Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel

 

Another book review here, but today something totally different from normal. This book is written by Esther Perel, who is well-known as a relationship adviser, and comes from a very interesting multicultural background (born and raised in Belgium, daughter of two Holocaust survivors, but mostly practising in the US, and with a lot of experience working with refugees and victims of terror). She also went to university in Israel, and this mixed background does seem to inform her work, as I will explain later.

She is mainly concerned with how our ideas about relationships, and in fact our whole childhood experience and the assumptions we bring to relationships, can have the effect of squeezing desire out of what we intend or hope to be the most important relationships in our lives. Perel, as an adviser, works with couples where this has become a big problem and affected their sex lives, but she has a very interesting approach towards what her clients think to be the problem. 

She is very much not in favour of the phrase 'sex lives' at all, regarding this - quite correctly in my opinion - as a very mechanical view of something which is actually much lighter, harder to pin down, and potentially much more exciting and liberating. She says that if you concentrate on 'sex lives' it becomes strangely mechanical: How many times? How long? Time to orgasm? It makes it sound like a checklist, a gym routine, a box-ticking exercise. And as Perel knows, and as we all really know when we are thinking properly, the most important organ of sex is the one between your ears. And it is not exactly under your control. 

Even allowing for the fact that Perel's clients are coming to her because they already have what they regard as problems (lack of desire, lack of libido, affairs etc) it does seem that what she is observing and proposing has great importance for all of us. And it is not even because we want to 'do well' at relationships. It is much more interesting than that. It is actually trying to understand the things that produce the desire and joy and beauty in our souls in all directions, and not merely sexual. She makes that point that when you look at the way that our 'erotic intelligence' functions, there is much in common with the way that 'play' works, for children but for all ages too. The creativity of play, the invention of new things purely for the joy of it, is something which we can identify in the way that our erotic side works. The word 'erotic' itself needs a bit of a wash, because too often it is simply tagged onto a product name like 'erotic literature' or 'erotic films'. Really, the way to think about it is that our understanding of what we want, what we like, what makes us excited, is a little exploration through our own imaginations and our own hearts. You can't look too closely at your feelings here or you may make the feeling vanish, but it is really uplifting to acknowledge when something - either in front of your eyes or between your ears - makes you excited. 

When suggesting ways to help develop our 'erotic intelligence' (and I would hate people to take this in the wrong way and start boasting about how good their own is) she has several suggestions which relate directly to how we relate with our partners (whether permanent or passing). She suggests that within long-term relationships there is a conflict between our desire for security and for passion. The subtitle 'Can we desire what we already have?' sums it up. The security of a loving and trusting relationship may itself take away some of the things that our desires need. And this is not a failing in our desires. Perel sees it more as a failing in our expectations of relationships. Merging and blending with another person has a huge problem: How can you desire someone if you barely see them as a separate person from you? 

Perel's multi-culture background does enable her to look at some of the ways that particular cultures idealise certain aspects of relationships. She finds for example, that the often-desirable 'hard work' culture of the US can have a harmful effect if you bring that approach to your relationships. The 'work' is much more subtle in affairs of the heart and body. She also quoted a Brazilian adviser colleague who pointed out that the tolerance for divorce was much higher in the US and the tolerance for infidelity was much much lower (one strike and you are out!). The tolerances in Brazil were tipped in the other direction somewhat, as they regarded divorce as much more of a family disaster and regarded some infidelity as less of a disaster. So Perel sees that we cannot claim universal standards in these matters, and that this should make us think a little more about what we do and, more importantly, what we expect. 

The book did make me think about my own relationships, past and present, and about the kind of thoughts that I found between my ears within those relationships. It also made me realise how important it is to remember that your loved one is still a separate person, has a life and history and feelings which are not the same as the ones in your brain and heart, however close you may feel. And also it made me think about how good that separateness is from the point of view of desire and joy. There is a whole separate world within their heart, life and memory, and yet they chose you! 

There is a very lovely account in one of the earlier chapters from the wife in a couple (clients of Perel's) who are suffering from a critical lack of desire for each other. She recounts how, at a social event which they both attended, she saw her husband talking to a group of people with enthusiasm and clear joy, and suddenly she saw him as if he was someone else, a handsome man who looked full of joy, and not just 'Ted' or whatever her hubby's name was. And she wanted him (even though of course she already 'had' him, whatever that means). It might only have been twenty or thirty feet, but that small real distance let her slip back into the interpersonal distance that had attracted her when they first met each other. And that distance, that essential space across which desire needs to leap, was back within her grasp.