The pursuit of female happiness

These days everyone seems to be talking about happiness. Books appear about it, schools even teach it. I asked my closest female friends what makes them happy, and they said great sex and walking barefoot on sand. Both would be high on my list -– as indeed would be great sex on sand. But as most of my travels tend to be in countries like Afghanistan, where ablution facilities are often a bucket and a hole, happiness can be a bath with lots of smellies. And, oh, the joy of clean bed sheets, particularly white Egyptian cotton, and fluffy pillows.

Yet some of my happiest moments have been in the midst of war or conflict. Living on the edge brings out the best and worst in people and often heightens experiences. During the war in Iraq, my interpreter was a chubby fellow called Edward, whose usual job was running dolphin shows in Kuwait City and whom I had hired solely because he had told me a romantic story of rescuing his girlfriend from Baghdad during the Gulf war. As we waited for Basra to fall, he kept me endlessly amused with stories of training Ukrainian dolphins. One evening we drove to the unsightly port of Umm Qasr to find the sea lit up by luminescent fish, somehow made all the more magical by the boom of guns not far away.

The most enchanting afternoon I’ve had recently was visiting Masood Khalili, the son of one of Afghanistan’s most famous poets, after a day of riots had left Kabul tense. His family home is one of the few in the capital to have survived the decades of war. We lounged on cushions in the small domed room that had been his father’s meditation room, nibbling dried mulberries, and let his mellifluous voice wash over us, reading poems of love.

Of course, the problem with spending a lot of time on the edge is that normal life seems tame. On the other hand, when you narrowly escape death – as I did in June when I was caught in a Taliban ambush in Helmand – merely being alive can give you a high. Afterwards, lying on the desert sand looking up at the Milky Way and thousands of stars you never see in London, I felt absurdly happy. Back home, all sorts of simple pleasures seem to have acquired added delight. Among them the smell of a new book, particularly a novel by a favourite writer, such as Haruki Murakami, to curl up in bed with. Better still, with the sound of the sea outside, or, failing that, Damien Rice’s haunting song The Blowers Daughter on my iPod.

I’d never really thought about what happiness was until, in my mid-twenties, I went to live in Brazil, a country Federico Fellini called “the Last Happy Nation”. From the moment I stepped off the aeroplane and felt the balmy sea air on my cheeks and the smell of red pepper trees, I fell in love. The newspaper for which I was working was running a series on poverty and asked me to go to one of Rio’s worst favelas, or shantytowns. I chose Rocinha, the oldest and largest favela, which sprawls across the hillside overlooking the stunning beach of Sao Conrado.

Life in Rocinha seemed truly awful, particularly for women. I wandered round shacks with no running water, dodging the trickle of stinking sewage and jumping at the occasional rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire from daily battles between rival drug gangs. Police did not dare enter these places. There was no sign of the menfolk – they were off downing what little they earned on cachaca, sugar-cane rum.

Brazil has the world’s biggest gap between rich and poor, and just below Rocinha the beach was lined with fabulous apartments that were among the most expensive real estate in Latin America. I expected the mothers of Rocinha to complain. But one after another assured me: “Life is good. The sun always shines. Rich or poor, we’ve all got the beach. And look at our view!”

It was indeed an unbeatable view. Everyone seemed to be laughing or dancing to samba Some women were busy sewing costumes of spangles for the carnival parade, which they had spent most of the year looking forward to. I had always been motivated by adventure rather than wealth, but that day in the Rio slums taught me that money is nothing to do with happiness.

It’s a view shared by the rulers of Bhutan, where they recently introduced the concept of gross national happiness (GNH). After years of isolation, people worried that opening up the Buddhist land might destroy its cultural identity and spirituality. So the government came up with GNH – the idea being that economic development should not mean sacrificing elements important to people’s happiness, such as family, the environment or free education.

I’m not sure you can really legislate happiness – and indeed, Bhutan has a serious alcoholism problem – but I think they’ve hit on something. Once you have enough money to buy the basics, what working mum would not trade that fab Missoni dress for some more time?

It’s always nice to receive a turquoise Tiffany box, but the presents that have most brought a smile to my face include a plastic snow globe and a bunch of just-picked yellow daisies. One of my happiest days was driving through Portugal with my husband, filling his cabriolet with bundles of mimosa gathered from the hedgerows, singing along to Sinatra on the stereo and laughing at the astonishment of old men in the whitewashed villages through which we passed. But maybe war correspondents make cheap dates.

FACT: HORMONES

Female students directly exposed to semen are happier than those with partners who wear condoms. Researchers at the State University of New York believe that mood-improving hormones in semen are absorbed through the vagina.

FACT: SEX

When US scientists asked more than 900 women to break their days into episodes and score them out of six, ‘intimate relations’ scored highest and ‘commuting’ lowest. Schmoozing the boss was the low social point of the day.

FACT: SOLITUDE

The 2005 Unilever Family Report polled 1,142 men and women, and found that women like the ‘sense of achievement’ in living alone, are more likely to spend time with friends and family, and feel less lonely than men in the same situation.

On the face of it, women want the same as men. Equal pay, equal rights, equal respect, equal shares of your income and all the house

By A A Gill

When I was a teenager I had this friend, and he had the sex business taped. He never failed; shagged everything. You know how the toast always falls butter side down? Well, girls always fell on their backs for him. I had a girlfriend, and when I mentioned this mate and his astonishing success to her, she laughed and said: “Well, you know, the thing about him is that he hates women.”

Hates women? How can you say he hates women? He does nothing but lurve them, and they’re apparently forming disorderly queues to be lurved. He’s hardly gay – how can you say he hates women? She did that sighing “Do I really have to explain this to you?” business that women do and replied: “Of course he’s not gay, gay men love women. It’s obvious he hates us; that’s why he has to bed so many.”

But I hate horses and I don’t have to ride a new one every Friday and Saturday. “No, you’re frightened of horses, that’s not the same thing – and you’re frightened of women.” I’m not. She smiled and that was pretty much the end of that.

I only mention this because it was the first of many, many arguments with many, many women in which I was apparently wrong but for no apparent reason. And although I’ve continued to engage in meaningful emotional discussions with those of the opposite sex, I never seem to learn that I will always be in the wrong. Wrong because of some sort of girl blindness. Wrong because I haven’t noticed something that’s staring, and occasionally slapping, me in the face. A later girlfriend told me on the way out of the door that “ignorance of the female is no excuse”.

I could no more draw you a map to what women want than a woman could read it.

On the face of it, of course, women want the same things men want. Equal pay, equal rights, equal protection, equal opportunity, equal respect, equal shares of your income and all the house. Women want to be hugged in the night, smiled at for no reason, surprised in a predictable way, and have the lid put back on the honey – but then those are all things I want as well.

I’ve learnt that women want to be offered things that they don’t really want. They don’t want to tell jokes, as a rule – they don’t particularly like jokes – but they do want you to make them laugh. It’s not the laugh they care about, it’s the fact that you’re making exhaustive efforts to make them laugh. Women like to flirt, but don’t much care for men who flirt. They want protection, but not paternalism. So don’t run round and open the car door, but do open the door to the restaurant. Carry the bag if it is full of vegetables, but not if it’s full of shoes.

And I’ve realised that when men argue, we keep things personal and singular. Women, on the other hand, escalate to third-party collective after the first shot. They become symbolic representatives for the whole gender. So a man will say, “You don’t know what I want,” but a woman will say: “You don’t know what women want.” There’s a difference. That’s all of them against just you. Don’t think you can turn round and say, “Well, you don’t know what men want,” because it’s as plain as the lump in your Y-fronts what men want, and every woman knows it.

It was another girlfriend who said: “You have no idea what women want.” Naturally, I replied: “Well, why don’t you tell me, then?” Leaving myself open for the checkmate riposte (note the “we” here) – “We want a man who knows what we want without having to be asked.” And that’s the best I can do in answering the question “What makes women happy?” If you have to ask, you’re not even close to knowing.

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One of the things that nobody understands is, what changed the world for women is hair dye. A simple thing that is so obvious

By Nora Ephron

Everybody would like to be happy, but some people are more gifted at it than others. Just as some have what my family calls the “fun gene”, others don’t. You go to Las Vegas with them and they don’t get it. Same goes for baseball. Baseball is immediately seeing if someone you know is capable of happiness.

I am happy to be alive, which is a thought that never used to cross my mind. When you are young, many things never cross your mind. The expression “Money can’t buy happiness” is at least partly wrong; money makes people happier. Not that it makes them happy if they’re chronically unhappy, miserable, repellent human beings; but if they have a capacity for happiness, there is no question that money can make you happier. Love can certainly make you happier, but that is a chicken-and-egg thing.

It’s my experience that success definitely can make you happier, especially if one of the things that was lowering your happiness quotient was that you weren’t successful. But what success mostly does is turn you into whatever you truly are. So, if you’re a person with a big capacity for happiness, it will let that out, and if you’re a person with a capacity for making others’ lives miserable, it will enable you to do that.

People who become very successful always like to talk about the downside of fame. There is no question that famous people’s lives are way more miserable than they used to be. This whole thing where you are tailed by packs of paparazzi in cars is a new development, and people love to talk about it in the hope that nobody will be jealous of them. But most people who have achieved that kind of fame wanted it and wouldn’t give it back, so who are we kidding?

I don’t think happiness was the goal of the women’s movement: it was about choices for women and advancing women. It didn’t use the word “happiness” but it made it possible for women to succeed in places where they hadn’t succeeded, and have choices, and that’s all good.

One of the things nobody ever understands is that what changed the world for women is hair dye. It’s a simple thing that is so obvious, we don’t even see it. Women look better, and feel better as a result of looking better, because hair dye is everywhere. There are parts of New York with no grey-haired women at all. So whenever anyone talks about 60 being the new 50, and 50 being the new 40, part of what they are talking about is something you can buy in a drugstore.

I look back on the books I read as a child as a series of blissful experiences, including the ones that aren’t very good. I didn’t have much to compare them to. I think back on the Nancy Drew books – potboilery teenage-girl detective stories, which I read in a state of rapture. There’s no question that when you get older you become more discriminating. And I’m big on ordering more than one dessert. If you can’t decide between chocolate and lemon, order both. It’s not going to have cost much more. You’ll just be so happy you did.

Nora Ephron’s new book, I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts about Being a Woman, is out in the UK in January 2007

FACT: CHILDREN

In a poll of 1,500 British men and women, 66% of mothers say children are their greatest source of happiness, compared with 44% of fathers. Mothers rate a partner in the top three things that make them happy; fathers rate theirs fourth.

It’s about knowing that tomorrow will be as much fun as today, that life goes on, for ever and ever. I still need it, that feeling of security

By Julie Myerson

It is tempting to claim that different things have made me happy at different stages of my life, but that’s not quite true. It’s the exact same things that did it for me at 3, 4, 13 and 16 years old that make me happy now.

First: security. I’m a small girl, put to bed after a long summer’s day of playing on the lawn. I lie there all clean in my pink flowery nightie and listen to my daddy putting my toys away. There’s the satisfying swoosh as he empties the paddling pool onto the parched grass, the tick tick as he wheels my tricycle indoors.

I can see him so clearly. He is bending down, two hands on the tricycle bars, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, walking in that slow way of his through the open patio door. And it’s an ecstatic moment. It’s about feeling safe and looked after, and going to bed when you’re told to – when it’s still light – all the time knowing that the grown-ups are down there taking care of things. It’s about knowing that tomorrow will be as much fun as today, that life goes on, for ever and ever.

I still need to know that now. I still need it, that feeling of security. Even though these days I’m the one who must take on that adult role, I need to know that I’m dealing with life’s glitches, griefs and troubles as honestly and bravely as I can. Deep down I’m still an anxious person, and doing everything I can not to have to worry or panic is one of the things that make me happy.

Then there’s nurturing – the intensely pleasurable sensation of taking care of someone else. The first someone else was my doll Cathy. Every single morning I woke her up and wiped her shiny plastic cheeks and nose with a moist flannel. I dressed her and fed her a plastic breakfast. Then I stood or sat her somewhere interesting so she could watch the day unfold. At night I slipped her in beside me, kissed her, stroked her head. I still remember the intense pleasure I got from the hard plastic feel of her next to me, the clean nylon scent of her yellow hair. Lots of girls played with their dolls, then forgot all about them and left them upside down at the bottom of the toy basket. Not me. I could never have done that to Cathy.

Taking care of the people I love makes me very, very happy. Ever since I was small I wanted babies, and having three of my own has given me intense happiness. It has taken me to the calm centre of myself, given me an understanding of the mysterious magic of life, and maybe death too. Loving my children makes everything else possible. Even now, from the sometimes dark depths of these years of coping with teenagers, I only have to glimpse those three cherished faces and my heart turns over and says, Yessss!

And then there’s my body – the sheer physical elasticity of being easy inside my own skin. Bending on the diving board, no longer terrified of water, going in with a perfect, silent sloop. Running as fast as I can up the field with my dog. Pointing a muscled foot in a leather ballet shoe, feeling the gorgeous ache of a relevé. And then maybe most of all my naked, private, teenaged self in bed – skinny legs, knobbly knees, slim hips, the secret beginnings of breasts, a feeling of supreme strength and lightness and possibility.

My relationship with my body is just as it always was. I like it. For its strength and its odd flashes of beauty and its sweet signs of mortality. Who can mind a wrinkle or two when so many good people have died young? So I try to treat my body well. Being content in my physical skin is an unmissable daily high.

After my body, because it can’t exist without it, comes my mind, my soul. I know that more than anything else I need to be allowed to dream, to think, to practise fantasies – good and bad. I need to wonder and be startled. I need, again and again, to go back to the optimistic, open child I once was, and remember how to start all over again and forget what I thought I knew, and be amazed, amused, transported. My imagination – its lightness and its darkness – makes me incredibly, ecstatically happy. I can’t explain it. I can’t even begin to imagine existing without it.

And last of all – but maybe more happiness-inducing than all of these put together – connection. Not just falling in love (though certainly that as well) but discovering a perfect, breathless understanding with another human being. Looking straight into the eyes of someone who really gets me, who excites me, who makes me curious about them, and curious all over again about myself and this strange
world and my place in it.

Love is both inseparable from and the sum total of all of these things. It’s a place of safety, of nurturing, of physical and mental exhilaration. There’s no point in looking for it – if you do, it will run away from you – but it’s well worth waiting for. All your life, if necessary. Maybe that’s the only thing I know now that I didn’t know then. That staying open to the possibility of love is what makes me happiest of all.

FACT: COMMITMENT

A University of Virginia study of 5,000 married women showed the most fulfilled wives were the ones who felt their husbands were emotionally engaged and viewed marriage as a lifelong commitment, and whose husbands were the main breadwinners for the family.

What’s in it for us if we make women happy? Nothing, aside from an altruistic sense of wellbeing, the sort of thing you feel when buying The Big Issue

By Rod Liddle

The notion that we men should be charged with the task of making women happy has always rather rankled with me. Why should we? What’s it got to do with us? Can’t they take responsibility for making themselves happy? We have enough to do, skivvying every hour God sends in order to pay off the alimony. Then there’s the bins to be taken out. There are not enough days to worry about the happiness of women. And in another sense, too, time has moved on. Women are very different creatures from those scented, fabulous beasts of a century ago who, deprived of the vote, education and the right to paid work, could justifiably expect to be flattered, pampered and waited upon in return for male economic and cultural hegemony. Back then, we men tried to make women happy to gain access to their closely guarded, mysterious sexual organs. But those sexual organs are far less closely guarded now, and getting access isn’t too much of a problem. These days, you only have to ask (and maybe buy her an Archers and lemonade. And some nuts). They have become, in a sexual sense, more accommodating. So what’s in it for us if we do make women happy? Nothing at all, aside from an entirely selfless and altruistic sense of wellbeing, the sort of thing you feel when you buy a copy of The Big Issue.

So when women look at us with that expression of regret and grievance, and ask what we’re doing to make them happy, we should point them in the direction of the Qualification of Women Act (1918) and the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Act (1986, amended 1999) and go back to watching the football, with the sound turned up full, a can of Stella and a reheated balti pie.

But it has remained part of the contract that women can prevail upon men to provide them with happiness and succour, even though the stuff we got in return – sex, power, a few moments of peace and quiet – has been withdrawn, or is given out at the drop of a hat. I asked some women what men could do to make them happy. One said: “I want emotional and spiritual support and understanding in whatever I might do.” Oh, please. Anything else, honey? “Yes, a gesture of wild spontaneity.” Ah. So if, on an impulse, I bought you a halibut at the fishmonger’s, you’d be happy? “If you brought it home and cooked it for me in an interesting way,” she said. Anything else? “Yes. Money.”

These days, nothing is really enough. Whatever we do will fall short. What women really want is the knowledge that we men feel perpetually uncomfortable and guilty, and that our underachievement is a constant source of disappointment to them. They want us to cower and skulk under a cloud of female opprobrium. So much ground has been ceded by men that we have reached the point where the only thing that will ensure even a temporary truce is our complete misery and mental subjugation.

All of the women I polled for this article demanded from us intangibles: spontaneity and understanding, that sort of thing. So that we would never really know if we were coming up to scratch or not. All the tangible stuff we used to give them, they can now get for themselves. So, by all means, leave the toilet seat down, praise her superb taste, whisk her off for a weekend break and cook her a nice piece of fish. But do not suppose for a moment that it will keep her happy. It may postpone the demise of your affair by a few days. But it won’t put it off for long.

FACT: MONEY

Only 39% of women want a partner who is amazing in bed; 54% would prefer their man to be rich, according to a survey of New Woman magazine readers.

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Surely a reason many women are so miserable is that they’re caught in the arms race of looking younger and more beautiful

By Susan Greenfield

A recent survey reported that an astonishing number of British women own over 100 pairs of shoes. Wouldn’t life be simple if footwear was the panacea, a generic prize that instantly ensured that warm glow inside? But to try to generalise a formula is as crazy for women in particular as it is for humans in general. The question to ask is not what makes us happy, but what are the different means by which we women get there?

For starters, what makes all of us happy is to achieve on the one hand personal fulfilment and, on the other, the value and appreciation of others. While a man might be valued for his power to financially maintain mother and child, biology has dictated that a woman be valued for her appearance, more specifically for outward signs of fertility (hourglass figure, bright red lips, etc). Shoes are part of the appearance for convincing potential mates of your reproductive potential. Surely a reason that many women in our society are so miserable is that they’re caught up in the arms race of trying to look younger and more beautiful, for example by virtue of their footwear.

Yet appearance is much more than skin-deep. One initiative, “Look Good, Feel Better”, has resulted in significant therapeutic improvement in women undergoing chemotherapy. Moreover, when I worked in France, I was struck by the fact that French men complimented women of all ages and shapes on how they looked. It imbued a feelgood factor that is much harder to find in the British workplace. The more internalised goal of self-fulfilment is harder to resolve.

A few years ago the government asked me to prepare a report on the problems facing women in science. Women have always lived more complex lives than men, balancing conflicting demands. This is nowhere truer than in science. It is possible to be a mother and to have a stellar scientific career – as with the Nobel laureate Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. But I’d challenge anyone to say it was easy. All too often, when we were interviewing for the report, the problem arose of how one could put one’s work on hold while having children, while male peers would be further up the greasy pole by virtue of having the time to produce more original publications, which characterise progress in science. Many women come back at a more junior level, or give up altogether, or decide not to have children, or put it off until they’re more established but beyond their reproductive optimum.

Many women in all professions face this conundrum: how to put your heart and soul and time into work you find interesting but, at the same time, make the most of an alternative scenario that is equally all-absorbing, as your child cuts its first tooth and says its first word. Another obstacle for women is “impostor syndrome” – the feeling that your position of success is a mere fluke. It comes down, again, to self-worth and self-confidence – but this time, we women need to generate it for ourselves.

A possible characteristic of the baby-boomer generation is that they might have been among the first not to look to men and marriage as an automatic source of happiness. And the current world of technology and science is not just creating a level playing field for women, but even sloping it in our favour. Thanks to our superior verbal skills and intuition, the removal of the premium on physical prowess and strength, and our ability to work by consensus, our employment prospects, in one sense, could not be brighter. But will it make us happy – fulfilled and valued? The good news is that for the first time, women have at least the opportunity to contemplate such goals.

Men will fake attention the way women fake orgasms: to get it over with. The difference is, we can tell

By Ariel Leve

Growing up, my mother had a much older, very wealthy boyfriend. She was never upset that he didn’t spend his money on her, because he gave her something far more valuable: his time. He would sit quietly and listen to her for hours. She would talk to him about me, her career, her mother, financial problems…

He never interrupted, only nodded, with a placid smile on his face. Then one day, after 15 years, she noticed something in his hand. “What’s that?” she asked. It was his hearing aid. He had been taking it out every time she started to talk. Finding out that he hadn’t been listening to her all those years was worse than finding out he had been cheating. Because, more than anything else, women want to be heard and understood. What makes women happy isn’t when a man pays for dinner, it’s when a man pays attention. Attention is the invisible currency. It is the only thing that can buy a woman’s happiness and devotion.

Ask a successful lothario: what is the skill that matters the most? Most likely he’ll say it’s the power to make a woman feel special. A woman feels desired when she feels she is being listened to. Is that too much to ask? Often it is. And if you have to ask, it’s too late. Whenever people talk about the reformed lothario Warren Beatty, they mention that he has the ability to make the woman he’s talking to feel as if she is the only one in the room. There is indeed something to be said about that when it happens. I’ve experienced it a few times, and it’s intoxicating.

Attention, for it to count, has to be genuine. Because, if they can, men will fake attention the way women fake orgasms: to get it over with. The difference is, we can tell.

When I’m on the phone with a man and the TV is on in the background, I know straight away that whatever I’m talking about has become white noise. I could tell him my arm was on fire and his response would be “Uh huh.” But attention, like wealth, is relative. Some women need more than others to be happy. Here’s the line I get: “No matter how much attention I give you, it will never be enough.” Really? I’ll let you know. Chances are, given my low expectations, having my hand held will feel like a round-the-world honeymoon.

I’ve been accused of needing too much attention, but this is like being accused of needing too much air. I take issue with the term “needy”, because in my experience it has meant requesting permission to finish a sentence.

Besides, if I just wanted attention, I’d get a boob job, publish a sex journal or wear a miniskirt. Or all three. It’s the quality, not quantity, that matters. Anyone can get noticed. But when someone notices what you care about, and appreciates it, that’s rare. The psychotherapy industry is built on a tremendous void that had to be filled. Freud’s real genius was figuring out that women would actually pay money for someone to listen to them for 45 minutes.

We live in a world where everyone’s attention span is so fleeting, we have to exist in constant “wrap it up” mode. So when someone takes the time and effort to really understand who we are, what we care about and why, it’s blissful. Because the only thing that is better than feeling there’s someone willing to listen to you explain yourself, is feeling you don’t have to.

FACT: OMEGA 3

Out of 1,200 British women aged 35 to 65 surveyed by the Natural Health Advisory Service this year, those who ate oily fish, fruit and vegetables and exercised reported having a higher libido, more energy and less pain.

What makes women happy? Tell us your views at www.timesonline.co.uk/women