REVIEWS

Quit cuddling, flirt with other men and other erotic advice

Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence by: Esther Perel Harper, 2007 ISBN#: 978-0-06-075364-1 244 pages

Doctors’ offices held a special intrigue for me as a child: a stack of women’s magazines. My mother didn’t have any of these around the house, so the insight they offered into the whole adult gig of being a wife was like sunken treasure.

One magazine in particular held a special appeal for me. It offered a feature called something like “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” There was a he-said, she-said description of the problems in a particular relationship, plus the pronouncement of a therapist. I loved this!

Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity (love the title) allowed me to experience this same delight. The New York psychotherapist illustrates her suggestions for maintaining eroticism in long-term relationships with stories from her clients’ experience. Perel makes sure to provide a fair assessment of each partner’s complaints and then adds her own conciliatory advice, aimed always at preserving relationships.

Some of the advice she offers her clients and readers will surprise you because it frequently contradicts the usual relationship guidance advice. With one couple, Perel learns that they are frequent cuddlers. Stop it! she tells them. Her hope, which succeeds, is to have the partners rediscover the sense of separateness they had before becoming so bonded. Nothing kills eroticism more effectively than a loss of mystery about a partner, she says. While a happy home requires security, a vibrant sex life requires some uncertainty. Perel helps couples find a way to balance the tension between these two.

What else does eroticism need to stay alive? Perel presents the idea that our sexuality is one place where we heal our emotional imbalances. For instance, someone highly responsible and leadership-oriented during the day may crave a submissive role in sex. A person more meek may require a dominant role in the bedroom. The author widely accepts these needs. “To my thinking, being able to play with roles goes some way toward indicating that you’re no longer controlled by them” (p. 61).

Part of playing these roles involves acceptance of them by a partner. “When our innermost desires are revealed, and are met by our loved one with acceptance and validation, the shame dissolves. It is an experience of profound empowerment and self-affirmation for the heart, body and soul” (p. 105).

Notice the language used here? There are no mechanical sex tips in this book. No urging to give more blow jobs or wear more lingerie. This book is about experiencing sex in a way that makes you feel more alive, happier and satisfied. Perel is ultimately fair in urging both partners to understand each other’s needs more and move mutually toward a central ground.

It was fascinating to juxtapose Mating in Captivity with the usual fodder on relationships. In the midst of reading this book, I read an article online urging couples to call each other at work and to keep in touch with what each other was doing during the day. Bleck! I was so relieved to return to Perel’s advice to couples to maintain a stronger sense of self and even in one woman’s case, to flirt with other men. Such sage advice is refreshing in a culture that feels like it suffocates our separate selves.

Mothers will especially appreciate Perel’s chapter on the decline of sex with the onset of parenting. Her portrait of a mom of two offers very sympathetic and realistic advice for moms and dads living in this age of hyper-parenting. Can eroticism survive children? Perel offers a thoughtful and fair answer. In it, she gives a new definition of what is erotic and what makes us feel vibrant and alive. I was really happy to hear something more profound than the usual suggestion to get a babysitter, eat dinner out, read the soft porn in trashy novels, etc. Perel gets to the deeper issues of why moms often don’t want to have sex, why we opt to sweep the floor when we could be burning calories in a different room. She acknowledges, “(T)he liberation that so bolstered women’s sexuality has yet to cross the threshold of motherhood, which has not lost the aura of morality and even sanctity that it always had” (p. 144). We’re tired, we’re petrified of the future, we’re struggling with all the work, we’re trying to achieve the minimum, and even that is not easy.

Finally, Perel urges readers that eroticism requires work. If we want a happy, erotic experience in our lives, we have to take responsibility for creating it by scheduling time for sex, understanding each other, and so on. But she does this urging in a gentle, therapeutic way. We resist the work involved in seducing our partners for a very basic reason, she writes.

“This reluctance is often a covert expression of an infantile wish to be loved just as we are, without any effort whatsoever on our part, because we’re so special” (p. 215).

So sex takes work, by both people in a couple. There aren’t any easy answers. Sorting out our sex lives and relationships is a complex achievement, as challenging as deciding why you are here and what is the meaning of your life. Individual family-of-origin experience overlapping cultural narratives make our journeys formidable but somehow, people are making sense of their sexuality and creating happiness. Perel argues for doing the work, whatever it is your situation needs.

Sometimes, the work’s not that tough. Check out the cowboy fantasy on page 162...This is waaaaaaaaaay better than all those “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” articles from the doctor’s office.