The Pleasure of Having Excellent Taste

I think having excellent taste is one of the great pleasures of being a grown woman.

I don't mean knowing which wine to order, recognizing an expensive handbag, or being able to identify the designer of a beautiful chair. Although I have no objection to any of those things.

I mean knowing what you like.

Really knowing.

Knowing what makes you feel beautiful. What sort of room you want to spend an afternoon in. Which conversations leave you exhilarated and which ones make you wish you had stayed home with a novel and a very good piece of cheese.

Knowing whether you prefer a crowded dinner party or a long lunch with one fascinating person. Whether you want to spend your money on beautiful shoes, old books, fresh flowers, airplane tickets, or a bathtub large enough to disappear into for an hour.

Knowing what you find vulgar, what you find irresistible, and what you are prepared to be completely unreasonable about.

I think a woman should have a few things about which she is completely unreasonable.

Not because she is difficult.

Because she has developed preferences worth defending.

The extraordinary business of developing taste

Most of us spend an astonishing amount of our early lives learning what other people like.

We learn what our families consider respectable. What our friends consider fashionable. What our partners find attractive. What our professions consider appropriate.

We learn which ambitions sound impressive and which pleasures sound frivolous.

We learn to explain our choices in language other people will approve of.

Somewhere along the way, we can become so accomplished at arranging ourselves around other people's preferences that we lose track of our own.

A woman can become extraordinarily competent at living a life she would never have chosen if someone had simply handed her a blank piece of paper and asked her what she wanted.

She can be successful, admired, responsible, attractive, and deeply bored.

There is something almost tragic about that.

Especially because the world is so magnificently full of things to love.

There are paintings that can rearrange your understanding of beauty. Cities that smell of rain on stone and coffee drifting out of tiny cafés. Music that makes you want to take a lover or learn another language.

There are extraordinary people whose minds work in ways you have never encountered. There are strange little museums, provocative books, unfamiliar foods, beautiful arguments, ancient gardens, ridiculous hats, and entire artistic movements waiting to be discovered.

There are women who have decided they don't like any of it because they tried something vaguely similar once, twenty years ago.

Darling.

The world deserves another look.

Taste is not the same thing as luxury

Some of the most interesting people I have ever encountered have had very little money and exquisite taste.

They knew how to arrange a table, tell a story, find the most beautiful corner of a city, or make an ordinary Tuesday feel like an occasion.

They possessed a quality that money cannot reliably purchase.

Discernment.

They had paid attention to their own delight.

They had cultivated it.

This is where I think the conversation about luxury becomes terribly confused.

We have allowed an entire industry to convince us that taste is something we demonstrate through consumption.

The correct label. The correct neighborhood. The correct hotel. The correct handbag.

But a woman can spend a fortune and still have no idea what she likes.

She can also possess three beautiful dresses, a collection of secondhand books, a spectacular way with flowers, and a life overflowing with aesthetic pleasure.

Excellent taste is not necessarily expensive.

It is specific.

It is personal.

And it is often gloriously eccentric.

I am far more interested in a woman who has an inexplicable passion for antique botanical illustrations than one who simply buys whatever everyone else has decided is desirable this season.

Give me the woman who knows which obscure Italian film she wants to watch, which perfume reminds her of a particular summer, and which restaurant makes the best little plate of something she cannot pronounce.

Give me the woman with opinions.

Preferably interesting ones.

You are allowed to dislike things

This may be one of the most liberating discoveries of adulthood.

You are allowed to dislike things that other people adore.

You do not have to enjoy hiking. You do not have to develop a passion for pickleball. You do not have to attend a sound bath, keep a gratitude journal, love minimalist interiors, or pretend that a room full of networking professionals is your idea of a good time.

You are also allowed to love things that other people find silly.

Romance novels. Elaborate dinner parties. Leopard print. Opera. Reality television. Expensive lipstick. Cheap roadside tacos. Collecting tiny porcelain animals.

The point is not to become an authority on what is good.

The point is to become an authority on what is good for you.

I know women who have spent decades defending their preferences as though enjoying their own lives required a carefully prepared legal argument.

They explain why they bought the flowers.

Why they want to travel alone.

Why they don't want to attend the family gathering.

Why they would rather spend Saturday in an art museum than doing something productive.

I would love to see more women stop explaining.

"I wanted to" is a perfectly respectable reason.

So is "I don't care for it."

And occasionally, "Absolutely not. That sounds dreadful."

A cultivated woman is a curious woman

There is, however, a difference between having taste and simply having habits.

Someone who orders the same meal, visits the same places, reads the same authors, and refuses every unfamiliar experience may have very strong preferences.

She may also have mistaken familiarity for discernment.

Taste develops through exposure.

Through curiosity.

Through discovering that you were wrong about something.

Through ordering the strange thing on the menu. Going to the exhibition you don't understand. Listening to music from a place you have never visited. Having dinner with someone whose life bears almost no resemblance to yours.

Sometimes you will hate it.

Wonderful.

Now you know something.

Sometimes you will discover an entirely new pleasure.

Even better.

I think there is something deeply attractive about a woman who remains available to being surprised.

A woman who has lived long enough to know herself and is still interested in finding out what else she might love.

She is neither easily impressed nor impossible to impress.

She has standards without becoming rigid.

She can recognize beauty in unexpected places.

She understands that the purpose of developing taste is not to become more difficult to please.

It is to become more fully alive.

Your preferences are trying to tell you something

This is where the conversation becomes particularly interesting to me as a coach.

Because our preferences are rarely limited to our aesthetic lives.

A woman who begins paying attention to what she genuinely enjoys may discover that she has been making much larger compromises than she realized.

Perhaps she prefers slow mornings but has built a life around urgency.

Perhaps she likes intellectually adventurous people but spends most of her social life discussing obligations and other people's problems.

Perhaps she loves beautiful surroundings but has convinced herself that caring about her environment is superficial.

Perhaps she wants a life with more privacy, more travel, more sensuality, more solitude, more art, more money, or more opportunities to be gloriously irresponsible on an occasional Thursday afternoon.

But she has organized her life around being sensible.

Being available.

Being easy to accommodate.

Being the sort of woman nobody could reasonably criticize.

Now she is wondering why she feels so terribly absent from her own existence.

I think one of the most consequential things a woman can do is begin taking her preferences seriously.

Not every preference needs to become a demand. Not every desire needs to be fulfilled. We live among other people, and love requires a certain amount of generosity.

But our preferences deserve to be part of the conversation.

They deserve consideration.

They deserve a seat at the table, preferably with a linen napkin and something lovely to drink.

Become a woman with a point of view

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from having a well-developed point of view.

You stop waiting for other people to tell you whether something is beautiful.

You stop assuming that popularity is evidence of quality.

You stop arranging your entire life around what a hypothetical audience might think.

You become more willing to experiment, because you trust yourself to recognize what works for you.

You become less desperate to be liked, because you are occupied with the much more interesting business of liking things.

Perhaps most importantly, you begin to build a life that has your fingerprints all over it.

Not a life assembled from recommendations, expectations, trends, and inherited obligations.

Your life.

With your books on the shelves.

Your peculiar little rituals.

Your preferred company.

Your beautiful things.

Your unreasonable pleasures.

Your very particular ideas about how an afternoon ought to be spent.

I don't think we talk nearly enough about the pleasure of becoming a woman who knows what she likes.

Not because her tastes are superior.

Because they are hers.

And because, after all these years of being told what a good woman should want, there is something deliciously rebellious about saying:

No, thank you. I have something else in mind.

A little grown woman magic

If you have spent years making a life work beautifully for everyone except yourself, I would love to help you reconsider the arrangement.

My private coaching practice is for women who are ready to take their desires, preferences, ambitions, and possibilities seriously. Women who want more than a beautifully organized life. They want one that actually feels like their own.

We work together on the real things: identity, boundaries, relationships, decisions, habits, and the sometimes astonishing business of giving yourself permission to want what you want.



Because knowing what you like is lovely.

Building a life around what matters to you is where things get interesting.

Explore private coaching with Lisa