Читать книгу The Secret Sex of Money - Clara Coria - Страница 6

The four key words in the title: love, money, power and couple, are, in themselves, exciting, worrying, opaque, challenging and revealing. These four nouns are the basis for the mystery of the lives of most people who have lived in the realm of Western Judeo-Christian culture and who have incorporated its principles, its ways of understanding life and, especially, the power model established between genders.

Exciting, because they pull the vital strings of exchanges between people. And all that is vital is also exciting. That is, it stimulates our greatest conscious and unconscious desires. It makes our hair stand on end, our muscles twitch, our pulse accelerate and our imagination soar. And we feel like Icarus, flying towards the sun.

Worrying, because in spite of the possible certainties some people believe they have, we are never sure of whether love, money, power and couple are what we believe they are or what we were taught they should be. Uncertainty looms at the most unexpected junctures of life, shaking the foundations we believed sustained our present and future projects. And uncertainty is worrying because, in our culture, it has been relegated to a secondary status, it has a bad reputation and it usually lacks the psychological space required to deal with it without fear. Fear of the unknown is emphasized whereas enthusiasm towards novelty and adventure are concealed.

Opaque because the apparently unambiguous and common concepts in which the words of this title are presented conceal, beneath their seemingly harmless appearance, infinite unspecified expectations, unspeakable ambitions and codes whose incompatibility is only discovered in practice. That is, when the moment comes to manage money, to take up the responsibilities of power, to share life as a couple attempting to harmonize the inevitable differences and, especially, when attempting to find and unravel the great mystery of love.

Love, money, power and couple are words that are difficult and, therefore, revealing. These concepts we “carry along” in our everyday lives, as we do with our personal history, cultural traditions or gender identity. They behave so “naturally” that they end up being obvious and, therefore, unnoticed by all. For instance: men and women tend to find it “natural” that emotional restraint is a feminine prerogative and that “protection” is a masculine obligation. In practical everyday life we can see that neither emotional restraint nor protection is universal and certainly not exclusive of either gender. Love, money, power and couple are not innocuous concepts, because the way in which we conceive them conditions our life and our environment irrevocably. It is important to keep in mind that these conditionings condition our future at all times. It is worth pointing out that, on this subject, it is often difficult to reveal even that which is not hidden, simply because the manner of understanding the concepts of couple, money, power and love have become naturalized. And sometimes, the hardest thing is to see what is before our very eyes because our outlook is limited by the prejudices we uphold disguised as “natural” certainties.