A review by mburnamfink
Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic by Esther Perel

4.0

Pat Benatar - Love is a Battlefield

Perel is a practicing family therapist, and this book is a tour through the wreckage of the American marriage. European, Jewist, sex-positive, and (most exotically) a psychodynamic theorist, she brings an outsider perspective to the American Protestant marriage to help unhappy couples have better sex.

Perel has a few major points which she touches on repeatedly. The first is that comfort and desire are competing psychological drives. Sustaining a relationship and a household over the long-term requires comfort; you would no more willfully stay in a constantly uncomfortable relationship than you would sleep in a painful bed. Yet too comfort comfort smothers desire, and a sexless marriage isn't going to work over the longer term.

Erotic desire is rooted in the depths of the individual psyche, and if it's defined by anything it is a a sense of paradox compared to the ordinary life. The ultra-competent decision-making business woman wants to be taken and ravished, the man afraid of expressing needs wants to be adored, someone afraid of intimacy prefers the clear rules of BDSM. In short, while erotic desires are full of strange creatures, they are not dragons to be slain but unique wonders to be cherished.

The last point is that sustained eroticism requires play, not work. Americans are great at work, but putting sex on your todo list means it becomes just another undone chore. Whatever brought the couple together in the first place was sustained, erotic play, and you have to find that again.

Perel takes a rather accommodating view of infidelity, which I see is to be blame for a lot of the one star reviews. Americans do hate a cheater. I'm not pro-infidelity, but she makes a good point that while an affair is a breach in a relationship, a divorce is scorched earth and it might be worth trying to repair the marriage.

Mating in Captivity is interesting, very readable, and while Perel's clients are tilted towards New York 1%s, the concepts are applicable in a lot of American relationships. The pyschodynamic theories are a strength and a flaw; they're not exactly scientific, but people are complex and reading about fantasies and suppressed urges is a lot more interesting than yet more neural scientism about oxytocin.