Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic (2006) – Esther Perel
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“Love,” says Perel, “needs closeness and intimacy and familiarity to flourish. Desire does not. Desire needs distance, insecurity, novelty and surprise. Desire needs tension, breaches and repairs.”
“Love is not comfortable with fights, but desire needs fights,” says Perel. “Fights generate energy, erotic energy – and this is not just desire for sex, but a general exuberance and vitality, an élan, an aliveness! We often judge couples on the amount they fight, like: “Oh, they have such a good relationship! They never fight!” And yes, I know of couples who never fight and do have a very good relationship – but they also have a sex life that is somewhat flat. Desire needs fights! Intimacy – that is, emotional intimacy – inhibits erotic expression. Desire needs edge!”
“Love needs absence of sexual threat, but desire? Desire needs to know there are other options out there for your partner, that your partner moves out there in a sexual world when they are not with you, a world of other people who look at them, sexually. Love needs talk. Desire needs not to talk. Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to maintain a sexual edge in our relationships, we must learn to tolerate this void, these uncertainties.”
“I wrote this book,” she says, “because, in 22 years of practice in six different languages, I’ve met couples over and over again who were having a good relationship, who love each other, but who have no sex, no tingle! I met couples who had a bad relationship, and who I helped to have a good relationship again, and the expectation was that the sex would just come back – but it didn’t. I began to think there’s something in this premise – that if sex is wrong, the relationship is wrong; and equally that more talk, intimacy and closeness will equal more sex, better sex – that just doesn’t work.”
“Fantasy… is never politically correct, it’s transgressive and about power, which is why it’s so hot. It’s about surrender, revenge, aggression, abandonment. You can transcend moral and social boundaries. But this idea that you should share your fantasy with your partner… I think that’s very risky.”
“Talking is overrated. Especially talking to just one person”.
“I cannot stand this tendency to identify a victim and a perpetrator in an affair.”
“This idea that tenderness and emotional intimacy leads to good sex – I’m afraid it became current when women came into my profession.” –via Click Opera [Oct 2006]