WOMEN are training themselves not to fall in love because relationships are skewed in favour of men, Fay Weldon said yesterday.

The novelist and commentator told an audience at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival that women were no longer as romantic as they were a generation ago, to the detriment of their happiness.

Weldon, 75, argued that having been liberated by the Pill in the 1960s women were paying the price of trying to behave like men. “Our generation fell in love all the time,” she said. “We sacrificed everything. Now women are much more practical and hard-headed. However, in the pursuit of professional, social and domestic fulfilment many women are failing to accept that, hormonally and physiologically, they are programmed to experience life differently from men,” she said.

“I think we need to make the most of being women as women, not aspirational men. The assumptions we all make now as to what comprises a good relationship are upside down. The differences between men and females are what we should be celebrating.”

Weldon’s new book What Makes Women Happy has outraged feminists because of its suggestion that women should fake orgasms to keep their men content. Commentators pilloried her for encouraging women to accept submissiveness in the most intimate area of their relationships. But Weldon believes that sex is the area where men and women come closest to making a sincere emotional connection. The pursuit of intimacy in all aspects of their lives is a false goal, she says. Better to give each other space to indulge the genders’ different impulses, she says.

“The more we know, the less easy we find it to get on together, I fear,” she said.

Weldon’s critics accuse her of losing touch with the aspirations of women, a far cry from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when she was regarded as a high-profile feminist with novels such as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, which celebrated women being bad.

Her own life, as she recorded it in her 2002 memoir Auto Da Fay, has included a series of complicated relationships and snatched periods of joy, leading to two divorces and four children. Her first husband pimped her to a Soho nightclub because he had no interest in satisfying her sexually and she once slept with a market trader for a pair of nylons.

Happiness, her experiences have taught her, is about aspiring to virtue. Shopping, chocolate and the other “consolations” that women comfort themselves with are frivolous but valuable diversions.

“Nothing makes a woman happy for more than ten minutes at a time because after that the doubts and anxieties arrive. You can’t help it as a woman. It’s not fair: men can be happy for the time of a football match. They have the advantage of single-tasking. Multi-tasking, which women are so proud of, is a great drawback because it limits the periods of our pure happiness. We are training ourselves out of being in love because it is so unfair.

“I think for most women that intense love brings unhappiness with it. A lot of our grief comes when one’s instincts are at odds with socialisation.”

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