Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel Read Free Book Online Page A

relationships with a heightened need for personal space—our sense of self-preservation inspires vigilance against being devoured. Erotic, emotional connection generates closeness that can become overwhelming, evoking claustrophobia. It can feel intrusive. What was initially a secure enclosure becomes confining. While our need for closeness is almost as basic as our need for food, it carries with it anxieties and threats that can inhibit desire. We want closeness, but not so much that we feel trapped by it.
    All these meanderings on intimacy are still far from the awareness of John and Beatrice. The authenticity and the spontaneity of the beginning did not lead them to anticipate the ambivalence of love that would follow. From where they were, intimacy was simple. Open up, reveal, share, become transparent, open up more . . .
    John and Beatrice exemplify a typical beginning. In fact, the intense physical and emotional fusion they experience is possible only with someone we don’t yet know. At this early stage merging and surrendering are relatively safe, because the boundaries between the two people are still externally defined. John and Beatrice are new to each other. And while they are migrating into each other’s respective worlds, they have not yet taken full residence; they are still twodistinct entities. It is all the space between them that allows them to imagine no space at all. They are still enthralled by the encounter, and they have not yet consolidated their relationship.
    In the beginning you can focus on the connection because the psychological distance is already there; it’s a part of the structure. Otherness is a fact. You don’t need to cultivate separateness in the early stages of falling in love; you still are separate. You aim to overcome that separateness. As new lovers, John and Beatrice enjoyed a built-in distance that allowed them to experience the confluence of love and desire freely, exempt from the conflicts they would bring to therapy later.
Entrapment Deadens Desire
    For John, intimacy harbors a threat of entrapment. He grew up in a home with an alcoholic, abusive father. He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t acutely attuned to both his father’s moods and his mother’s sadness. As a young boy he was recruited to be his mother’s emotional caretaker, and to alleviate her loneliness. He was her hope, her solace, a vicarious affirmation that her miserable life would be vindicated through her marvelous son. Children of such conflicted marriages are often enlisted to protect the vulnerable parent. John has never doubted his mother’s deep love for him; nor has the love ever been without a sense of burden. From early on, love implied responsibility and obligation. And even while he craves the closeness of intimacy—he has always had a woman in his life—he doesn’t know how to experience love in a way that does not feel confining. The emerging love he feels for Beatrice carries with it the same heaviness that love has always had for him.
    There are many circumstances that can lead people to experience love and intimacy as constricting—an unhappy childhood is not a prerequisite. Popular love talk has made a real case for thinking ofthis as a “fear of intimacy,” which is seen as afflicting men in particular. But what I observe is not so much a reluctance to engage in intimate bonding—no one can doubt John’s deep involvement with Beatrice. Rather it is the weightiness of that involvement that these people find overbearing. Foreclosing the necessary freedom and spontaneity that eros demands, they feel trapped by intimacy.
    John’s sexual inhibitions are exacerbated as his emotional involvement with his girlfriend deepens. As a matter of fact, the more he cares about her, the less he can freely lust after her. For him, as for many other men in this predicament, erotic shutdown is not subtle. He is at the mercy of a stubborn penis that simply will not respond. But why? What is