Independent Women: The Luxury of Knowing Your Own Standards

Disclaimer: This post is meant to inspire and share ideas for informational purposes only, based on personal experiences and opinions. It is not intended as legal, medical, financial, tax, safety, immigration, insurance, travel, or other professional advice. For more information, please see our Disclaimer. 

Luxury is often easy to recognize. Things such as a beautiful hotel, an unforgettable meal or a home filled with things chosen carefully over time that showcase all of your travels. That time you were able to splurge and upgrade to first class on a flight, or get access to that airport lounge you always wanted to try.

But there is another kind of luxury which is knowing what works for you. Knowing what you enjoy, what you would rather skip, what is worth your time, and what simply is not that important to you. These preferences can influence everything from the way we travel and work to the places we spend our time and the commitments we make.

For independent women, making our own decisions can also give us plenty of opportunities to discover those preferences, and perhaps that is part of the luxury.

What Does It Mean to Know Your Own Standards?

Standards can simply reflect the preferences, priorities, and values we use when deciding what fits our lives.

For example, you might care deeply about living in a walkable neighborhood but have little interest in owning a large home, or you might happily pay more for first class on a flight but rarely spend money on clothes. These choices do not necessarily set a better standard, they simply reveal what matters to you.

Standards Aren't the Same as Perfection

Knowing what you prefer does not require expecting every experience to be perfect. In fact, personal standards often involve deciding where you are willing to compromise.

When you travel, the hotel room may be small, but the location is exactly where you want to be, or a job may not have the most impressive title, but the schedule fits the way you want to live.

The standard isn't perfection, rather, it is knowing which details matter enough to influence your decision.

Your Standards Don't Have to Be Someone Else's

It is easy to confuse standards with status and those are not necessarily the same thing.

Someone else's idea of luxury may involve a five-star resort while yours might be a quiet guesthouse in a neighborhood where you can walk to a café every morning.

Someone may love a packed social calendar while you may prefer few plans and plenty of free time.

Someone else's choices can be perfectly reasonable but just may not be right for you.

Independence Creates More Decisions, Not One Right Answer

Independence gives us choices, but choices still require decisions.

Where do we want to live? What kind of work suits our lifestyle? How much do we want to travel? Which invitations sound enjoyable and which do we want to decline? What are we willing to spend more on? What can we happily do without?

Part of an independent lifestyle can be developing our own criteria for making those decisions rather than relying entirely on what is popular, expected, or impressive.

Deciding What Matters to You

Some preferences become obvious quickly while others take years of experience to recognize. Perhaps you realize that you would rather take fewer trips and stay longer when you travel. You may learn that you enjoy working remotely but don't particularly like working from home every day.

Sometimes experience also teaches us what doesn't matter. The larger hotel room may not be worth giving up the better location. The popular restaurant may not interest you enough to wait an hour for a table. The invitation may sound fun, but a quiet Saturday at home sounds equally appealing.

Standards Show Up in the Small Things

Personal standards don't always appear in major life decisions, often, they show up in ordinary every-day choices.

How You Spend Your Time

Time makes personal preferences particularly visible. For example, some women enjoy busy schedules filled with activities, dinners, travel, and events while others prefer more room between commitments. Many of us probably move between the two depending on the week.

Knowing your standards around time doesn't mean optimizing every hour, it may simply mean recognizing which commitments are genuinely worth putting on your calendar and which ones you don't particularly mind missing.

The Spaces You Choose

Think about the places where you naturally feel inclined to linger. Maybe it is a café with outdoor tables and excellent coffee. A hotel with a quiet lobby and a great location. A neighborhood where everything you want is within walking distance.

These details can sound small until you realize how consistently you choose them. Our standards often reveal themselves through repetition.

What You Choose to Spend Money On

Personal standards also appear in what we consider worth paying for which doesn't necessarily mean choosing the expensive option. Someone might spend generously on travel and drive the same car for years. Another person may invest heavily in her home because she spends most of her free time there. Someone else might care very little about either but happily spend money on restaurants, concerts, or hobbies.

The interesting question isn't necessarily How much does it cost? It is Does this matter enough to me to spend money on it?

Knowing Your Travel Standards

Travel has a way of making personal standards particularly obvious because nearly every trip involves tradeoffs.

Location or room size?

First Class or Economy?

Detailed itinerary or open afternoons?

Famous restaurant or neighborhood café?

Major attractions or wandering through streets you've never seen before?

There is no universally correct way to travel, each person has their own preferences.

What Actually Matters When You Travel?

After enough trips, many travelers begin noticing patterns in what they consistently prefer. Maybe you don't care about having a luxurious hotel room as long as you can walk out the door and immediately start exploring or perhaps the hotel matters a great deal because returning somewhere comfortable at the end of the day is an important part of the experience for you. You may happily take public transportation everywhere but refuse to book a flight in economy.

Those preferences become your personal travel standards and they don't have to match anyone else's.

Luxury Is Personal

This may be where the traditional definition of luxury becomes especially interesting. For one traveler, luxury might mean flying business class and staying at a five-star hotel. For another, it might mean having an entire afternoon in Paris with no reservations, tours, or appointments.

Maybe it is waking up without an alarm. Ordering another coffee because you like the café. Taking the scenic train instead of the faster one. Choosing the hotel you actually want instead of the one everyone else recommends.

Luxury can be expensive but it can also be having enough autonomy to make a choice simply because it suits you.

Knowing Your Standards at Work

Personal standards don't disappear when the workday begins rather we develop preferences about the environments where we work, the responsibilities we enjoy, the schedules we prefer, the amount of travel we're comfortable with, and how much space we want between our professional and personal lives.

Those preferences may also change. A work arrangement that fit beautifully five years ago may no longer be appealing. Something we once considered important may move down the list, while something we barely considered before becomes much more significant.

Changing your mind doesn't necessarily mean you didn't know what you wanted before. Sometimes the circumstances simply changed.

Relationships, Friendships, and How We Spend Our Social Time

Personal standards can also shape our social lives. Some people enjoy spontaneous plans. Others would rather know what's happening each day. Some love large gatherings. Others prefer dinner with two close friends. Some maintain friendships through frequent contact. Others can go months without talking and pick up exactly where they left off.

These aren't universal rules for how friendships or relationships are supposed to operate, they're preferences.

That distinction matters because personal standards are primarily about understanding what works for us, not establishing rules everyone else is expected to follow.

The Freedom to Like What You Like

There can be something wonderfully uncomplicated about simply liking what you like. You don't have to love minimalist interiors because they're fashionable. You don't have to stay at luxury hotels to be a sophisticated traveler. You don't have to fill every weekend because you're independent. You don't have to embrace a quiet life because someone else decided that slowing down is the answer to everything. You don't have to prefer the city, the suburbs, the beach, the mountains, fine dining, street food, solo travel, group travel, ambitious career goals, or a perfectly balanced calendar.

Personal taste doesn't require consensus and independence doesn't have to look the same from one woman to another.

A Few Ways to Notice Your Own Standards

Sometimes our preferences are easier to recognize in hindsight than to define in advance.

You might notice what you repeatedly choose when several options are available. You might notice the things you're happy to compromise on and the few things you almost never do.

Spending can offer clues too. There may be categories where paying more feels worthwhile and others where the premium option adds very little to your experience.

And preferences are allowed to change. The standards that suited one chapter of life don't have to become permanent rules for every chapter that follows.

Perhaps the most useful distinction is between preference and expectation. This is what I prefer is very different from this is what everyone should prefer.

There is plenty of room for both personal standards and flexibility.

What Does Your Version of Luxury Look Like?

Luxury becomes considerably more interesting when we define it for ourselves.

What are you particular about?

Where are you surprisingly flexible?

Which experiences are worth spending more on?

What impresses other people but doesn't particularly matter to you?

Which small details consistently make an ordinary experience better?

And what have you discovered you simply don't care about anymore?

There are no correct answers to those questions and that may be the point.

The Quiet Luxury of Knowing What Works for You

Knowing your own standards isn't necessarily about demanding more or about spending more, refusing to compromise, or constructing a life where everything meets an exact specification.

Sometimes it is simply knowing what matters to you and what doesn't.

Those distinctions can appear everywhere: where we have coffee on Saturday morning, where we live, how we work, how we travel, with whom we spend time, what we spend money on, and what we choose to leave off the calendar.

Our answers won't always remain the same. They don't need to.

Perhaps one of the quieter luxuries of independence is not having identical standards to everyone else.

It's having the space to discover your own.

Wander&Prosper