Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

by Esther Perel

Yet the mechanisms that we put in place to make love safer often put us more at risk.

We ground ourselves in familiarity, and perhaps achieve a peaceful domestic arrangement, but in the process we orchestrate boredom.

It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.

Not everything needs to be revealed. Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.

When we privilege speech and underplay the body, we collude in keeping women confined.

There’s an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher who explains that lust is metabolically expensive. It’s hard to sustain after the evolutionary payoff: the kids. You become so focused on the incessant demands of daily life that you short-circuit any electric charge between you.

“You can’t choose between inhaling and exhaling; you have to do both.

Despite living in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom in America, the practice of policing sexuality has continued unabated since the days of the Puritans.

Abortion, homosexuality, adultery, and “family values” have been active items on the national political agenda for more than thirty years. This sexual conservatism is rooted in the Puritan tradition, with its deep suspicion of pleasure and its moralistic attitude toward anything that strays from heterosexual, monogamous, marital, reproductive sexuality.

When we can be present for both love and sex, we transcend the battleground of Puritanism and hedonism.

Female eroticism is diffuse, not localized in the genitals but distributed throughout the body, mind, and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin, and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion.

There’s an assumption—and you’re not alone—that we need only pursue what we don’t yet possess. The trick is that in order to keep our partner erotically engaged we have to become more seductive, not less.”

Fantasies—sexual and other—also have nearly magical powers to heal and renew. They return the breasts confiscated by mastectomy, or let us walk as we did before the crippling accident. They reverse time, making us young again, and briefly allow us to be as we no longer are and maybe never were: flawless, strong, beautiful.

When we can tell the truth safely, we are less inclined to keep secrets.

Complaining of sexual boredom is easy and conventional. Nurturing eroticism in the home is an act of open defiance.