Hey everyone,
Welcome to the first newsletter where I didn’t know what I wanted to write about ahead of time! A predictable place to find oneself, six weeks and two newsletters in. Fortunately, the goal of this project is to emphasize process over outcome. To simply to show up for myself and write *something.* So, after opening hundreds of browser tabs and filling multiple online shopping carts with items I had no intention of purchasing, I decided to just engage with some material. I hope you enjoy, or maybe learn. Either way, it’s something.
This newsletter period I re-read Esther Perel’s Mating In Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. For those who haven’t heard me wax poetic about her previously, some context: Esther Perel is America’s most famous couple’s therapist, as well as a bestselling author, TED talker, podcaster, and “relationship expert.” She’s the child of Holocaust survivors, and cites her parents, their relationship, and their commitment to living fully and presently in the wake of massive trauma as the primary inspiration for her career and body of work. She grew up in Belgium and is fluent in nine languages. Mating In Captivity was my first exposure to her work. I listened to it in 2018 while I was thinking about becoming a therapist, and it not only re-oriented my approach to my own long-term relationships, but also awakened my desire to work with couples professionally. When you claim a book has changed your life, it can be beneficial to sit down with it, pen in hand, and do a close reading.
The essential argument of Mating In Captivity is that American domestic life, marriage, and long-term commitment are inherently at odds with erotic vitality and sexual expression. Desire (“Eros”) craves separation and mystery, while the intimacy that is cultivated in long-term partnerships breeds the opposite.
“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. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been, than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.”
The book aims to help people in long-term partnerships learn to play in and with this inherent tension, holding the paradoxical nature of sex and marriage up for examination and creative reinterpretation. But not before it spends multiple chapters exploring the ways that American culture and its attitudes towards marriage wreak havoc on our sex lives.
Perel starts by critiquing modern intimacy’s over-emphasis on talking as a way to access feelings. She argues that a cultural favoritism for spoken word not only disadvantages partners who are more comfortable expressing themselves through sexuality, physical touch, or acts of service, but also places an undue burden on the more verbal, emotionally literate partner (often the woman; have I mentioned this book is super heteronormative?). She then dives into the idea of equality in the modern American relationship, and the ways that “some of America’s best features — the belief in democracy, equality, consensus-building, compromise, fairness, and mutual tolerance— can, when carried too punctiliously into the bedroom, result in very boring sex.” Americans “shaped by the feminist movement and its egalitarian ideals” are left in a bind, shying away from power imbalances in their bedrooms out of fear that they will trample on ideals of mutuality and respect within the relationship. (It’s worth nothing that her original audience and client demographic at the time of this writing seems to be boomers and Gen-X couples, mostly heterosexual, mostly quite privileged.) But desire does not abide by egalitarian rules. “Negotiating power,” she insists, “is part and parcel of all human relationships.”
Digging even deeper into American cultural norms from what has become known as her signature outsider’s perspective, she moves on to unpack the ways that our Protestant work ethic and cultural love of efficiency have been misguidedly applied to couples’ sex lives. Read a self-help book! Take a pill! Follow these 10 steps to reignite desire in your relationship! Work harder! Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get to fucking, people! Whatever isn’t working must be the fault of an individual or couple. Never the culture, never the context. The effect is similar to the aforementioned over-emphasis on talk-based intimacy and the misapplication of “American values” of fairness and democracy: a total sexual flop.
The book also looks at sexuality as it is portrayed in the media, America’s staggering teen pregnancy statistics, and the pathological insistence on abstinence in so much of American sex education. Examining the juxtaposition between the blatant sex-shaming that our culture perpetuates and the abundance of easily accessible porn on the internet, it draws a foreboding conclusion: “taboo ridden sexuality and excess-driven sexuality converge in a troubling way… A society that sees sex as soiled does not make sex go away. Instead, this kind of anxious atmosphere breeds guilt and shame in its more extreme version, or a generalized discomfort in its more ubiquitous expression. Sex is divorced from emotional and social continuity. What is missing is a sexuality that is integrated, in which pleasure flourishes in a context of relatedness.”
In re-reading these chapters about American culture, I was reminded of my childhood idol, Britney Spears, whose virginity and sexual behavior was hotly contested on pretty much every magazine cover in every supermarket and airport I entered from the moment I got my period through the day I left for college, despite being absolutely no one’s business but her own. Certainly, it resonates. Certainly, I notice my own shame and shyness around the subject of sex coming up as I write this. But it’s also worth noting that this book was published in 2006, just before the advent of social media, a time when it was easier to believe in the good intentions of our country’s news media outlets, our “ideals,” and our “values.” A time when “democracy, equality, consensus-building, compromise” felt — at least to me, a very privileged young white woman about to vote in my first presidential primary (Hillary Clinton vs Barack Obama) — like real American ideals rather than just hypocritical platitudes.
Perel rarely uses hard data to make her point, but instead invokes anecdotal evidence from 20 years of her private therapy practice and her outsider’s eye to make pointed cultural observations: Americans are obsessed with efficiency and work. The Puritanical underpinnings of our country’s foundation create shame around sex and orient us towards it in a way that feels burdensome and labor intensive (because, have I mentioned, we love work!). Modern American ideas of intimacy are all about talk. Americans are overly attached to ideas of monogamy and sexual fidelity. We have no tolerance for cheating and too much tolerance for divorce. Sweeping generalizations like these have the inadvertent effect of portraying American culture as a monolith, while in all likelihood, she was interacting with a narrow sliver of it, a privileged few. Some people may feel a desire to poke at her observations, to seek out the nuances and exceptions. Mostly though, I buy it. It feels true. Also, I don’t want to read data, I want to read romantic love stories and flirty, long sentences where “desire” is referred to as “Eros” with a capital E. My husband jokes that I can only retain anecdotal information, so the container in which these lessons were delivered was generally amenable to me. But I would be remiss not to take the opportunity to react with some sweeping generalizations of my own.
For millennials like myself, who have graduated into recessions and pandemics, confronted the futility of our ambitions and the emptiness of the promise of a “good” education, watched multiple creative industries (journalism, music, TV production) cave in on themselves economically, no longer able to provide a stable living wage or regular employment to more than a select few, let alone justify the massive cost of our educations, I posit that a mood of great skepticism permeates the cultural context. It feels generational; when I try to paint my world view of America for my mother, we argue viciously, stuck in a stalemate, living in two different worlds. It is not the stark polarization of Democrat vs Republican that divides us — my parents are liberal California baby boomers — but the belief in the country’s ideals, its fairness, its values.
I wonder if this generational skepticism, reinforced every day by climate emergencies, an ever-increasing wealth gap, and a government full of octogenarians who mostly need to retire yesterday, may be providing us with one unexpected gift: we mostly aren’t bringing democracy into the bedroom. We’re pretty disenchanted with it, and also the world is burning? I don’t see it as a “what have we got to lose?” as much as a “we’ve already lost so much, and are facing so much more inevitable, massive, preventable loss… might as well give spanking a try while we’re staring extinction in the face?” IMO.
It’s not that Esther’s points don’t hold power in my psyche and my consciousness, it’s just that they are the discourses of my adolescence, not my 30s. I see the cracks in them, am not eager to claim them as my country’s or my own. Not because they aren’t, but because I want the country to change. And while I hold little hope for American culture, I do have hope for my generation’s resilience, our bedrooms, our kitchen counters, or wherever we choose to do our sex stuff, as a safe place to subvert some of these old and harmful cultural norms and instead play with power. In doing so, I have hope that we can find some of our own.
In the second half of Mating In Captivity, we move from the cultural to the personal. Perel shares stories of families whose sex lives have been torn apart by their children, lost to busy work schedules, or relegated to the back room of the psyche, where they festered for years, then burst forth into painful, marriage-altering affairs. She delves into the impact of family and the many ways parenting and caregiving can interrupt sex. Some couples mourn the loss of their sex lives, others don’t miss it at all. Some couples’ entire foundation is shaken without sex, others simply trudge through it, uninspired, but unwavering in their commitments to one another.
One of the best parts of the latter half of the book is its solution-focused orientation. Perel takes us into therapy with her and shows us how she deftly wields the internal fantasy world as a tool to subvert sexual dynamics that feel immovable and entrenched. She shows us how couples can find a way back to each other after years of disconnection and erotic estrangement. The musicality of her language mirrors the sensuality she is trying to ease us into, the way she talks about eroticism is in and of itself quite sexy. But she also gives us concrete tools:
Schedule time for one another. Not necessarily for sex, but for eroticism to grow and flourish, for sex to stand a chance against parenthood and work and single-family units without enough social support.
Develop an awareness of your own sexual fantasies. What they are, what they might mean, why you have them, and what psychological need they might be seeking to fill or meet.
De-stigmatize your partner’s fantasies, and then, rather than despairing about your different sexual tastes, recognize that there is separateness and freedom in imagination. Remove the shame, and embrace the mystery inherent in your separateness.
“The ability to go anywhere in our imagination is a pure expression of individual freedom. It is a creative force that can help us transcend reality. By giving us an occasional escape from a relationship, it serves as powerful antidote to loss of libido within the relationship. Simply put, love and tenderness are enriched by the spice of imagination.”
Regarding fantasy, she acknowledges that most of us are embarrassed by ours, that many of us were raised with a belief that our sexual selves should be hidden away, rather than integrated as powerful parts of our psyches. “What turns us on often collides with our preferred self-image, or with our moral and ideological convictions. Ergo the feminist who longs to be dominated… the husband who fantasizes about the au pair (the stripper, the masseuse, the porn star) in order to boost his enjoyment with his wife.” But she emphasizes that fantasy need not be over-interpreted. Wanting something in a sexual fantasy does not mean you want it in real life. What would it be like to let fantasy live and breathe, and be nothing more than what it is: a clue. An expression of need or want.
Finally, the book returns to its core themes: desire and separateness, acknowledging the “shadow of the third” that lives in every relationship. Rather than turn away from the third, she argues that couples who make room and psychological space for the “third” can harness it as a powerful aphrodisiac. Whether it be an affair, a potential fling, a high school sweetheart, or an extramarital glance at another across the supermarket produce aisle, the imagined “third” reminds us of our partner’s otherness, their individuality, and their agency to choose (or leave us for) another. The third is a threat, yes, but it also wields extreme seductive power. “The more we choke each other’s freedom, the harder it is for desire to breathe within a committed relationship.”
I read this book while my husband and the dog were out of town for a week, and found myself observing all the weighty realities of his absence, our separateness. There was no morning or evening dog walk together to pass the time, no shared morning pour-over coffee routine (it’s quite involved and I’m too impatient) resulting in a fresh, steaming HydroFlask of hot coffee to carry around for the first three hours of my work day, no meal planning, no cooking of meat. Instead, I lived like I was single in my early twenties. I bought iced coffee daily. I made one giant vegetable pasta and divided it into Tupperwares, then ate the same thing for lunch and dinner for three days in a row, rarely bothering to heat it up in the microwave. I took the car to run errands instead of accompanying him on our usual, goal-oriented, errand-exercise bike rides. I read novels until 2:30AM (specifically, Body Grammar by Jules Ohman, which I highly recommend) and watched TV on my laptop in bed instead of the many TV’s in my home. I went on two runs (voluntarily!) and finally signed up for a lap swimming membership at the local pool. I rested frequently, cried openly, walked around my house naked. I did zero dishes, filled the kitchen sink to the tippy top, ran out of clean plates. When the Internet in my house stopped working, I took myself to the beach and journaled by hand for over an hour without once dissociating into the abyss of my phone. I couldn’t tell if I was falling apart or thriving, but I could see myself, recognize me.
But it wasn’t until Nick returned that I was able to sit down and write this newsletter. The accountability and companionship of the two of us together, writing, not talking for hours, then heading out on a dog walk to chat and decompress, pulled me back into another kind of rhythm, one that’s equally important, and also mine. Our work partnership (separate, but with elements of togetherness) was the stabilizing force I needed to put these words on the page. I missed him for other reasons too — I love him; watching House of The Dragon wasn’t as fun without him; he’s a better cook than I am; I was going to have to call my Dad about the internet soon (no, I do not have any intention of learning to reset a router).
It is easy to lose yourself in a marriage, to forget that before you were married, you didn’t really eat much meat or ride an e-bike or drink hot coffee. That you don’t actually like cooking and no, you aren’t “a clean kitchen person now,” you were just making an effort with the dishes because someone you love asked you to, nicely, more than once. These are valuable lessons to re-learn, about your body, your needs, your separateness. Our week away was a nice reminder that I am, without him, a whole and capable self, with her own opinions, perhaps different rhythms. This can, as the “Captivity” part of Mating In Captivity implies, feel suffocating, but it can also be liberating, grounding, and motivating — the safety you need to be brave and write the newsletter.
We went out to dinner this week with another married couple after spending the week apart. One of them joked that her husband is working so hard right now that she’d tried to book a vacation without him. “He didn’t like it at all,” she told me. “He started saying I was going to leave him for the pool guy… I was like, what pool guy? Who is this pool guy that doesn’t even exist?” I thought of everything I’d read in the past week, grateful for our week apart, but more grateful to be here together, at Connie and Ted’s, eating a gluten-free lobster roll and fries with a side of dill aioli, an order my husband put in for me while I went to the bathroom, because it’s my order and he’s memorized it. “You know, eroticism flourishes in separation,” I told them, feeling self-satisfied and wise. Nick reached across the table and took one of my fries, then a big dip in the dill aioli, comfortable and familiar. “Nick just got back and I’m already thinking of sending him away again,” I joked. “Especially if he keeps helping himself to my fries.”
“The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours…” Perel writes. “But it is in their inherent separateness, in our inability to own them, where we find ourselves drawn back to them again and again.”