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Wild things in captivity while they keep their own wild purity won’t breed, they mope, they die.
The great cage of our domesticity kills sex in a man,
THE STORY OF SEX IN committed modern couples often tells of a dwindling desire and includes a long list of sexual alibis, which claim to explain the inescapable death of eros.
our lives are surely more stressful than they should be—it
It’s hard to generate excitement, anticipation, and lust with the same person you look to for comfort and stability,
Eroticism requires separateness. In other words, eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to commune with the one we love, we must be able to tolerate this void and its pall of uncertainties.
the sexual relationship is a metaphor for the overall relationship.
Love may be universal, but its constructions in each culture are defined, both literally and figuratively, in different languages.
Mating in Captivity aspires to engage you in an honest, enlightened, and provocative discussion. It encourages you to question yourself, to speak the unspoken, and to be unafraid to challenge sexual and emotional correctness. By flinging the doors open on erotic life and domesticity, I invite you to put the X back in sex.
“You don’t necessarily need love for sex, but you need sex in love,”
They mourn the loss of excitement and fear settling down.
I think its easy to forget the excitement of waiting for someone to come visit you. Waiting all week just to spend the weekend with you and the excitement of getting a random “you up text” to invite you over. They does disappear when you become domesticated.
“Some of you resist the loss of intensity, some of you accept it, but all of you seem to believe that desire fades. What you disagree on is just how important the loss really is,”
Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.
In fact, security and passion are two separate, fundamental human needs that spring from different motives and tend to pull us in different directions.
The challenge for modern couples lies in reconciling the need for what’s safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what’s exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.
Unfortunately, too many love stories develop in such a way that we sacrifice passion so as to achieve stability.
The social and cultural transformations of the past fifty years have redefined modern coupledom.
when he explains that sexuality became a property of the self, one that we develop, define, and renegotiate throughout our lives. Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do. It has become a central feature of intimate relationships, and sexual satisfaction, we believe, is our due. The era of pleasure has arrived.
The extended family, the community, and religion may indeed have limited our freedom, sexual and otherwise, but in return they offered us a much-needed sense of belonging.
Adult intimacy has become overburdened with expectations.
The more you become attached, the more you have to lose.
You make your first commitments, and happily give up a little bit of freedom in exchange for a little bit of stability.
You enjoy the comfort, but complain that you feel constrained.
Yet when we trade passion for stability, are we not merely swapping one fantasy for another?
When we love we always risk the possibility of loss—by criticism, rejection, separation, and ultimately death—regardless of how hard we try to defend against it. Introducing uncertainty sometimes requires nothing more than letting go of the illusion of certitude. In this shift of perception, we recognize the inherent mystery of our partner.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do. Mitchell reminds us that even in the dullest marriages, predictability is a mirage. Our need for constancy limits how much we are willing to know the person who’s next to us.
We see what we want to see, what we can tolerate seeing, and our partner does the same. Neutralizing each other’s complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness.
Suddenly, the compromises that worked so well yesterday become sacrifices we no longer want to brook today.
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.
“Love arises from within ourselves as an imaginative act, a creative synthesis that aims to fulfill our deepest longings, our oldest dreams, that allows us both to renew and transform ourselves.”
Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.
The first stage of any encounter is filled with fantasies.
If love is an act of imagination, then intimacy is an act of fruition.
The seeds of intimacy are time and repetition.
We penetrate our partner mentally. We talk, we listen, we share, and we compare. We disclose certain parts of ourselves, while we adorn, fiddle with, and conceal others.
Good verbal communication is one of the keys to a good sex life. When couples share their thoughts and emotions freely throughout the day, they create between them a high degree of trust and emotional connection, which gives them the freedom to explore their sexuality more fully. Intimacy begets sexuality.
Ironically, what makes for good intimacy does not always make for good sex. It may be counterintuitive, but it’s been my experience as a therapist that increased emotional intimacy is often accompanied by decreased sexual desire.
Andrew and Serena are clear that sex has been an issue from the beginning, and that regardless of how much their relationship has flourished, it is never enough to charge them erotically.
I think relationships are really interesting, what do we want vs what are we giving ourselves permission to experience and explore. I think it's interesting that some people can have so much in common that the interests are there but the spark isn't, the sexual chemisty is missing, while it might be easily ignited by others. Is it deep internalized shame and repression? What is really the issue that is coming up amongst couples that supposedly love each other? What does that even mean really?
Sexuality is more than a metaphor for the relationship—it stands on its own as a parallel narrative.
A couple’s emotional life together and their physical life together each have their ebbs and flows, their ups and downs, but these don’t always correspond. They intersect, they influence each other, but they’re also distinct.
It is too easily assumed that problems with sex are the result of a lack of closeness. But my point is that perhaps the way we construct closeness reduces the sense of freedom and autonomy needed for sexual pleasure.
Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness. One does not exist without the other. With too much distance, there can be no connection. But too much merging eradicates the separateness of two distinct individuals. Then there is nothing more to transcend, no bridge to walk on, no one to visit on the other side, no other internal world to enter. When people become fused—when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with.
Others approach relationships with a heightened need for personal space—our sense of self-preservation inspires vigilance against being devoured.
Erotic, emotional connection generates closeness that can become overwhelming, evoking claustrophobia. It can feel intrusive. What was initially a secure enclosure becomes confining.
many couples experience their relationship as a dance in which great sex brings them close, but then this very closeness can make sex difficult again.
We appreciate being left alone to meander leisurely in our own mind because this reestablishes a psychological distance, a delineation of the boundaries between me and you.
intimacy comes with a growing concern for the well-being of the other person, which includes a fear of hurting her. But sexual excitement requires the capacity not to worry, and the pursuit of pleasure demands a degree of selfishness.
Dynamics in relationships are always complementary—both partners contribute to creating patterns.
