What Makes Women Happy. Fay Weldon

For men it can last as long as a football match before they realize they’re late picking up the child from school.

      

      So is the sum of human happiness greater for a man than for a woman? I suspect so. Lucky old them.

      

      Be generous. You can afford to be. At least you occupy the moral high ground, and they know it.

      Occupying the Moral High Ground

      It’s quite nice up here these days. Women can look out over the urban landscape and know they are nicer than men, more co-operative, more empathic, better at communication, better at getting to university and better at getting jobs. Women multi-task – everyone knows. They can do many things at once. Men tend to do one thing at a time. If a woman loses a sock she finds another which will do just as well; a man continues the search until he has found it (albeit in the bin where he threw it), by which time the train has gone and the meeting has begun.

      

      Women abjure the idle languorousness of sexual contentment and get on with things. Women leap out of bed after sex to feed the cat and wash out their smalls so that they’ll be dry by morning. Men just go to sleep gratified and satisfied, happy that all is well. (Though if it’s not his own bed he may well want to regain it before falling asleep. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ he says. Oh yes!)

      Women worry in advance. They search through their bags for the dry-cleaning ticket before they even get into the shop. Men wait until they’re in there and then hold everyone up.

      Just Accept It

      Accept gender differences, don’t deny them. That way you make the most of what happiness nature did allow you as a woman.

      

      Evolution has allowed you an intellect that’s pretty much the same as the male’s.

      (Though the male bell curve when it comes to IQ is a little more flattened than for the female. That is to say there are more males at the extreme ends of the spectrum – extreme intelligence, extreme lack of it – which is why you get more male double-firsts at Oxford than female and more males held in police cells overnight than females.)

      Evolution has also allowed you an aesthetic appreciation equal to that of the male. There are as many men as women listening to flute concertos at the Wigmore Hall, as many men as women wandering round art galleries.

      (Nature might slightly favour the male when it comes to creative activity – men’s books may be ‘better’, if less readable, than women’s, their paintings fetch more in the art market, and so on – but that claim would take a whole book on its own to discuss.)