Mating in Captivity - 9/26/06

[Smartmarriages]

- LET'S GET IT ON 
Does marriage smother sex? Author Esther Perel talks about how to unleash
erotic desire inside long-term relationships.

Slate.com
By Helaine Olen 
September 26, 2006

Is it really possible to make marriage feel sexy? Esther Perel, a New York
couples and family therapist, argues that it is, but that it involves
nothing less than a rethinking of what matrimony has become for most
Americans, as well as a hard look at how we deal with the competing roles of
parent, worker and lover. In her new book, "Mating in Captivity: Reconciling
the Erotic and the Domestic," she takes aim at the modern conception of
marriage as a mélange of the romantic, the sexual, the economic and the
companionate. 

Erotic desire, Perel argues, thrives on mystery, unpredictability and
politically incorrect power games, not housework battles and childcare woes.
Furthermore, increased emotional intimacy between partners often leads to
less sexual passion. "The challenge for modern couples," she writes, "lies
in reconciling the need for what's safe and predictable with the wish to
pursue what's exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring."

Traditionally, Perel points out, marriage was a business relationship,
designed for procreation and economic survival. It asked nothing more of its
partners than stability, reliability and a day-to-day ability to get along.
Recent generations added romantic love and sexual passion to the mix,
followed by demands for equality after the resurgence of the feminist
movement in the late 1960s. As our society placed new requirements on the
institution of marriage without stripping away much of its historical
functions, we responded by expecting our spouse -- one person -- to provide
what in the past it had taken an entire village of people to give us.

Perel, who was born in Belgium and has been married for more than 20 years,
views our dilemma with an outsider's perspective. Her advice is refreshingly
counterintuitive: Communicate less with our spouses about the minutiae of
daily life and speak more with the language of our bodies and our secret
desires. Pursue interests outside of work, marriage and the family. Open up
about our fantasy lives. Flirt and play with both our spouses and others.
And get the kids out of the literal and figurative bedroom even if you have
to rent a hotel room to do it.

Salon met with Perel in her New York office, where she discussed the
difficulties of combining long-term love with erotic desire, why Americans
need to learn to play more in their personal lives, and the modern cult of
childhood. 

WHY DO YOU THINK so many couples have trouble keeping desire alive in
long-term relationships or marriages, even when they are extremely loving?

Relationships are crumbling under the weight of our expectations. We want
marriage, companionship, economic support, family life -- and then on top of
that we want our partner to be our best friend, confidant and passionate
lover. For a long time the idea that passion and marriage could go together
was a contradiction in terms. Marriages were about economic criteria. When
you chose your mate, or somebody chose your mate for you, sex did not enter
into the equation. 

ARE LONG-TERM LOVE and eroticism ever compatible?
I think that they're not inherently incompatible. But why is it so
difficult? There is in the experience of love an experience of security, of
predictability, of safety, a kind of grounding and anchoring. And eroticism
thrives on something very different. It thrives on the unknown and the
mysterious, on the unexpected. It's not what you want in a long-term, secure
relationship. 

IS THAT TRUE across all societies?
I think that some societies have it more and some have it much less,
depending on how much the society experiences seduction and sensuality and
flirtation as part of its ecology.

WHERE DOES THE United States fall on that spectrum?
People don't play much in the United States. Flirting, where you play with
the possibilities, goes against the goal-oriented, pragmatic approach
Americans often take -- which is, if you go out, you go out to score.

BUT THERE'S SEX all around us -- in music, on TV, in film. Are you saying
we're not an erotic culture?
Animals have sex. Sex is an instinct, it's the primordial instinct. But
eroticism is sexuality transformed by the human imagination. It is
exclusively human. That makes all the difference. It is playful, and in that
sense it is inherently unselfconscious and carefree. It has no other goal
than the cultivation of sex, of pleasure for its own sake.

ARE AMERICANS MORE comfortable talking about sex than erotic love?
There is a fundamental discomfort about sexuality in our society. That's why
on the one hand sex is ubiquitous but we also hang onto these attitudes that
are very sex averse. You get both extremes in this country -- abstinence
education and talk shows that blabber off every detail of people's lives.

HOW DOES THE EROTIC die in long-term relationships?
Often it's not that the erotic energy is gone, it's that it has left the
couple. It may be quite present in the house, but it's been transferred onto
children or work. I saw a couple recently who had become best friends. In 20
years, they'd had one night apart. They put their passion into making a
beautiful home, building the whole thing from scratch. They also put their
passions into creating a business together. They have passion. And it's
erotic passion, in the sense of aliveness, vibrancy and vitality, but it is
not a sexualized passion.

There is a notion people have that in the beginning of relationships passion
is spontaneous. They actually forget that the beginning was one big story
line. There were hours spent anticipating, planning, plotting, developing
the script, imagining what you're going to wear, what you're going to eat,
where you're going to go, the whole thing. But people remember things as
explosive and in the moment and unplanned. And that's not true. But passion
can die because we forgo the willfulness, the intentionality and the
imagination that fuel the erotic.

Many of us hope that our marriages will be models of equality between best
friends. Yet in your book you say equality and friendship are not
necessarily the best ways to preserve erotic love.

I think the equality model is something that we want in everyday life with
our partner. But it can have unforeseen negative consequences in the
bedroom. Fantasies are rarely egalitarian, I can tell you that. Friendship
is a different story. Best friends share everything, talk about everything.
And when you're lovers, you want mystery. I've never in my life called my
husband my best friend.

DO YOU THINK MANY of us are uncomfortable with fantasy and power plays in
the modern conception of long-term relationships and marriage?

The women's movement needed to address the abuses of power. Nobody would
ever challenge that. But in the course of doing that, it had some
unanticipated consequences, including attempting to neutralize power in
places where power is intrinsic. Such as in desire. An element of aggression
or hostility is often part of erotic desire. It's not just joy and
contentment. There is another side to desire and it's that that we have
become uncomfortable with feeling and expressing. The whole point of fantasy
is that it's not meant to be reality. We can experience these feelings very
comfortably and playfully with a partner, without fearing, What does it say
about me? 

YOU SAY PARENTHOOD can have an effect on erotic desire too.
Family life needs constancy, predictability and stability. What eroticism
thrives on, family life defends against. And at this point there is an
unprecedented child centrality in our culture. We have a kind of a
sentimentalization of the child -- well, that's the only value that they
have at this point. They don't produce anything and they drain us
economically. You put that child centrality combined with a model where the
survival of the family depends on the happiness of the couple, and basically
you get a 50 percent divorce rate in first marriages. Kids get the latest
fashions and adults walk around in college sweats. Kids get languorous hugs
and adults must make do with a diet of quick pecks. We need to re-create
some boundaries. 

CAN THE EROTIC NATURE of the parent-child bond create a lack of passion
between a married couple?
There is a powerful, sensual, erotic connection between the mother and an
infant or a newborn. There is tickling, kissing, nibbling. Then there is the
gaze, that kind of adoring gaze of this little child. It's often very
similar to when the couple was first meeting. And it is a sensuality that is
more akin to the way that I think female sexuality is organized, that it's
less genital, that it's more full bodied, that it's more subjective and
contextual. When the mother says to her husband at the end of the day, "I
have nothing left to give," I have, on occasion, had to say, "Maybe at the
end of the day, there is nothing more that you need." You're satiated. And
it is intoxicating, it's like it fills you up completely; it's no surprise
that one wouldn't need the scruffy guy after that. But it's not easy to
acknowledge that. And it's not what kids need either. They need parents with
a healthy sex and emotional life. It gives room for the child to go and do
what explorations they need to do and not become the physical and emotional
caretakers of their parents.

YOU DON'T VIEW a lack of sexual fidelity as a big problem, as many couples
-- and many therapists -- believe it to be.
Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal. That's why adultery is
such a crucial issue. There is a moral edge that many Americans bring to
this without sometimes looking at many factors that bring a person to stray.
Our model is that marriage is for everything. So, we think if it didn't work
out with you, I'm not going to think that maybe there is something to
question about my model, I'm just going to say I chose the wrong person and
I'll go somewhere else to get everything. And there is something about not
wanting to give up on that ideal that makes people more willing to go for
divorce, and the dissolution of the entire family system and all the bonds,
than the willingness to renegotiate boundaries.

HOW HAS YOUR own marriage affected your beliefs?
I say I have had three marriages with the same person. I think we
reorganized our relationship completely, at various stages in our life. I
married my mentor. Something shifted completely when we had children. I
think a third shift took place when our parents died. And what shifted? The
balance of interdependence. The power balance, the boundaries between us,
the level and kind of negotiation. The balance between togetherness and
separateness. 

YOU WRITE THAT we need to speak with our bodies as well as with language.
How do we do that? 
I think that our mother tongue is the language of the body. Every mother
that has touched a child knows how she spoke with the child and how the
child spoke back with his or her body. It is our original mother tongue,
long before the first verb is ever spoken. We should certainly not reduce
ourselves to just the spoken word. We really need that instrument that we
play here, that often is able to express things very differently. I mean,
people sit here on the couch and they talk, talk, talk, talk, and then
finally somebody puts the hand on the other and it just speaks volumes.
That's what they needed, touch. We all need to be touched.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/09/26/esther_perel/print.html


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