Fay Weldon - What Makes Women Happy

Illness is bad. But it can be very interesting, especially if it’s your own. Symptoms are fascinating. It’s another world, a bubble one, perhaps, and precarious, but those in it have already found a way to live with it. The skill of physicians and surgeons is inspiring. As is other people’s selflessness. The walls of your experience may narrow to the width of a hospital bed, but it is still a stage, this is your drama and you are the centre of it. A good performance will get good reviews. Understand and please your audience: the visitors who may or may not cluster round your bed; at the very least the volunteer who brings round the library books or the man who wheels the trolley of newspapers and junk food.

‘How are you today?’ they ask. Well, tell them. That’s pleasure in itself. If ill enough, you are excused selflessness and martyrdom.

And if you are temporarily in a hospital ward, try not to hate it. Go with the flow. The social life of the ward is rich and strange, never mind the routine. People elaborate their symptoms and treatments with a relish others share. They support and understand each other. They joke about death. The ward is a mini-tribe, sharing experiences.

In the private ward you have your comfort but you can be lonely, and another patient is more likely to come to your aid than a nurse. Sometimes money is not the universal solution.

When Children Are Ill

There is nothing good to be said about the serious illness of a child and not much comfort to be offered to the parents involved, other than to try to shift the perspective, see the small body as too frail and weak to support the intense existence of the mind and soul of this particular child. See how the latter exists, how clearly and powerfully it becomes apparent even as the body fails. The inner being makes itself clear – let the parents try to gain strength from it. Difficult, because parental distress is based in one of the most powerful instincts we have: to protect and save the children. The mind has little defence in these circumstances. The soul has. It is strong in the child. Those who suffer with children will understand the concept.

You can pray, though your sense of a benign universe will be somewhat blunted. That in itself is unsettling. The prayers would have to overcome your sense that you are picked out by fate for cruel and unjust punishment.

And it might help you, selflessly, to let the child go, to not struggle pointlessly for the continuation of its existence.

You could try Lourdes. I haven’t been there, but they do say that a community of the like-minded, on the edges of despair, within which you don’t have to explain yourself, with standards you can adapt to, however idiosyncratic and peculiar they may seem to the healthy and flourishing rationalist you once were lucky enough to be, can be a great comfort. You’re with the tribe you have inherited. It might seem grotty compared to the one you were born into, but it is a tribe.

We’ll get on to these universal enemies later, and in more detail, when we are feeling stronger. I can be quite cheerful about bereavement, there are cures for isolation, and as for debt, well…

It’s probably your own fault. You had a vision of yourself which did not accord with reality. You upgraded yourself to a wealthier sort of person than you actually were. It happens. You should have listened to the Voice of Guilt. You have my every sympathy. Earn your way out of it.

Very little in life is fair. Some of us are born with longer legs than others. Some of us are born into poverty in the Sahara desert, others into prosperity in leafy suburbs.

It’s unfair that some are born thin, active, nervy ectomorphs and others are born rounded, easy-going endomorphs. Society these days smiles on the former rather than the latter, who have to spend their lives on diets, never eating what they want, except in those few places left in the world where obesity is valued.

Seeking natural justice is absurd: justice does not exist in nature. Seeking justice in the home is okay, but tends to end in exhaustion: it can be easier to wash his socks than argue that he should do it.

Resenting men, an emotion familiar to most women, is understandable but pointless. Don’t let it make you bitter. Some things are just not fair. It is not fair that for men the culmination of sex is always an orgasm – or at least for 98 per cent of them – and for women it is not.

10 per cent of women never experience orgasm.

20 per cent occasionally do.

50 per cent sometimes do.

20 per cent usually do.

10 per cent always do.

Or so the current figures say. But figures change. Someone in the 10 per cent ‘always’ category suddenly goes down to the next division: ‘My partner came back from his trip and he’d grown a beard.’ Someone in the ‘never’ group claims now to be in the ‘sometimes’ category: ‘I met another man.’ But the broad pattern is clear. The pleasure so liberally bestowed upon men by nature is only grudgingly given to women.

Of course women resent it. Listen to any conversation between women when men aren’t there: at the hen night, on the factory floor, over the garden fence, at the English Lit. tutorial. Women may laugh and joke, but actually they’re furious. ‘They can, we can’t, unfair, unfair.’ They may not know what’s biting them, but that’s it.

But facts are facts and there we are. Deal with it. Life is not fair. Resenting the fact is no recipe for happiness.

Indeed, the less you think about orgasms the better, since the greatest bar to having one, if we’re to believe the research, is wanting one. Best if they creep up on you unawares. Women are at their most orgasmic when they are least anxious, but wondering why you’re not having one can make you very anxious indeed. Which is ironic, since what you want most you’re going to get least.

But a lot of life is like that. Want too much and it’s snatched away. An attitude of careless insouciance is more likely to pay dividends.

Because really, having an orgasm or not doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things, just as having an éclair or not doesn’t matter. Life goes on pretty much the same with or without. There are other pleasures. There’s true love, trust and sensual pleasure. Or, if you’re that kind of person, and I hope you are not, the victory of disdain. ‘See, knew you were no good in bed.’

But actually, it’s as likely, if not more likely, to be your doing, not his.

Unfair – but what you are after is happiness. Sexual repletion is not a necessary ingredient. Sexual satisfaction can happen anyway, and is not dependent on orgasm. If women were not so often described as ‘achieving orgasm’ then there would be no sense of failure when they didn’t. The word is wrong, not the thing itself.

‘I don’t do orgasm’ might be a more useful way of describing yourself, initially, to a partner, and it’s a bonus to both if it turns out not to be true. But having an orgasm is not a sign of true love any more than the lack of it is the opposite. I have read letters from girls who think they must end a relationship because sex between them and their true love does not conclude with an orgasm for her. Imagining sex has failed, they feel the relationship has failed. It hasn’t – all that has happened has been that she didn’t have an orgasm . So what? Better, more conducive to happiness, just to see orgasm as an additional extra, something special that happens, a bonus, a surprising gift from heaven which descends like manna from time to time, not your natural-born right – and then a whole raft of unhappiness will be wiped from your life.