Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel Read Free Book Online

their erotic frustrations, these couples seem to share a fine intimacy, not a lack thereof.
    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. Before she met Andrew, Serena had experienced a luscious sexual life in a number of long-term relationships. In her experience, mounting intimacy had consistently led to better sex, so she was surprised when it didn’t work that way with Andrew. When I asked her why she stayed with him when from the first date she didn’t feel desired by him, she answered, “I thought we’d work on it. That with love it would get better.” “Sometimes it is the love that stands in the way,” I explained, “so just the opposite happens.”
    Listening to these men and women has led me to rethink what I had long assumed about the correlation between intimacy and sexuality. Rather than looking at sex as an exclusive outgrowth of the emotional relationship, I’ve come to see it as a separate entity. Sexuality is more than a metaphor for the relationship—it stands on its own as a parallel narrative.
    The intimate story of a couple can indeed tell us a lot about their erotic life, but it can’t tell us everything. There is a complexrelationship between love and desire, and it is not a cause-and-effect, linear arrangement. 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. That’s one reason why, to the chagrin of many, you can often “fix” a relationship without doing anything for the sex. Maybe intimacy only sometimes begets sexuality.
Separateness Is a Precondition for Connection
    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. When intimacy collapses into fusion, it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire.
    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. 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. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.
    The dual (and often conflicting) needs for connection and independence are a central theme in our developmental histories. Throughout childhood we struggle to find a delicate balance between our profound dependence on our primary caregivers and our need to carve out a sense of independence. The psychologist Michael Vincent Miller reminds us that this struggle is vividly representedin children’s nightmares: “the abandonment dreams of falling or being lost, and the engulfment dreams of being attacked or devoured by monsters.” We come to our adult relationships with an emotional memory box ready to be activated. The extent to which our childhood relationships nurture or obstruct both sets of needs will determine the vulnerabilities that we bring into our adult relationships—what we most want and what we most fear. We all straddle both needs. Their intensity and priority fluctuate throughout our lives; and, as it happens, we tend to choose partners whose proclivities match our vulnerabilities.
    Some of us enter intimate bonds with an acute awareness of our need to connect, to be close, not to be alone, not to be abandoned. Others approach