The key ideas

Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

Esther Perel, 2006

Why does passion so often fade exactly where everything is going well: trust, care, a shared home? Esther Perel, a couples therapist in New York, shows that love and desire want different things. Love needs closeness. Desire needs distance, mystery and play. You'll learn how to hold security and adventure together and bring eroticism back home.

Who it is for

For anyone whose home is warm and calm, but whose passion has faded. And for anyone who fears that love and desire can't coexist in a long relationship, and wants to know if that's true.

Where there is nothing to hide, there is nothing to seek.

Can you want what you already have?

Esther Perel remembers a party in New York. The moment she said she was writing a book about couples and eroticism, a circle formed around her and the small talk was over. The guests quickly split into two camps. Some believed that passion in a long relationship is bound to fade, and grown-ups simply accept it. Others refused to accept it and kept looking for the one person with whom the fire would never go out.

Perel is a psychotherapist who has seen couples in New York for many years. Her first book came out in 2006, and its very title holds the central question: how do you keep desire alive where everything is safe, familiar and predictable, that is, in captivity?

Her answer is awkward for both camps. Desire often fades not because something in the couple broke, but because so much went right: comfort, trust, care. Love and desire grow from different roots, and what feeds one often smothers the other. Perel does not see this as a verdict. She has a name for the skill of holding security and adventure together: erotic intelligence.

Ahead are twelve ideas drawn from her practice and her observations: about talking, children, fantasies, jealousy and how to bring eroticism back home. The book speaks about sex openly, but without savouring the details. And if you are opening it because home has become warm but quiet, that is already an honest step.

One person instead of a whole village

Marriage was once, above all, an economic arrangement. Meaning, support and the feeling of belonging to something bigger came from family, neighbours, community and faith. Perel notes that today we expect all of this from one person. Our partner has to replace a whole village: be our best friend, our rock, our confidant, and a passionate lover too. And the smaller we feel in a vast world, the more we need to shine in our partner's eyes.

We have more freedom, but the couple also carries a heavier load. We want two opposite things from the same relationship. On one side, safety and predictability. On the other, novelty, risk and the unknown. Perel calls us walking contradictions: we seek stability, yet we thrive on variety. Love, she says, rests on two pillars: the ability to surrender to another and the ability to stand on your own. The need to be together lives right next to the need to be separate.

The mistake is to choose one and give up the other. Some decide passion belongs to the young and give up. Others leave as soon as comfort starts to crowd out excitement. Perel offers a third way: accept that both needs are legitimate, and learn to hold them together instead of waiting for one to win on its own.

Read in Livria

About the author

Esther Perel is a Belgian-born psychotherapist who has worked with couples in New York for many years. She is the author of books on desire and fidelity, and the host of podcasts about love and about relationships at work.

All books by this author: Esther Perel

Terms from the book

  • Freud
  • Leo
  • James
  • Philip
  • Ray
  • Marcus
  • Synapse
  • Ben
  • hedonism
  • erotic intelligence: Perel's idea, not a scientific term: a couple's ability to keep desire alive by holding security and adventure together.
  • Adele: A woman from one of the book's stories: a lawyer and mother who felt drawn to her husband again after seeing him among his colleagues.
  • Alan: Adele's husband in a story from the book.
  • Proust: Marcel Proust, a French writer of the early twentieth century, author of the novel In Search of Lost Time.
  • Jed: A man from one of the book's stories: a calm architect who, in bed, is drawn to games of power.
  • Coral: Jed's girlfriend in a story from the book, a documentary filmmaker.
  • Protestant work ethic: An idea linked to Protestant culture: hard work is the highest virtue and the way to any result.
  • puritanism: A strict, austere attitude to life in which pleasure is seen as suspect or sinful. The name comes from the English Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
  • Jacqueline: A woman from one of the book's stories, Philip's wife.
  • Dylan: A man from one of the book's stories whose father taught him that feelings are weakness.
  • Stella: James's wife in a story from the book: they have been together for more than thirty years.
  • Carla: Leo's wife in a story from the book, who brought back her husband's desire through play.
  • Madonna-whore complex: An idea going back to Freud: being unable to join respect and sexual desire in one person. A descriptive image, not a diagnosis.
  • Joni: A woman from one of the book's stories, embarrassed by her own fantasies about cowboys.
  • Doug: A man from one of the book's stories who lived a double life for five years.
  • Naomi: Doug's colleague, with whom he had an affair, in a story from the book.
  • Zoe: Doug's wife in a story from the book.
  • Monogamy: A relationship in which a person has one sexual partner.

All terms

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