What does pleasure mean to you?

How much pleasure do you allow into your daily life?

Pleasure is my friend. I met her anew one afternoon when I opened the door to my apartment and stared out my kitchen window. The sun was doing a slow strip tease, sliding off its silken colors behind bare tree limbs. Then I noticed all the uns—the unwashed dishes in the sink, the unsorted pile of mail on the table, the un-hung-up jackets slung over chairs. Yet, as I stood there open-mouthed at the riot of peach, pink, and plum, I didn’t want to move.

– Journal Entry, March 2020

To many, the word pleasure often connotes mostly sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is an important and healthy pleasure we need and experience physically in our bodies and through our emotions. Certainly, women still need more permission to experience sexual pleasure and to communicate their sexual needs to their partners—especially male partners.

Yet, we can experience many more pleasures physically in our bodies—pleasures we may have let in only as thoughts: walking outside admiring the play of light in our neighborhoods, forests, and gardens; delighting in colors of everyday objects that pop out, exclaiming over the fireworks of sunsets; humming along with recorded music; eating and tasting something we love slowly—the list is as infinite as the sights, sounds, touches, and scents of the earth.

This vision of this blog is to explore the vast cornucopia of pleasures in our daily world that can increase our resilience to daily stress and negative emotions. Women’s pleasure will be a focus because women are still raised to be primarily caregivers and to be self-sacrificing; as a result, women are more likely to minimize their need for daily pleasures of all kinds as well as their need for the pleasure of solitude.

As you may know, living with my husband’s dementia and movement challenges these last four years has demanded I have a lot of patience to give him much emotional understanding and growing physical care. Early on, I realized that to not only just cope but remain reasonably good natured and happy given our situation, I needed  to slow down, to allow more play and pleasure into my life, and to experiment with new ways of doing all of that. These explorations led to published research and to conversations with friends about why we women find it so natural to please others and so difficult to please ourselves.