that was the last straw, he was tired of being bullied, and he fired her. She told her mother she’d rather she didn’t phone the office because of her Birmingham accent and her mother spent her savings – those that hadn’t gone on Valerie’s expensive education – on a little cottage in France and wouldn’t be there to babysit when she was needed – not that there was much question of babies any more, since Valerie was 41 and her boyfriend got so nervous in the end about not ‘giving’ her an orgasm (which didn’t seem in his power to give anyway) that the sex dried up altogether and he left. And she had to make her own coffee in her lonely home, while trying to find a lawyer willing to accept her unfair dismissal case, and these days caffeine gave her palpitations, and her mother was out of even mobile range.