A couple’s emotional life together and their physical life together each have their ebbs and flows, their ups and downs, but these don’t always correspond. There is a complex relationship between love and desire, and it is not a cause-and-effect, linear arrangement. Noting that sex is not a function of emotional intimacy but a separate state of being, Perel counters a misconception central to our cultural narrative: So begins the paradox of intimacy and desire: As a couple grows emotionally intimate through this repetition, which furnishes the building blocks of trust and security, desire begins to diminish. We choose each other again and again, and so create a community of two. The seeds of intimacy are time and repetition. It waits for the high to subside so it can patiently insert itself into the relationship. If love is an act of imagination, then intimacy is an act of fruition. Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss The trouble for many couples, Perel points out, is in sustaining the desire fueled by the initial fantasy - the fantasy of what Mary Oliver so poetically called the “invisible and powerful and uncontrollable and beautiful and possibly even unsuitable” - while settling into the comfortable intimacy of a real relationship. But as the encounter evolves from the fantasy of an idealized romance to the reality of an actual relationship, the projection begins to dim. In this imaginative act, we project ourselves into a fantasy of who we can be to and with the other.

Through love we imagine a new way of being. Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.īeginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Drawing on decades of her own work with couples and a vast body of psychological literature, Perel offers an illuminating and consolatory perspective on intimate relationships and our conflicting needs for security and freedom, warmth and wildness.

How to live with those paradoxes, rather than succumbing to the self-defeating urge to treat them as problems to be solved, is what Belgian psychotherapist and writer Esther Perel explores in Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence ( public library).

One chief reason we flounder in this supreme human aspiration is our unwillingness to accept the paradoxes of love - paradoxes like the necessity of frustration in romantic satisfaction and the seemingly irreconcilable notion that while love longs for closeness, desire thrives on distance. “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his 1965 classic on mastering the art of loving.

Mating in captivity