Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

by Esther Perel

It takes two people to create a pattern, but only one to change it.

“I knew we were in trouble when I couldn’t even think about having sex until all the toys were put away,” my patient Stephanie reluctantly admits.

“Have you seen the movie Before Sunset?” I ask him. “At one point the main character, Jesse, says that he feels as though he’s running a day care center with someone he used to date.”

This is actually misattributed to the wrong movie in the series. This quote is from Before Midnight, which is one of my absolute favorite movies. The argument scene, which is basically the last third of the film, is incredible.

There are regular playdates for Jake but only three dates a year for Stephanie and Warren: two birthdays, hers and his, and one anniversary. There is the latest in kids’ fashion for Sophia, but only college sweats for Stephanie. They rent twenty G-rated movies for every R-rated movie. There are languorous hugs for the kids while the grown-ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks.

The imagery of the last sentence is one of the ones that really worked for me.

“You spend a lot of time on the computer. Is it all work?” “Where have you been?” “Who was there?” “Did you miss me?” Many of our inquiries hover at the border between intimacy and intrusiveness. We want to know, but we don’t want to be too obvious. We say that we ask because we care, but often it’s because we’re afraid.

Nowhere are we encouraged to be satisfied with what we have, to think, “This is good. This is enough.”

I very much appreciated Perel connecting capitalism/materialism to how people see themselves. What would she say about social media these days?

Many people in my field assume that the intensity that shapes the early stages of romance is a sort of temporary insanity, destined to be cured by the rigors of the long haul. Clinicians often interpret the lust for sexual adventure—ranging from simple flirting to infatuation, from maintaining contact with previous lovers to cross-dressing, threesomes, and fetishes—as an infantile fantasy or a fear of commitment.

"temporary insanity" is one of my favorite phrases in the book!

The English analyst Adam Phillips underscores this point in his book Monogamy: If it is the forbidden that is exciting—if desire is fundamentally transgressive—then the monogamous are like the very rich. They have to find their poverty. They have to starve themselves enough. In other words they have to work, if only to keep what is always too available sufficiently illicit to be interesting.

The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustained desire becomes a real possibility. It’s remarkable to me how a sudden threat to the status quo (an affair, an infatuation, a prolonged absence, or even a really good fight) can suddenly ignite desire. There’s nothing like the fear of loss to make those old shoes look new again.

One of the messages from the book that Perel articulated nicely was the need to cultivate Other-ness in our partners, because otherwise we may fool ourselves into believing we know completely, where we really just know them as the "you" in "us."