Love and sex in confused days

Argentine writer Tamara Tenembaum, at her home in Buenos Aires.SILVINA FRYDLEWSKY

In the Orthodox Jewish community where Tamara Tenenbaum (Buenos Aires, 32 years old) grew up from the age of 12, girls could not have any contact with boys.

“We did not greet each other with a kiss, we could not play anything that involved touching, we did not shake hands.

Hence the right to marriage.

Orthodox courtships do not have hugs, caresses, or kisses ”, he describes in the essay

The End of Love.

Wanting and fucking

(Seix Barral).

In the secular world that he knew from high school, there was much more freedom, but the couple seemed to be "the only way to understand love."

Today, this philosopher, teacher, poet and journalist believes that this paradigm is increasingly questioned and defends "the existence of thousands of alternatives, thousands of ways of being happy and living together."

Love in times of 'apps'

“The religion of the lay girls I met in school was love,” she writes.

“When I came to the secular world, I began to observe and think about what I saw as an instinct for survival.

The first thing that caught my attention was that we are talking about men all the time and they are not, or very little.

I began to listen to the conversations of the boys among them and in high school they talked more about heavy metal, guitars, soccer, computers… ”, he says in a bar in Villa Crespo, the Buenos Aires neighborhood where he lives.

"I also realized that we cared a lot about how they looked at us, which they didn't care too much about, and that this very much defined our self-esteem," she recalls about that first teenage reading of the links.

She herself converted to the newfound religion, but without ceasing to ask herself questions for which she still has no answers today.

“I don't know what kind of bond closes me the most, if a monogamous one, an open one, a stable one or a temporary one.

I don't know how to navigate the contradiction between the desire for novelty and warmth, ”he admits in the book.

Her essay is now in its seventh edition in Argentina and has been read as a generational manifesto among young women who, like her, rethink inherited structures and seek to build new affective relationships.

• A generation between two worlds

• Jewish women, torn between success and submission

Love does not have to be for life or even that everything revolves around you.

“You no longer think that when you have a partner you stop going out with your friends.

The couple is no longer the center of everything, "he says, marking distances between the links formed by

millennials

and

centennials

(born from the mid-nineties to the beginning of this century) with respect to those of their predecessors.

"It may seem strange to our parents that one goes on vacation with a friend, but we are demanding other ties, other communities, and I think that is what, if we can build it, that will end the hyperinflation of the couple."

Still, he believes that the ideal of romantic love “endures because it is renewed.

Today, perhaps in Argentina, no one is interested in having a 50-year-old marriage, with a ring and a white dress, but the girls do want the boyfriend with whom you go to the Caribbean and take your photo for Instagram.

What used to be the ideal of family happiness today is an aspirational consumption of the perfect partner ”, he reflects.

A sea of ​​doubts

When it comes to making vital decisions, she thinks that few are more difficult for women of her generation than whether or not to be mothers.

“Some of my friends often say (and why lie, it happens to me sometimes too) that they would like to save the decision, get pregnant by accident or find out that they cannot conceive and bye, that our bodies make the decision for us ”Writes Tenenbaum, who lives as a couple, without children.

The sea of ​​doubts and connection possibilities raised by this philosopher contrasts with the rigidity of the norms of the Orthodox community where she grew up with her two younger sisters, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Once.

"Orthodox Jews have clear rules for everything: food, clothing, how to deal with the opposite sex and even about how to manage menstruation," he says.

In the upbringing of women "the family, childcare and household chores are idealized, but not the husband, love or partner," she describes.

Orphan of a father since the age of five, Tenenbaum explains that her mother allowed them to relax some rules as they grew older.

At 32 years old, the author answers without hesitation that she prefers the secular world in which she now lives to the religious one of her childhood.

"I feel much freer," he sums up.

Rescue, however, the most carefree way of approaching motherhood.

“I see that my friends, who are beginning to have children, are very enslaved.

You have to get up and start cooking organic porridge, use cloth diapers ... In Eleven mothers are not like that, because they have 12 children.

The little ones are cared for by the older ones and they turn out well, just as we did well with chocolate and watching TV.

As long as they are all unemployed and go to school they consider themselves satisfied ”.

Without fear of an unwanted pregnancy

Tamara Tenembaum believes that few women in Argentina stopped having an abortion when it could only be performed clandestinely - “it was estimated that 450,000 abortions were performed per year, she remembers - but with the recently approved legalization, fear disappears.

It was one of my biggest fears when I was a teenager: Who do we call? Who do we talk to?

One day my mother heard us talking about it and said: "Of course they call me, don't even think about looking for any phone, ridiculous stupid things."

Now I imagine teenagers growing up without that fear, knowing that if you get pregnant you can do it.

That is a lot.