La gatera de Beguemot

‘Love,’ she announces, in dramatic tones, ‘needs closeness and intimacy and familiarity to flourish. Desire does not. Desire needs distance, insecurity, novelty and surprise. Desire needs tension, breaches and repairs. Love is not comfortable with fights, but desire needs fights. Fights generate energy, erotic energy - and this is not just desire for sex, but a general exuberance and vitality, an élan, an aliveness! We often judge couples on the amount they fight, like: “Oh, they have such a good relationship! They never fight!” And yes, I know of couples who never fight and do have a very good relationship - but they also have a sex life that is somewhat flat. Desire needs fights! Intimacy - that is, emotional intimacy - inhibits erotic expression. Desire needs edge! Love needs absence of sexual threat, but desire? Desire needs to know there are other options out there for your partner, that your partner moves out there in a sexual world when they are not with you, a world of other people who look at them, sexually. Love needs talk. Desire needs not to talk. Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to maintain a sexual edge in our relationships, we must learn to tolerate this void, these uncertainties. I wrote this book because, in 22 years of practice in six different languages [Perel speaks eight, but teaches, lectures and practices psychology in only six], I’ve met couples over and over again who were having a good relationship, who love each other, but who have no sex, no tingle! I met couples who had a bad relationship, and who I helped to have a good relationship again, and the expectation was that the sex would just come back - but it didn’t. I began to think there’s something in this premise - that if sex is wrong, the relationship is wrong; and equally that more talk, intimacy and closeness will equal more sex, better sex - that just doesn’t work. I knew I was on to something.’

And so Perel begins, launching herself into a 90-minute discourse that dismantles all popular wisdom. She addresses honesty, ‘which in American terms has come to mean transparency, this idea that the only way a couple can be healthy, or can heal themselves, is with absolute honesty. Come on! We need secrets! We can never know our partner completely, and they can never know us completely, and that’s good.’

Y a mí que esto me suena de haberlo oído en clase…

[Mis queridos lectores y corresponsales (los que me queden tras tanta e injustificada desidia), dentro de poco les prestaré la atención que se merecen]