I Thought I Had to Earn Pleasure
I’m GenX - we had to earn everything, so why not pleasure? And then, as if on cue, a client put the whole thing into words.
A client said something to me recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
“I can’t relax until everything is done.”
She said it so matter-of-factly, the way you’d describe the weather. As though it were simply a personality trait rather than a belief she’d been quietly carrying her entire life.
And I understood exactly what she meant. Because I’ve heard it so many times, in so many different forms, from so many women sitting across from me. The details change. The exhaustion doesn’t.
The finish line keeps moving, of course. There is always another email, another responsibility, another person who needs something. And somewhere in the background, desire waits patiently, getting a little less attention each day, until eventually it stops waiting at all.
My client is in her early fifties. Behind her are decades of caregiving, emotional labor, work stress, parenting, relationship tension, and the hormonal upheaval of menopause. She came to me wondering why intimacy felt so distant. Why her body felt so unfamiliar. Why desire, which had once existed quite naturally, now felt like something she had to hunt for.
The answer wasn’t hormonal, though hormones were part of it. The deeper answer was this: she had spent so long running on stress and obligation that her nervous system had simply never learned how to shift gears. You cannot pour everything outward for years and then expect sensuality to appear on cue at night. The body doesn’t work that way. Pleasure requires a nervous system that has been allowed, at least occasionally, to rest.
What struck me most about her story was the language she used without realizing it. She talked about earning the massage. Deserving the vacation. Finally getting a break. Even the words around rest and enjoyment were transactional, as though pleasure were a payment issued after sufficient suffering.
Very few women are ever explicitly taught that enjoyment needs to be justified. But most absorb it anyway, threaded quietly through childhood praise and cultural expectations and years of being the person who holds everything together. It shapes how they experience intimacy too. Some women spend so much energy performing desire correctly, making sure their partner feels satisfied, avoiding any hint of selfishness, that they never pause long enough to ask whether they themselves are actually present for the experience.
My client had never really asked herself that question. When she did, it opened something up.
We started small. Not with grand declarations or dramatic changes, but with tiny moments woven into ordinary days. A cup of coffee drunk slowly, without a screen. Music on while cooking dinner instead of a mental rehearsal of tomorrow’s schedule. Ten minutes outside before moving on to the next task. A romance novel opened in the middle of the afternoon with zero apology.
None of it sounds revolutionary. That’s the point.
Each small moment was practicing something. Teaching her nervous system that enjoyment was allowed to exist here, in this body, in this life, without being earned first.
The shift surprised her. Not because anything dramatic changed, but because of how much was unlocked by something so quiet. She described feeling more present. More open. Curious in a way she hadn’t felt for years. Desire, she told me, had started returning in the background, gently, without force, as though it had simply been waiting for a little space.
That is usually how it works.
Something To Try This Week
Choose one enjoyable thing and do it before your responsibilities are finished. Not after. Before.
Keep it genuinely small. Drink your coffee slowly this morning. Sit outside for five minutes before opening your inbox. Read one chapter of something you actually want to read, in the middle of the day, without justifying it to anyone including yourself.
Notice what comes up while you do it. Guilt will probably arrive quickly, right on schedule. That isn’t a sign you’re doing something wrong. It’s your nervous system encountering a pattern it hasn’t practiced yet. Notice the guilt, let it sit there, and continue anyway. That continuation is the practice.
Pleasure is not a prize awarded after exhaustion. Your body was designed for enjoyment, connection, rest and desire as part of being alive, not as an occasional reward for good behavior. Sometimes intimacy begins returning long before anything else visibly changes. Sometimes it starts the moment a woman quietly decides she is allowed to feel good before every obligation is complete.