The Luxury of Wanting More

I would like women to become considerably more difficult to satisfy.

Not in the exhausting sense of being perpetually disappointed, but in the delicious sense of developing an appetite for a life that offers more than predictability, responsibility, and the occasional reward for being good.

I want us to want things.

Beautiful things. Strange things. Experiences we cannot immediately explain. Afternoons that serve no practical purpose. Conversations that change the way we think. Lovers who fascinate us. Books that make us uncomfortable. Rooms filled with art we don't entirely understand.

I want women to become curious about what else is available to them.

Somewhere along the way, wanting more became something women were expected to defend.

We can want more money if we can explain how responsibly we intend to spend it. We can want more time if we promise to use it for something productive. We can want a different relationship if we can produce sufficient evidence that the current one is intolerable.

We are permitted to pursue pleasure once we've earned it, rest once we're exhausted, and change once we've made an airtight case for why remaining where we are has become impossible.

That is an extraordinarily narrow set of conditions under which to live.

I would like desire to be allowed to stand on its own.

I want to visit that city because something about it calls to me. I want to study that subject because I find it fascinating. I want to dress differently because I've developed a taste for velvet and enormous jewelry. I want to rearrange the furniture, take dancing lessons, learn Italian, or spend an unreasonable amount of time wandering through antique stores.

None of those desires require a more respectable explanation.

We have become so accustomed to evaluating our choices according to their usefulness that we sometimes forget we're allowed to choose something simply because it makes life more interesting.

And interesting is a perfectly legitimate ambition.

The problem with being satisfied

Women are often encouraged to practice gratitude as though it were a cure for desire.

Look at everything you have. Think about how fortunate you are. Remember how much worse things could be.

There is wisdom in noticing abundance, certainly. There is also a peculiar cruelty in using gratitude to convince someone that she ought to stop wanting.

I can be profoundly grateful for my life and still have an appetite for something I haven't experienced.

I can love my home and want to see Paris. I can adore my marriage and want more solitude. I can enjoy my work and wonder what other versions of my intelligence might be worth exploring.

Contentment and curiosity are perfectly capable of occupying the same body.

I suspect many women have confused being satisfied with being finished.

There is a difference.

An education in appetite

Taste is something we develop.

The woman who knows exactly which wine she likes probably drank a few she didn't. The woman who can walk into a gallery and identify the work that moves her has likely spent time looking at art that left her cold.

The woman with wonderful stories has usually been willing to have experiences that didn't come with guarantees.

This is one of the reasons I want us to engage with more of the world.

Go to the lecture. Order the unfamiliar dish. Read the controversial book. Learn about an artist whose work initially irritates you. Talk to someone whose life looks nothing like yours.

Develop opinions. Change them. Develop better ones.

Become someone who has encountered enough of the world to recognize what she loves.

There is something tremendously attractive about a woman who has preferences, not because she has decided what sort of person she is supposed to be, but because she has paid attention to her own experience.

She knows what she enjoys, what bores her, what excites her, and what she never intends to tolerate again.

She has become an authority on her own life.

Extravagance is not necessarily expensive

When I talk about wanting more, I am not suggesting that everyone needs to purchase an expensive lifestyle.

I am talking about extravagance of attention, imagination, and experience.

Some of the most luxurious things available to us cost very little.

An afternoon spent reading in a beautiful public library. A dinner prepared with care and eaten by candlelight. Fresh flowers gathered from the garden. A long conversation that wanders through history, politics, sex, religion, and the peculiarities of human behavior.

There are people with extraordinary wealth whose lives appear painfully unimaginative. There are women with modest means who have cultivated private worlds of such richness that spending an afternoon with them feels like visiting another country.

Money can expand our options. It cannot substitute for curiosity.

A fascinating life is built, in part, by developing the capacity to find things fascinating.

That capacity deserves our attention.

You are allowed to outgrow your own expectations

One of the stranger things about becoming a grown woman is discovering how many of our preferences were inherited.

We accepted certain ideas about what a good life looked like long before we had enough experience to evaluate them.

We may have built entire lives around those ideas.

There can be genuine grief in realizing that something we worked very hard to achieve no longer holds the same appeal.

But there can also be extraordinary freedom.

You are allowed to change your mind about the life you ordered.

You may discover that you want more company or less. You may want to become more ambitious, less ambitious, more visible, more private, more sensual, more intellectual, or simply more eccentric.

You might discover an interest in opera at sixty. You might decide to become a painter at seventy. You might develop a completely unexpected passion for architecture, astronomy, perfume, or the history of scandalous women.

There is no age at which curiosity becomes inappropriate.

You are not obligated to spend the rest of your life faithfully performing the preferences of a woman you used to be.

Let yourself become interesting to yourself

I want women to have stories.

I want us to know things that surprise people. I want us to own beautiful objects with peculiar histories. I want us to have opinions about paintings, political movements, obscure historical figures, and the proper way to make a martini.

I want us to have private pleasures that belong to no one else.

I want us to cultivate our minds and our senses with the same seriousness we've devoted to caring for everybody around us.

Perhaps most of all, I want us to stop treating desire as evidence that something is wrong.

Sometimes wanting more is simply what happens when a woman realizes there is still an enormous amount of life available to her.

There are cities she hasn't wandered, books she hasn't opened, flavors she hasn't tasted, ideas she hasn't considered, and parts of herself she hasn't met.

She doesn't need to be unhappy to want those things.

She only needs to be alive.

May you never become so grateful for the life you have that you stop being curious about the life you could still experience.



And may you become gloriously, extravagantly difficult to satisfy.