“If you want to stop having sex, just get married,” goes that tired American chestnut. Our cultural dictates that the marital bed might be intimate, cuddly, and comfy — the sexual equivalent of a teddy bear, perhaps — but rarely ever hot. Hot is reserved for the call girl, the college Spring Break fling, the emotionally-crazy-yet-passionate ex-girlfriend before the search for stability.
But does it have to be this way? Esther Perel, a sexual psychotherapist of 20 moons, doesn’t think so. In her new book, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic + the Domestic (HarperCollins, 2006), Perel argues that the American drive for complete togetherness — matching sweatpants at Junior’s soccer game, endless late-night divulgences of your every last recollection from junior high, and making every night a Blockbuster night — is completely antithetical to keeping eroticism alive in a long-term, committed relationship. According to Perel, separateness, not togetherness, is the key to maintaining the hots for one another. “When people become fused — when two become one, connection can no longer happen,” Perel writes. “There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.”
Perel utilizes this thesis for a number of topics related to pair-bonding: maternity (she laments the “cult of the child” and the lack of separate space for adults to be adults), fantasy (she says it’s important to cultivate our own, separate fantasy lives to re-charge the relationship) and even the Holy Grail itself, monogamy (while she doesn’t explicitly advocate for polyamory, she does claim that every relationship exists on a “dyad of the third,” and that one must “let the stranger in” to keep things hot.) Ostensibly using examples from her real-life therapy practice, Perel writes in a breezy, conversational style that is easy to follow and renders Mating a quick read. Unlike most tomes about sex written by psychiatric professionals, Perel understands the need for humor: in her fantasy chapter, for instance, she makes light of a patient’s D/s fantasy featuring cowboys with some quick-witted John Wayne references and a touch of playful irreverence.
It is difficult to say if every example Perel utilizes is really true to life; the cast of characters, for example, all speak with remarkably similar diction. Yet Perel’s down-to-earth style and provocative thesis — who knew, in our hyper-saturated, Oprah-fied culture, that growing apart could make the sex better? — is sound. Captivity won’t start a revolution, but it will get couples re-evaluating their sex lives. And anything to keep the Joneses jonesing for each other is a good thing, I say.
Gallery Carre
