Mating in captivity

Susie Bright of Susie Bright's Journal just interviewed sex and relationships counselor , and recent author, Esther Perel in podcast ($$$).

Perel is the author of Mating in Captivity: : Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic..

She is not your average advice-monger-- she would be glad to shred every piece of conventional marriage manual wisdom.

Esther argues that erotic passion-- to a certain but critical degree-- is built upon distance and ambiguity. In her view, transparency is for politicians, not for lovers.

"It's often assumed," Esther writes, "that intimacy and trust must exist before sex can be enjoyed, but for many women and men, intimacy-- more precisely, the familiarity inherent in intimacy-- actually sabotages sexual desire. When the loved one becomes a source of security and stability, he/she can become desexualized.

"The dilemma is that erotic passion can leave many people feeling vulnerable and less secure. In this sense there is no 'safe sex.' Maybe the real paradox is that this fundamental insecurity is a precondition for maintaining interest and desire. As Stephen Mitchell, a New York psychoanalyst, used to say, 'It is not that romance fades over time. It becomes riskier.'"

Read her blog-entry here.

At one point Bright says

If I could have had Esther all to myself... ha!... I would love to ask her what she thinks of "bed death" among the kinky and adventurous. It's not just something Ozzie and Harriet face. Familiarity breeds contempt even among the polyamorous, the bohemian, the tightrope walkers.

I was organizing my workspace 9which doubles as the dining room table) in preparation for the holidays today, sorting my papers, paying bills, and carrying all my books and software boxes and whatnot out to my office. All but one book went: Perel's.

And since I happen to have the book right next to me, I think I can answer Bright's question about bed-death, even for kinksters.

First of all let me define a term Perel uses a bit differently. When we think of the word "intimacy" we usually think about being sexy/snuggly face-to-face and body-to-body, like puppy love only maybe a little more grown up. Perel means it in the more formal sense of never shutting the bathroom door, feeling guilty if you fail to disclose any thought, and/or feeling hurt when your partner fails to similarly share all of his or hers. She says we tend to blend the two, that we consider the second kind a logical, maybe even a *better* continuation of the first. She disagrees, pointing out that the unity you get from being that close robs all the mystery and spontaneity that attract us to each other in the first place.

As to "bed death" Perel suggests we're mistaken if we imagine we *lose* sexual interest in sex once we're in a relationship. She says instead it's that we *pile on* so many other interests. Emotional interests. Economic ones. Social. Parental. Domestic. Medical. As we become more invested in our one-partner-must-meet-all-needs relationship the less willing we become to rock the boat.

Confess a crush on someone else? Yikes, no way. Admit you want to try anal sex? Or stop having it so often? Confess to a foot fetish as a Dan Savage correspondent's partner did? That was the end of her relationship, what about yours? Or admit you once had a threeway, Cary Tennis correspondent did? So much for those marriage plans! Better to just keep quiet...

Except...

Little known neurological factoid (caveat: one that I haven't personally verified in primary sources): Human vision depends on motion. Evidently if our eyes are held perfectly still in front of an unchanging scene, no matter how complex or vivid, it eventually dissolves into undifferentiated gray. Perel hints that something similar happens in relationships when we become so invested we're afraid to change anything in our sexual "fields of vision." (And no, that's not an excuse to go wandering off with others. For one thing that trick works only until you begin to get invested with the next person. Instead she spends much of the book pointing out ways to continually see our same partners with new eyes.)

I'd like to mention two other problems Perel mentions that can lead to bed death: The first involves hardcore intimacy she mentions early in her book. When you're constantly close to each other there's always tomorrow. Which, given the immediacies of routine life, never comes. A different problem arises from our American results-oriented lifestyle -- not necessarily Puritan but certainly influenced by the Protestant work ethic. Combined with her form of intimacy sex becomes like masturbation -- routine, efficient, gotta-work-tomorrow, we'll-do-something-special-next-weekend. Only, as with tomorrow, the weekend never comes.

Which brings me to how I think Perel would answer Bright's question. The kinky are just as susceptible as the vanilla given the relationships she warns us we construct for ourselves -- of intimacy, of investment, and of efficiency.

In other words, if I were to have only one book on my desk... oh, wait! I've got only one book on my desk. Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity. It's definitely worth a read.

[I'd better mention that Perel's publisher mailed me a review copy of the book months ago but neither obliged me to review it nor paid me to. And if you buy the book via the link I posted to Amazon, Susie Bright will get credited for it since I copied her link. Bottom line, though, if I hadn't thought it was a kick-ass relationship book -- one with the kind of "figleaf twists" I wish I had the background and experience to write -- I'd have taken it out to storage this morning with with all the other books I'll probably never review. --fl]