MATING IN CAPTIVITY by Esther Perel is a really incredible book about unlocking erotic intelligence. Esther Perel is the leading therapist for couples and has incredible books and podcast. I have included some of my favorite quotations from the book below:
This book speaks about eroticism and the poetics of sex, the nature of erotic desire and its attendant dilemmas. When you love someone, how does it feel? And when you desire someone, how is it different? Why is the forbidden so erotic? We all share a fundamental need for security, but we have an equally strong need for adventure and excitement. Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did. We expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling.
It’s hard to generate excitement, anticipation, and lust with the same person you look to for comfort and stability, but it’s not impossible. I invite you to think about ways you might introduce risk to safety, mystery to the familiar, and novelty to the enduring.
Love flourishes in an atmosphere of closeness, mutuality, and equality.
For many, emotional intimacy inhibits erotic expression.
The caring, protective elements that foster love often block the unself-consciousness that fuels erotic pleasure. In the course of establishing security, many couples confuse love with merging. Eroticism requires separateness. In other words, eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to commune with the one we love, we must be able to tolerate this void and its pall of uncertainties.
Sexuality and emotional intimacy are two separate languages.
Love seeks closeness, but desire needs distance. Erotic intelligence is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life.
I see people who are such good friends that they cannot sustain being lovers. I see others who believe that intimacy means knowing everything about each other.
In my therapy practice, my clients don’t just miss sex, the act; they miss the feeling of connection, playfulness, and renewal that sex allows them.
Excitement is interwoven with uncertainty, and with our willingness to embrace the unknown rather than to shield ourselves from it. But this very tension leaves us feeling vulnerable.
By flinging the doors open on erotic life and domesticity, I invite you to put the X back in sex.
Many couples enjoy the comfort, but complain that they feel constrained. They create predictability, all in an effort to feel more secure.
In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do.
There are many circumstances that can lead people to experience love and intimacy as constricting. It’s the weightiness of involvement that these people find overbearing.
We appreciate being left alone to meander leisurely in our own mind because this reestablishes a psychological distance, a delineation of the boundaries between me and you.
It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned their sense of autonomy.
“Many men and women I see in my practice find it particularly difficult to introduce this kind of emotional space into their loving relationships.”
Sexual desire does not obey the laws that maintain peace and contentment between partners.
Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbered by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.
When we put our hopes on one person, our dependence soars. So do our frustrations and disappointments. No one can bring us to the boiling point as quickly as our partner (except maybe our parents, the original locus of dependent rage).
In session: “it’s landed you a steady diet of sex that’s satisfactory without being really satisfying”.
The act of choosing, the freedom involved in choosing, that keeps a relationship alive.
Safe Sex or No Sex (European slogan)
It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before…to test your limits…to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
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