The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille Read Free Book Online

love. She opened the oven and I told her, “I love you!” She closed the oven, came to give me a kiss, and told me, “I love you, too.” Then she gave me a big portion of the cake and I knew she really meant it when she said, “I love you.”
    —a forty-year-old man

Mother loved us so much, she cooked all Thanksgiving Day. She was so happy to see her family all together again, around the table, eating…so much love around the table, so much food. We could not stop eating.
    —a thirty-six-year-old woman

When you are little, parents are there to care for and protect you. You have no cares or worries. If something bad happens, your family is there for you. I miss this protection.
    —a fifty-eight-year-old woman

The best way to describe my parents’ room is a nest. The carpet was light brown and the walls were blue. The bed was in the center of the room and had a huge white comforter. It was on this bed that I sat with my mother as a child and asked her about the world.
    —a twenty-one-year-old man

I remember lying in my mother’s lap in my early years. I remember talking with my mother and sharing caresses.
    —a sixty-five-year-old man

    Consistently, participants related their first experience of love to their mother’s care—feeding them, holding them, making them feel safe. This is entirely understandable. After all, for nine months, our mothers provide us with the most perfect “resort hotel” imaginable. The room service is first-rate and available immediately upon demand, the space is neither too hot nor too cold, transportation is free, and there’s even a musical backdrop (her heartbeat) for entertainment. And even though we ultimately must leave this vacation paradise, our mothers are there to guide us through the transition, feeding us with their bodies, keeping us coddled and warm, taking us out to see the world, and providing numerous ways for us to occupy our time and to delight in the act of learning.
    These responses were very consistent with the thinking of an adolescent culture. Adolescents, after all, flit from pressing for independence to acting like children; in the latter mode, they seek the succor (inwardly, if not overtly) of their mothers, the safe harbor provided by that all-encompassing love.
    Then there is the “independence” mode, the mode that demands a rejection of home and the right to make one’s own mistakes. When I asked participants to recall their most powerful memories of love, different stories emerged.

I went to college. I was so happy. Free at last. But it did not go so well. First time I started drinking, I could not stop. Then I don’t know what happened next, I was so sick. None of the boys who were after me the night before were there to help me.
    —a fifty-year-old woman

I was thirteen and I liked a boy but he liked someone else. This taught me a big lesson, because I thought that I was prettier than her and she was fat, but I was spoiled and sometimes mean.
    —a twenty-four-year-old woman

My most powerful experience is when my parents decided to separate. I found out eavesdropping on their discussions late at night. Things were tense, but everyone wanted to be normal.
    —a thirty-seven-year-old man

I have an image of a white beautiful horse and a blond beautiful woman in a flowing crepe-like dress with a lush green forest and waterfall and a handsome man meeting and embracing her. I long to be that woman.
    —a thirty-eight-year-old woman

    This was a different component of the adolescent experience: the part where experimentation leads to exhilaration and disappointment, to success and failure. The vast majority of these stories expressed some degree of discomfort, of uneasiness with the events described, much as an adolescent describes experiences he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand. Remember, these stories were about the
most powerful
memory of love.
    Perhaps the most significant element of the adolescent experience, however, is the loss of