Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

by Esther Perel

When you love someone, how does it feel? And when you desire someone, how is it different? Does good intimacy always lead to good sex? Why is it that the transition to parenthood so often spells erotic disaster? Why is the forbidden so erotic? Is it possible to want what we already have?

These types of questions really pique my interest. They also can answer why do people cheat and how relationships (especially in marriage) work.

Call me an idealist, but I believe that love and desire are not mutually exclusive, they just don’t always take place at the same time. In fact, security and passion are two separate, fundamental human needs that spring from different motives and tend to pull us in different directions.

While love promises us relief from aloneness, it also heightens our dependence on one person.

passion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate.

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.

if we are to maintain desire with one person over time we must be able to bring a sense of unknown into a familiar space. In the words of Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

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. We narrow down our partner, ignoring or rejecting essential parts when they threaten the established order of our coupledom. We also reduce ourselves, jettisoning large chunks of our personalities in the name of love.

Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination.

Love and lust are inseparable parts of a larger whole for some, while for others they are irretrievably disconnected. Most of us, however, express our eroticism somewhere in the gray areas where love and lust both relate and conflict. —Jack Morin, from The Erotic Mind

Sexuality is more than a metaphor for the relationship—it stands on its own as a parallel narrative.

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. 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.

When people become fused—when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.

It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy. Maybe he can love her, but it’s clearly much harder for him to desire her. There’s no tension.

In order to bring lust home, we need to re-create the distance that we worked so hard to bridge. Erotic intelligence is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life.

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting.

Marriage used to be primarily a matter of economic sustenance, and it was a partnership for life. Mating today is a free-choice enterprise, and commitments are built on love.

But the fact is that negotiating power is part and parcel of all human relationships. We recognize it most easily when it’s expressed outright, through authority, coercion, bullying, aggression, and castigation.

Childhood is our basic training for power tactics. We have our will; our parents have theirs. We demand; they object. We bargain for what we want; they tell us what we can have. We learn to resist, and we learn to surrender. At best we learn to balance, to mediate, to understand.

As adults, we seek control in part as a defense against the vulnerability inherent in love. When we put our hopes on one person, our dependence soars. So do our frustrations and disappointments. The greater our helplessness, the more dangerous the threat of humiliation. The more we need, the angrier we are when we don’t get.

If, in our daily life, we shun dependence, in our erotic life we might welcome it.

What makes sustaining desire over time so difficult is that it requires reconciling two opposing forces: freedom and commitment.

Love and desire are two rhythmic yet clashing forces that are always in a state of flux and always looking for the balance point.

“I think that might be the heart of the issue for my whole generation, this lack of trust. We were taught to rely on ourselves, not to depend on others.”

In other words, the experiences that caused us the most pain in childhood sometimes become the greatest sources of pleasure and excitement later on.

Erotic intimacy is an act of generosity and self-centeredness, of giving and taking. We need to be able to enter the body or the erotic space of another, without the terror that we will be swallowed and lose ourselves.

She’d say, ‘Have a good time’ in a way that made it very hard for me to have a good time.”

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.

However, if one partner really misses sex and can’t engage the other, a pernicious downward spiral is set in motion. For these chronically disappointed partners, the absence of sexual intimacy creates an emotional desert. Sooner or later things come to a head. They rebel and find sex elsewhere: on line, or in flings, tricks, or affairs.

Desexualization of the mother is a mainstay of traditionally patriarchal cultures, which makes the sexual invisibility of modern western mothers seem particularly acute.

A fantasy is a map of desire, mastery, escape, and obscuration; the navigational path we invent to steer ourselves between the reefs and shoals of anxiety, guilt, and inhibition. It is a work of consciousness, but in reaction to unconscious pressures. What is fascinating is not only how bizarre fantasies are, but how comprehensible; each one gives us a coherent and consistent picture of personality—the unconscious—of the person who invented it, even though he may think it the random whim of the moment.

The female characters in much pornography (themselves invulnerable) neutralize male vulnerability because they are always fully responsive and fully satisfied. The man never suffers from inadequacy, because the woman is in a state of ecstatic bliss that is entirely his doing. She confirms his virility.

The mother of all boundaries, the reigning queen, is fidelity, for she more than any other confirms our union. Traditionally, monogamy was viewed as one sexual partner for life, like swans and wolves. Today, it has come to mean having one sexual partner at a time.

The lovers’ jealousy depends on the presence of the spouse. Without the betrothed, all the possessiveness, passion, and insanity of fevered lovers will simply go limp.

Infidelity lies in breaches of the agreement, in violations of trust. Even though the rules themselves may look very different, they are breakable, and breaking them has equally painful consequences.

Acknowledging the third has to do with validating the erotic separateness of our partner. It follows that our partner’s sexuality does not belong to us. It isn’t just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction.

Oscar Wilde wrote, “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is getting what one wants, and the other is not getting it.”

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.

For them, love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of their romance, it’s the beginning. They know that they have years in which to deepen their connection, to experiment, to regress, and even to fail. They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli.

Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn’t swallow freedom whole.

We must unpack our ambivalence about pleasure, and challenge our pervasive discomfort with sexuality, particularly in the context of family. Complaining of sexual boredom is easy and conventional. Nurturing eroticism in the home is an act of open defiance.