Customer Reviews

Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Everyone knows that familiarity breeds contempt. Especially if familiarity comes with a wedding ring attached. A book about sex in marriage --- now there's a thin book!

But here comes Esther Perel to suggest that we --- men and women alike --- have it wrong. Good sex doesn't have to end when the hormones cool. Lust doesn't have to devolve into companionship. You can be a mom and a sex kitten. And as for "intimacy"....in the bedroom, a little goes a long way.

Who is this wild woman? A therapist in New York who's been working with couples and families for two decades. Belgian-born, to Holocaust survivors. Married (to her original husband). Two kids. Speaks eight languages --- including common sense.

Not for Perel a how-to book of ridiculous exercises you can practice to rekindle the passion you once knew. If she had her way, you'd never consult a manual again. You might, however, write a dirty letter about all the hot things you'd like to do to your partner --- or that you'd like done to you. Or maybe you should start two e-mail accounts just for the sexual dialogue between you and your mate.

But she's the mother of your child!

But he's the guy who only gets his kicks from online porn!

Perel has heard all that. Many times. She's not fooled --- underneath those smart New York rationalizations are hearts that still want to believe in hot sex with someone you know. The problem, she says, lie in the unspoken assumptions of most marriages.

Like: To love is to merge. Wrong. Merging is what happens when you see the Other as your security. That's death to sex. Good sex requires a spark. A spark requires a gap. Cross the gap, feel the sizzle. No gap? The best you can hope for is a cuddle.

"There is no such thing as 'safe sex,'" she writes. Sex requires mystery, excitement, uncertainty. Which means not knowing everything about your partner. You find that threatening? You'd find it less so if you stopped equating intimacy with sex.

Here's a radical thought: don't do everything together. Cultivate your own set of friends. Create differences, not affinities. "Ruthlessness is a way to achieve closeness" --- ponder that for a while. Monogamy? Great if you can honor it. But it is, statistics show, "a ship sinking faster than anyone can bail it out."

Infidelity is a symptom of deeper problems in the relationship? Many believe that. Perel doesn't. She finds life...complicated. She hates the verb "have" when used in relationships --- for her, no one "has" anyone. Relationships are negotiations, not assumptions. You can get crazy with someone you've lived with and known well --- if your "rules" allow that.

Eroticism, she says, is "sexuality transformed by the imagination." So, start dreaming. There's a big payoff: "Nurturing eroticism in the house is an act of open defiance."

I live in a city of therapists and in a neighborhood where they are at their most dense. I have done couples therapy; socially, I know several sex-and-couples therapists. All women. All buttoned-up --- their sexuality is not just unseen or tamped down, it's under lock-and-key. So it's a great relief to read Esther Perel. No question about it --- she's hot.

Because the author's ideas are provocative, this won't be an easy read. It wasn't for me, but an interesting read nonetheless. The author challenged all my beliefs about love and how relationships really work and I liked being challenged. She made me think in ways I had never before.

For example, her discussion on how desire needs distance -- but intimacy needs closeness -- and how these two conflict with each other in long-term relationships is dead on! But the author believes -- and I agree -- that it's possible to achieve both even if it seems impossible. She explains how this is possible without cornering you into believing only one method is the right way. There is no right way. Instead she shows how couples have managed to achieve this in their own way and discusses the pros and cons of each.

I also appreciated her discussion on how sexual fantasies differ from everyday fantasies. If you fantasize about the perfect job or the perfect mate, it's because you want these things to happen in reality. However, if you have a sexual fantasy about being raped, it doesn't mean that you want this to happen in reality. There's an element to your fantasy that is your true desire and in your sexual fantasies, you are in complete control about how this plays out.

So if I liked this book so much, why only 3 stars instead of 5? It's because there's a part where the author agrees with a client that it's respectful to withhold telling the truth about an affair. I've heard this argument before and I strongly disagree. I think it's disrespectful to decide for someone else (who's not your child) what they can and cannot handle. Withholding the truth is not about respect, it's about fear. If you told the truth, that person could leave you or retaliate in another way. Withholding the truth from them strips them of their choices in order to gain an unfair advantage over them. Lying to someone in order to keep them bound to you is not only selfish and controlling, it's also manipulative. It's just manipulation reframed in a positive way. And a surprising argument coming from an author who earlier argued against possessiveness. So, while I did enjoy the rest of this book, this part left me cold.

Otherwise, I think this is a very interesting and provocative book.

I hate self-help books. I'm a Master's candidate in psychology and my relationship was deteriorating fast. I'd been living in a passionateless environment with lots of affection and familiarity. It was causing amazing problems. This book was the most intelligent thing I'd ever read, and it was concise, clear, amusing, and devoid of rediculous jargon and quizzes and self-help steps. It has situations in it that are real and applicable.

If you are having problems, buy this book. It can only help.

This book is fantastic!! I don't know where to begin. First, her writing style is incredible. There is a beauty to what is written in her book. The beauty is revealed when you read passages that explain intellectually things you have felt for some time. Some of her explainations were so beautiful and fulfilling it brought me to tears.

Second, she is incredibly accurate about relationships and desire. She clearly shows why love and desire operate on different trajectories. But, the beauty is, the trajectories are not mutually exclusive and can co-exist. The key is re-igniting the individual.

Third, she is open minded, accepting, and understanding of the incredible impact that sexual freedom and individuality have had on marriage. She does not sugar coat the fact that monogamous marriage is "dying." She advocates being proactive about ensuring passion and desire within your marriage.

The examples in her book were not very applicable to me, but the principle of each story was clearly established and easily applied to my own marriage.

Most importantly, she helped me understand my desire. She helped me understand why I enjoyed thinking of my wife in certain ways. It helped me understand my desire and find new ways of experiencing passion.

I've skimmed a number of popular books published in the last few years on the problem of sexless marriage, and this is by far most interesting contribution to date. First, there is no recommendations for drug therapy anywhere in the book. Second, the author frequently brings into the discussion a European-influenced view of some particularly American style predilictions and assumptions reguarding sex, parenthood, gender politics, and relationship expectations.

Her fundamental premise is that eroticisim requires seprateness, and in the course of building and sustaining security, we can frequently lose the "me" and "you" in us. But even more important, she sees the very contemporary marital impulse toward an egalitarian union -- while great for chores and child care -- can be a neutralizer in the bedroom.

You may or may not find strands of your own dilemma in her case histories, but you will not walk away from them empty handed, either.

There are many aspects of the book which are highly nuanced, and won't survive well in the O'Reilly world of broadcast media interviews. I can just hear some producer-fed talking head asking something like, "You advocate couples go to Vegas for swinging? Why?" (She doesn't). So don't pay attention to that noise. This is an intellegent, respectful, contemplative work of original thinking that confronts a subject too often approached with superlatives and pabulum.

Buy one for yourself and one for your best friend -- more than likely, they're suffering, too.

NY psychologist writes book on sex to gain attention for herself and her practice. No quantitative scientific research. Consists of some quotes from some books she's read, plus some anecdotes drawn from people she's talked to, plus a lot of speculation. Her favorite word seems to be "perhaps," as in "perhaps we are convinced that lustfulness conflicts with maternal duty."

There is nothing in this book that would really help a married couple whose sex life has faded. She suggests role play, like pretending the wife is a prostitute. Yawn. She also suggests pornography. In his book "In the Shadows of the Net," Patrick Carnes, with 25 years of experience in the field, warns that many people get so hooked on porn that they lose interest in their mates. Fantasy and porn not exciting enough? Perel suggests the discrete affair, open marriage, swingers clubs. No mention of the risk of herpes, hepatitis, AIDS, etc. And for every anecdote that she has on extra-marital sex helping a marriage, I dare say I have heard ten about its having the opposite effect. Not that I have any actual numbers, but then I'm not writing a book. Dr. Perel doesn't back up her pronouncements with any hard data.

On 9-24-10 at the annual conference of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, plenary speaker John Gottman, mentioning Esther Perel by name, said that her idea that emotional distance makes for better marital sex is contradictory to his findings. Now at the University of Washington, he has been doing research with married couples since 1980.

On 5-20-11 at the annual conference of the Massachusetts Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, I asked Terry Real whether too much intimacy could be boring, whether it was important to keep mystery in a marriage. He recognized that as Perel's idea and said that while he likes her as a person, he totally disagrees with that idea. He says intimacy is the great turn on, the pearl of great price.

Lori Brotto, a psychologist in Canada, is doing serious research on lack of desire, and is getting good results with treatments based on mindfulness, one thing in the moment. She has published articles, but no book yet.

Esther Perel's sociological study on current sexual problems - most prominently, loss of sexual desire - in modern marriage is a page turner. She writes with a combination of intellectual and sexual attunement, sometimes being titillatingly down to earth with her frank and bawdy dialogue in case examples and sometimes being brilliantly cutting and succinct in her ability to weave together a number of opposing clinical concepts with originality, precision and verve. So, I admire her skill. Her purpose, on the other hand, I'm not so sure comes through.

I can't help but feel that Ms. Perel has made this topic way too complicated. For example, my generation is before hers by about two decades. I don't think that desire has changed all that much. Lifestyle has; sexual desire - no. I am a 71 year-old healthy woman, sexually active, happily married for the second time. Three kids, six grandkids. The first marriage was happy also. The advice I would give is to not get too mentally mired down with figuring all this out. This is truly the age of over-information and endless debate and it can make you sick, stressed, neurotic and un-desirable to spend time with. Just go to bed.

Life is actually so simple at the level of instinct and desire.
Trust your gut.
Relish your unique body.
Always keep a piece of pie for yourself and never give it away. Never.
Know that your sex life is very good for your body and your health.
Treat your marriage like you are giving it sunshine and vitamins every time you make love.
Adults come first. Kids learn good lessons from that.
Be completely honest and forthright.
Laugh a whole lot. Lighten up.
Really, it's not all that difficult.

As a guide for "mating in captivity", this book transcends its title. Written for the mainstream in an easy, flowing style, Ms. Perel tackles complex issues concerning sex, passion, and eroticism within long term relationships. She presents a narrative that exposes various aspects of case histories in her therapy practice that encompasses cultural, gender, and age differences. Offering diverse measures that creatively tackle the problems presented, she assists her patients in discovering their own erotic needs as well as their partners'. This is not a manual, it is more a playful treatise on eroticism in which Ms. Perel examines its complexity and the role it plays in maintaining sexual passion alive. Thankfully, she does not provide therapy that encourages only closeness/intimacy as the answer to a fuller sexual experience. Her book offers a creative approach to discovering the renewal of sexual, physical, passion that can parallel the intimacy that might already be established within the relationship. She presents `the erotic' as being central to the whole person rather than it being only a component of sex---and that finding the key to it within ourselves will ultimately unlock the sexual stalemate that oftentimes occurs within longstanding committed relationships. Her book proposes a fresh view that taps into the erotic energy that feeds our creative selves and permeates our life. For those that that want to re-vamp or re-claim sex within their committed relationships and to all that want to participate in a full and passionate life, this book is for you.

Esther Perel has written a compelling and intelligent book about what it means to be a couple today. In a fresh and provocative style she unpacks our prevalent ideas about "intimacy", "eroticism" and "being a couple" revealing to us how our unrealistic expectations about commited relationships are paradoxically responsible for our lack of "erotic" energy". In American society today we expect our intimate relationships to meet all our needs-- for friendship, companionship, economic stability, domesticity and passion --all with one person and at one time! As a result we end up creating our partner's and our own personal jails. In our self imposed "captivity" we loose our sense of separateness and freedom ---which are essential ingredients for a playful and passionate sexual life. Mating in Captivity takes the reader for a personal ride helping us examine our implicit notions. It is also an intellectual book that challenges our social constructions about love, intimacy and marriage and tries to bring forward essential elements involved in the cultivation of passion.

Do you feel lost, frustrated, confined or disappointed with your sex life? Does sex feel like a chore? Has the rugrats' arrival sucked that sexual impulse out of ya? Or maybe relations has morphed over the years from what seemed spicy and fresh into a short menu of the same ol' sauces and meats? Do you wonder if this is the inevitable result of being married/together with the same person for years? That you just have to "grow-up" and accept it?

Esther Perel, in "mating in captivity: unlocking erotic intelligence" says, you can have that soulful home-made chicken soup and STILL be pouring that Sriratcha in...or even head out for sushi some nights. How? By awakening your erotic intelligence: your ability to know how to be both serious and playful at sex; be both adult and child-like; be committed and free...

An experienced and articulate psychotherapist, Perel weaves together her specific experiences from her practice and professional observations about the societal forces that impact the bedroom dynamics to help give some structure to understanding what's going on in there.

Perel's core premise is that erotically intelligent people find a way to establish a healthy balance between serious intimacy and sexual play. Taking intimacy seriously means being committed to the relationship: establishing and cultivating communication. Being sexually playful means letting go (in a healthy way) of operating out of a rigid system of beliefs around what is and is not allowed in sex in a committed relationship.

It's not a simple topic: it doesn't lend itself to easy analysis and general prescriptions. Despite that, Perel does an excellent job at drawing out the abstractions out of the specific circumstances. Over the course of the book, she pieces together a small, course-shaped mosaic of the modern couple navigating their way along a path that includes a genuinely satisfying long-term relationship.

For me, personally, Perel sparked whole missing elements of this incredible uniquely-human experience of being erotic. I had my own set of beliefs that held me back from really opening-up and sharing the healing, fun and vital experience of being in sexual desire. She underscored for me how critical being playful is to the whole endeavor. I found that I had a pretty rigid idea of what one can do to another that they love and respect. Turns out, when the two are in agreement and it is physically and psychologically safe, there's not a whole lot that is categorically "bad." Of course, each individual and each couple will negotiate out what they are/are not willing to try.

It's about ferreting out those (sometimes deeply-held) beliefs that create unnecessary limitations. In unlocking those structures, a whole burst of creative energy is released. In the human experience, vitality is creativity, expressed.

It's that vitality that many of us long for five/seven/fifteen years down the road... and the good news is that it never left. It's just that, mostly subconsciously, we unnecessarily stopped cultivating the conditions where our sexual creativity can thrive. Unlocking erotic intelligence is about bringing awareness to those unexamined beliefs and opening up (and acting on) the actual possibilities of what we can share with our beloved in bed (or anywhere else you wanna get it on!).

If the flame in your marriage has died down and you are keen to understand why that might have happened (in hopes of changing how you do relationship to make it different/better), I recommend you pick this book up, open your mind and let your fantasies fly!