Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity is chock full of advice on keeping desire alive in a committed relationship. This is part one of a three-part series on how we apply her wisdom in our marriage to keep us craving each other year after year.
Jack and I have sex approximately four nights a week. Sometimes less, sometimes more, but that’s the average.
When I offer this fact up to friends, eyebrows are raised. Some people surely think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. Other people smugly reply that they go for quality over quantity. Yeah, us, too; that’s why we don’t have sex every night. Still others reply that they’d love to do that, but they’re just too busy. Perhaps competitive people hear my admission as a challenge, or folks who are insecure about their love life feel a sting of jealousy. I don’t mean to ignite negative emotions; this is a fact about Jack and I that defines us. Sex is a hobby for us, a pasttime, a means of being that we can embark on together.
However, most of the people to whom we choose to disclose this information are initially impressed, shocked even, that this little librarian is such a horndog. Then, once my revelation finally settles, the questions begin. People wonder how I can want to do it with the same person, night after every other night. Unless they too have discovered the secrets of desire in a long-term, committed relationship, the questions are always something along these lines: how do you guys do it that often after having been together this long?
The answer is, of course, multi-faceted. Something as huge as a sex life — the physcial incarnation of the psychology, emotions, and deepest desires of a person, paired with those of another person — doesn’t have a one-off answer that’s easy for me to supply to inquiring minds. Truth be told, we weren’t always like this, and I couldn’t put our sudden resurgence of sexual desire into coherent words until I did a re-read of Dr. Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity. Now, with her pearls of wisdom, I’m able to provide an answer to how we continue to fuck like rabbits after over twenty years together.
Mating in Captivity answers the question “Can we desire what we already have?”
Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity is about sex in marriage, yes, but it’s even more about your own sexual self — your “Eros.” How do we continue to truly feel desire for our spouse after many years of marriage? How do we keep feelings of young love alive in an old relationship? How do we continue to cultivate erotic feelings for a person that feels like an extension of ourselves — a given? The answer is actually about you first, your partner second.
Perel’s answers to these questions at first seemed counterintuitive to me, but her wisdom as a psychotherapist is unparalleled. I despised her insights the first time I picked up a copy of Mating in Captivity; they didn’t seem to answer my relationship questions (be more mysterious and independent to get closer…what?) and they also seemed extreme (non-monogamy, really?). Fast forward fifteen years and what seems like a lifetime later. After being inspired by Perel’s TED talks, I decided to give her book a closer read. This time, I gained new insights while being reassured and reaffirmed. Now I recommend her book to anyone looking to improve their marriage and sex life, and I use Perel’s pearls of wisdom to explain exactly how Jack and I have hot sex several times a week.
The first step in reclaiming desire in our relationship was for us to realize that we weren’t “one.”
“When people become fused — when two become one — connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separteness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.”
Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity, page 25
In the early chapters of her book, where she also lays out that truth bomb quoted above, Perel describes two types of people in relationships. There are Romantics, who value intensity over stability, and Realists, who value security over passion.
Now, once upon a time, I was a high school girl who fell in love with a high school guy, and I fell hard. This was first love combined with first sexual experiences, also combined with youth, inexperience, and a conservative upbringing. We were inseparable from our first kiss, to the point that one of our teachers even combined our names into a one-name nickname and let us turn in homework and tests as one.
When I headed off to college first, being a grade ahead of him, we wrote each other letters and emails that we now see as overly dramatic renditions of longing and pining. It was as if we had been separated for years and not, as it was, typically about two weeks between visits. These letters are way too embarassing to share with anyone, even for a sex blogger, and I feel that’s saying something. We obsessed about spending every moment together, and once he joined me at college, we did just that. People even commented on how strange it was to see one of us without the other on those rare occasions. I look back now with a tinge of shame, knowing that I was too reliant on him, too clingy, too dependent. We defined each other and feared life without the other.
That said, the sex was amazing (well, the sexual activity, since we hadn’t actually had penis-in-vagina intercourse at that point, which was our narrow definition of “sex” back then). Our appetites for each other were insatiable. Our friends were disgusted and our parents were terrified. (Side note: As it turns out, our parents were justifiably terrified, and it was a good thing we held off on intercourse for as long as we did, because getting pregnant was way too easy for us.) I recall a friend noting that we could be locked up together in a room for weeks and still keep the flame burning hot. An ironic sentiment, given our current lives on pandemic lockdown.
Jack and I had what Perel would refer to as a common love story: we spent the first years of our relationship fusing ourselves together, becoming one, hot with desire for each other, and having amazing sex. We had NRE — New Relationship Energy. Our worlds revolved around each other. And then, we started careers, got married, bought a house, and had babies.
We were intimate in all the best ways, but all the worst ways, too. The monotony of marriage settled upon us, and I’m certain that others know this story, too. You go to the bathroom in front of each other, you bicker about chores, you convince your partner to wake up and get the crying baby so that you can have a few more winks of sleep. You stop being careful with the words and tone in which you speak to each other. You pop pimples on your partner’s back and listen to them tell the same story for the gazillionth time.
This person feels like an extension of you, and you take them for granted. This is too much closeness; this does not breed desire. I was a romantic in the early days of my relationship, but as Perel says, “Few people can live at either extreme,” (page 25) and when real life hit us hard, we became lost. We had no other option but to agree with the majority of mature adults that, in a long term relationship, “diminishing desire is inescapable,” (page 3) but we were still depressed by its departure.
It was a hard pill for me to swallow in the beginning. I had to accept that Jack and I aren’t “one.” When the pill hit the bottom, though, I noticed that some pressure was off. I know there are things within my power of control and things that aren’t. Jack and I may be committed to each other, but we do not control the other, and we are not one.
I was able to shift my mindset. Once I accepted that Jack isn’t in my circle of control — that he has his own circle of control because he is his own person — it was like we separated, metaphorically speaking. For some couples, I imagine it takes an actual separation or divorce to come to this realization. I had to deeply acknowledge that Jack is separate from me. I had to see myself as my own person.
I spent time dwelling on what separates us, from differing interests to friends to opinions. I found myself asking him “What do you think about that?” more often, and actually listening to his replies. There was more discourse. We aren’t one; we can’t read each other’s minds, even if sometimes we can read the other’s body language. We realized that we need time apart as much as we need time together. We started to see ourselves as two separate people who are choosing to share this life .
We now see our marriage as a conscious choice. I choose him again each day. He gets to decide if he chooses me again, too. Nothing is permanent; divorce is an option, adultery happens, death is always a possibility. There’s a lot of shit in this world, but there is so much joy to be had, too. Jack is my best friend. He’s my companion, my parenting partner, the guy that gets everything checked off his honey-do list. He’s got amazing blue eyes and he’s rocking the white hairs coming in on his beard. I know all the best and worst parts of him, and I know that the best far outweighs the worst. Knowing that he chooses me back is the ultimate compliment.
Find your Eros; self-confidence and self-love breeds eroticism.
“If cultivating separateness sounds harsh, let’s think of it instead as nurturing a sense of selfhood.”
Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity, page 37
Where was Perel when I was in college, desperate for Jack and fearful of venturing out on my own? When I got upset with Jack for “leaving me” while he went out with friends on occasion? When I was so intent on fusing us together that I lost it when we had to be apart?
To be fair, some of the moments that I remember most vividly from college are the moments when I was unequivocally just me — getting in the zone as I wrote essays on intriguing topics, moments of deep thought walking across the Quad, presenting my thesis, getting back from a run and looking in the mirror to realize that I was, for the first time, feeling comfortable in my own skin. I was dipping my toes into self-love.
Of course, there’s nothing quite like planning a wedding, baby-making, and then raising children to get you feeling self-conscious, depressed, and isolated. Undermining any personal growth that I’d achieved as I grew into a young woman in graduate school and in the early days of my career, motherhood at age 25 nearly stripped all aspects of my Eros away yet again. Baby blues set in after each birth, and hormone fluctuations contributed to depression and anxiety.
For years, I was not in a good place mentally, so naturally our marriage and sex life suffered during these years, too. We still had sex often, but it wasn’t the same. I didn’t long for sex; I merely complied too often rather than truly enjoyed myself.
Sometime after baby number four, I started reading self help books rather than my usual historical fiction novels. I read titles about happiness, parenting, finding joy, minimalism, and, finally, marriage and sex. I began to focus on both physical health and mental health, evermore aware of what I choose to put into my body and what thoughts I allow to linger. I began doing yoga and using cannabis. I started writing again. I rediscovered what brings me joy.
I still get depressed, but my newfound sense of self-awareness means that I now recognize that I’m in a funk, and I am figuring out how to actively take steps that lead me out of the fog. I feel more comfortable in my own skin than ever before — than I ever thought possible, really. I am more accepting of the ideas and thoughts that are purely my own, no longer feeling the need to conform. I feel how fleeting life is, and I suddenly don’t care what “the norm” is. I focus on what is real — caring for myself and my people, spending time in nature, doing less harm and more good.
How does this all relate to our sex life? What’s changed? When I was wrapped up in those depressing days of years past, I would fantasize about other jobs that I could take as I commuted to work. I fantasized about moving and starting over, or obsessed about things on my to-do or to-buy lists. I would structure my arguments against Jack in my head, determined to be right and get my way. I felt fearful of death but bored of life. I thought about what I didn’t have, but not about what I truly wanted.
Now I often find myself getting slightly aroused on the way to work, not necessarily because I’m listening to one of my swinger podcasts, but just because I’m feeling so good. I distinctly feel the impermanence of life, and this makes me evermore grateful for the life that I have. I like the way I look. I like my people. I like my plans. I find my INFJ personality interesting, and I am increasingly aware of my many quirks. I know what to do to get the good feelings flowing again when darkness settles in — I need inspiration, words, music, ideas, the wisdom of those that have already walked this path. I appreciate the wisdom that I myself am gaining as I grow older.
I love feeling alive. I’m intent on becoming my best self with each passing day. I like me. And this confidence that I now cultivate makes me feel so good that I feel like I’m in a state of near-constant arousal. I welcome my Eros, this sexual and spiritual version of myself, into my life. I am all the better for it.
Help your partner be self-confident, too, and you’ll reap the benefits.
“Erotic initmacy holds the double promise of finding oneself and losing oneself. It is an experience of merging and of total self-absorption, of mutuality and selfishness. To be inside another and inside ourselves at the same time is a double stance that borders on the mystical. The momentary oneness we feel with our beloved grows out of our ability to acknowledge our indissoluble separateness. In order to be one, you must first be two.”
Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity, page 124
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, amiright?
Jack’s biggest complaint during our rough patch was that he didn’t feel desired by me. My response? I was annoyed. I gave him sex often enough, by my estimation. I wasn’t “into it,” he’d complain. Wasn’t it good enough that we were having sex, I thought? Now he wants me to act like a porn star, too? Obviously, it wasn’t good enough for me to allow him to lube me up and go at it, but what else was I supposed to offer? I wasn’t in the mood. I was tired. I couldn’t contemplate how to be the vixen that he remembered from our college days.
Jack and I were the first of our friends to marry and have kids, and the first to embark on an unconventional style of marriage, by our friends’ standards. I’m not even talking about the non-monogamy thing; I’m talking about our careers. When we calculated salaries and trajectories in the early days, we realized that I had the potential to earn much more money for far fewer hours than Jack did. It was simply a numbers game — so I became the provider and Jack worked part time from home, taking on the majority of household responsibilities and the daytime parenting.
For ten years, Jack was my “househusband,” and this worked out quite well from a logistical standpoint, but not in terms of desire. Jack didn’t feel respected or appreciated by me on many occasions. I piled on the chores yet rarely thanked him. He put on a little weight with each baby yet still dressed in the same clothes he had been wearing since college, now worn out and ill-fitting. My once-hot husband was feeling meh, trapped and tired, and his wife didn’t crave him anymore. We bickered more than we talked. I treated Jack like a fixture in our home, an appliance that you take for granted until it breaks.
We were indeed broken back then, but we’re both perfectionists, and we set out to repair our lives at about the same time. Just as those baby days were ending and I started reading self-help books, Jack discovered a new way of learning via audiobooks and podcasts, a perfect match for my dyslexic husband with ADHD. We began to inspire each other, each of us pushing the other to be better, to be our best selves.
We share inspirational articles and podcasts with each other, and we implement the wisdom we garner. He went to therapy for an OCD issue that he’d been dealing with for years. When I started eating healthier, so did he. Quitting sugar melted twenty pounds off of Jack in less than six months time, revealing a slim, chiseled physique along with a clearer head and better mental focus. Jack started doing yoga with me, and he introduced me to cannabis. Oftentimes sober and sometimes high, we discuss philosophy, psychology, and religion together with great enthusiasm.
When our children all went off to grade school, we decided that Jack should work full time, outside the home, to make more money. It was disastrous. He was gone all the time and came home miserable. More money couldn’t provide us with the happy homelife we desired; we all missed Jack. By this time, we’d garnered enough wisdom to make a quick decision, and so Jack quit.
We decided to try the househusband thing again, realizing that we didn’t care if we were doing things differently from our suburban contemporaries. Now we are thriving because we’re supporting each other doing what we each do best. Jack also entered the gig economy, working a flexible, part time job outside the home. As it happens, he excels at and loves this gig, too. He gets to interact with people who appreciate him — a much-needed bolster to his ego.
It’s no wonder that his self-confidence has returned, full fledged, with the sex drive to match. I look at him and see someone that I would choose again today — and I do. When this hottie approaches me from behind, his hands on my hips and his breath on my neck, I melt. He’s irresistible to me…and he wants me, too? Game on.
But what happens when two becomes three…then 4, 5, and finally 6? Next up: Perel on parenting.