Читать книгу What Makes Women Happy - Fay Weldon - Страница 4

Women can be wonderfully happy. When they’re in love, when someone gives them flowers, when they’ve 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 can’t 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 I’ve ever seen. Look at him, he’s golden!’

The wonderful happiness lasts for ten minutes or so. After that little niggles begin to arise. ‘Will he think I’m 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 I’ve 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, not for 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 it’s pretty much guesswork.

There are more subtle pleasures too, of course, which the polls never throw up. The sense of virtue when you don’t have an éclair 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. We’re not necessarily nice people.

Some women I know always bring chocolates when they’re invited to dinner – and then sneer when the hostess actually eats one. That’s what I mean by ‘not nice’.