According to most people and sources, modern couples are having less sex even though they have more sexual freedom than any generation that’s come before them. Now that it’s socially acceptable to have sex outside of marriage and we can do so without the threat of pregnancy, apparently, we’re not interested. It could be that we’re busy, stressed, tired, or overwhelmed by parenthood.
Or, it could be that modern domesticity and sexuality are an either/or situation—can we actually have both? Modern domesticity is associated with things like security, intimacy, and egalitarianism, while desire is concerned with things like play, aggression, jealousy, and risk. Even though domesticity and desire seem to be made up of contradictory ingredients, the author of Mating in Captivity, experienced couples therapist Esther Perel, believes it's possible to retain desire in a committed relationship.
First, let’s look at what shapes our desire. While desire is made up of the same general ingredients for everyone, everyone’s individual desire is different, as it’s influenced by our upbringing and personalities.
From the moment we’re born, we start learning about relationships from our families. We learn how to show affection, express ourselves, and interact with others, and we carry what we’ve learned into adulthood.
The first major element we carry forward is our relationship with dependence and independence. We depend on our parents and we do everything we can to stay close to them, but we also need our independence. We’ll experience this same tension with our partners later in life, and we’ll react to it the same way we learned in our childhoods.
The second major element is our views about sexuality. If our parents were open about sex, we’ll likely also be open. If our families thought sex was shameful, we’ll pick up this connotation too.
The last major element is how our gender tempers our expression of our sexuality. We’re exposed to gender stereotypes and expectations from the moment we’re born. When girls grow up into women, they sometimes have trouble owning their sexuality and base it on whether or not others desire them. When boys grow up into men, their desire debatably falls into two categories—those who want their partner to initiate to confirm their own desirability, and those who are uncomfortable with their partner initiating because it makes them feel passive, and therefore unmanly.
A fantasy is no more or no less than a mental exercise in creating desire. In spite of the negative reputation fantasies once had with the church and psychology, science now acknowledges that fantasies are a healthy part of adult sexuality. They help us figure out what we want—but not in the way you think.
Unlike daydreams or other fantasies, sexual fantasies are metaphorical rather than literal. If you’re daydreaming about cake, you probably do want cake. If you fantasize about being a high-priced prostitute, you may not literally want to be a high-priced prostitute. Instead, what this fantasy might reveal about you is that you want to be desired. If people are willing to pay a lot of money to sleep with you, you know you’re wanted and valued.
You can share your fantasies or you can keep them to yourself. Either way, remembering that fantasies are a non-literal expression of self can help you learn about your sexuality without shame.
Next, let’s consider desire for our partners specifically. It’s normal for desire to fade, or wax and wane, in a committed relationship. Balancing love and eroticism isn’t something we can do perfectly all the time, and a committed relationship gives us time to practice and play.
When we’ve decided it’s time to bring back desire, there are two ways to approach this: quantitatively and qualitatively. American culture tends to be big on the quantitative approach, which includes measuring the frequency and duration of sex, and medical intervention such as Viagra if necessary. However, the can-do attitude and emphasis on hard work that works well in other arenas don’t necessarily lend themselves to the subjectiveness of desire.
Mating in Captivity defines eroticism, or desire, as sex with imagination, and looks at the qualitative aspects of desire rather than stats. Imagination is made up of intangibles such as creativity, playfulness, and curiosity. In a sexual context, these intangibles tangle with longing and transform. The ingredients for desire become intangibles such as mystery, uncertainty, and aggression.
There are two types of tensions that make it hard to maintain desire in committed relationships: inherent tensions between the values of domesticity and desire, and external tensions between a couple and the rest of the world.
The values of long term relationships—commitment, intimacy, and egalitarianism—are at odds with some of the fundamental ingredients for desire—risk, distance, and power imbalances. The balance often lies in looking at your partner in a new context.
The author discusses three specific sets of conflicting values:
Commitment, and the security it brings, is a wonderful thing in a long-term relationship. You don’t have to worry about if your partner loves you or if your relationship might crash and burn at any moment. However, security has a deadening effect on desire. Fear of losing your partner was part of what made the relationship exciting.
To balance commitment and desire, change your perception of your partner. They might be committed to you, but they’re their own person, and you don’t own them. Look at them in a different context to your partnership. For example, the next time you’re at an event with your partner, imagine how everyone else in the room sees them—as someone unknown to be curious about—and try to see them that way too.
Knowing someone well is comfortable, and intimacy is a fundamental human need. However, desire requires distance because when two people are so fused they’re one, there’s no mystery, and no person separate from yourself for you to fall in love with. Many people would be unwilling to give up the closeness of a stable, long-term relationship for the distance required by desire.
To balance intimacy and desire, create either psychological or physical distance. Like balancing commitment and desire, you can try to change your perception of your partner. You might think you know everything about them, but it’s impossible to fully understand another individual, and simply acknowledging this can increase your psychological distance and increase desire. More literally, you can spend less time in close proximity to your partner, whether that’s leaving them alone when you’re home together, or one of you moving out.
Modern committed relationships value egalitarianism, partnership, and democracy, but desire fundamentally thrives on the conflicting intangibles of risk, aggression, and power imbalances. However, unlike commitment and intimacy, you don’t have to balance egalitarianism with desire—in the compartmentalized space of the bedroom, as long as things are consensual, one partner can take control of the other to increase desire. Egalitarianism may feel like a value inherent to love, but it’s actually more cultural. Latin Americans and Europeans don’t insist on egalitarianism in the bedroom the same way that Americans do.
The author recommends abandoning egalitarian only in the consensual, compartmentalized, erotic space. Maintain egalitarianism in other aspects of the relationship.
Mating in Captivity discusses four forces outside a relationship that can have a detrimental effect on desire: defaulting to talk as the main language of intimacy, mixed cultural messages, parenthood, and infidelity.
In modern times, talking has become the default language for intimacy. This is due to the female influence on modern relationships. As women became more economically independent, they wanted more from their relationships than being financially provided for—they wanted emotional connection too. And because women are socialized to be good at verbal communication, they build (and expect men to build) intimacy by talking.
Men, however, have been socialized to take a more physical approach when expressing themselves. They’re often more comfortable developing intimacy through non-verbal communication, for example, through touch or sex.
If you communicate verbally and your partner non-verbally, or vice versa, first, acknowledge that there’s more than one way to create intimacy. Then, try learning to speak each other’s languages in a non-sexual context first.
American culture sends out mixed messages about sex. The media encourages us to have it however and whenever we want, especially outside of relationships. Puritan legacy suggests that it’s only acceptable within heterosexual marriage, and it’s only for making babies—if you’re having fun, you’re doing it wrong and it’s shameful.
To navigate all these mixed messages, remember that sex can be whatever you and your partner want it to be. Shame is a cultural construct, not an inherent quality of sex. Being open and validating each other can help reduce shame.
Having a baby changes everything about a couples’ life. Time, imagination, and energy that they could previously spend on each other must now be shared with a child. Additionally, there are cultural messages about parenthood that affect desire, such as that mothers are sacred and selfless, and it’s inappropriate to lust after something so pure. For example, after Leo’s wife Carla gave birth, he could no longer see her as a lover or wife, only as a mother. He thought it was weird to suck the same breasts his children did.
Rekindling desire as parents involves making time to be together, letting go of the responsibility and selflessness you direct at your children, and not letting cultural messages constrain you. For example, Carla charged Leo $100 for a blow job. That’s not something a mother would typically do, so it helped him de-role her.
Every relationship has a “third,” a term the author uses to describe the potential for infidelity. The third can be an actual person, a fantasy, or an aspect of the life you would have had if you hadn’t chosen to be with your partner. There is a third in every relationship, because fidelity wouldn’t mean anything if it was the only option.
You and your partner can approach the third in three ways: as a threat to be ignored, a possibility to acknowledge, or an act to do.
Ignoring the third doesn’t usually turn out well—it can result in stifling boredom that encourages one person to look outside the relationship for excitement. (Affairs tend to be exciting because they’re heavy on the ingredients of desire, such as risk and jealousy.)
Acknowledging the third has a lot of leeway. You and your partner can simply acknowledge that it exists, or you can play with it, for example, by allowing each other to flirt with others but go no further.
Finally, acting on the third means opening up the relationship to nonmonogamy. Fidelity becomes emotional rather than physical. Open relationships can create desire for the original couple as well as the third—when your partner goes after someone else, they’re individual and mysterious, and there’s distance between you and them.
Regardless of how you and your partner choose to handle the third, it’s important to cultivate distance, mystery, and risk in your relationship to maintain desire.
Mating in Captivity defines eroticism, or desire, as sex with imagination. Imaginative sex is a quest for pleasure through play—creative, curious, unselfconscious, goalless play.
Eroticism, sex, and love are all interrelated, but they’re not interchangeable—they’re not even related in a predictable and linear way, and sometimes, they’re contradictory. Eroticism can be present or absent in both love or sex, and sex can be more or less than an extension of an emotional relationship. For example, for some people, a loving, committed relationship makes them feel free to experiment with sex and eroticism. Other people can have sex with someone regardless of whether or not they love or desire them. And finally, you actually don’t even need the act of sex to have an erotic experience; desire is about excitement and pursuing pleasure.
There are some ingredients inherent to desire: mystery, risk, aggression, uncertainty, and fascination with power. These characteristics conflict with many of the values of modern relationships such as security, intimacy, and fidelity. Even though the ingredients of love and desire clash, the author of Mating in Captivity, couples therapist Esther Perel, believes it’s possible to retain desire in a committed relationship.
While everyone’s desire is driven by the same general intangibles, everyone also has their own individual sense of desire, shaped by their childhood, culture, and personality. Part 1 will address how our families and fantasies shape our individual desire.
(Shortform note: The original edition of Mating in Captivity was written in 11 chapters. We've reorganized the chapter order to be more coherent and logical. As a reference, here's a mapping of our chapter numbers to the original book:
Factors such as media, schooling, religion, and where we grow up affect our sexuality, but our family is our first introduction to relationships and the greatest influence on our sexuality. From our families, we learn about our bodies, dependence, independence, our gender, and what emotions to attach to sexuality. We also learn how to love, trust, and experience pleasure (or learn the opposite, depending on the people in our families).
What we experience in childhood we carry forward into our adult relationships, and some of what we learned we may not even be aware of. The body as well as the mind stores memories, both good and bad, and intimate sex is so physical it can draw these out.
Example #1: Steven’s father left his mother. Steven admires and respects his mother and doesn’t want to be anything like his father. He married Rita and six years later finds it hard to have sex with her. Because of his relationship with his mom (love and respect), he learned that emotional security requires caution and selflessness. Caution and selflessness are the opposite of desire-driving emotions such as passion and longing.
Example #2: Dylan’s mother died when he was twelve and when he started to cry at her funeral, his father told him not to be weak. Dylan learned that feelings were shameful, and that he should never show or even feel them. This manifests in his relationships—he picks up strangers at clubs, because there are no feelings in anonymous sex.
Our childhood experiences influence our adult relationships in three primary ways: how we’ve learned to balance dependence and independence, how we view sexuality, and how gender norms affect our sexuality.
As children, we’re constantly dealing with the dichotomy of dependence and independence from our parents. We’ll do anything not to lose the parent-child bond, including a wide range of behaviors such as taking blame and minimizing our needs. However, we also want and need independence. We learn balance based on how our parents react to our attempts to connect with them or test our autonomy, and whether we interpret those reactions as suffocating, intrusive, permissive, or detached.
Dependence and independence are a dichotomy in adulthood too, with our partners. To have sex, we have to be able to enter another’s universe or body. However, we also have to be so aware of ourselves—so selfish—that the other disappears. The ability to temporarily “leave” someone comes from childhood experiences. If we’ve learned that the connection we have with someone doesn’t break the moment we stop monitoring it, we can believe that after we’ve finished focusing on ourselves, the other person will still be there when we come back.
It’s possible to balance dependence and independence emotionally but fail to do so physically. Sex is quite literally two becoming one, and losing the sense of self can be so off-putting that people can’t handle it.
In addition to teaching us about relationships and the balance between dependence and independence, our parents can much more directly shape our sexuality. If our parents treat sex as something dirty or shameful, we associate those feelings with sex too. If they teach us we must be a certain way in a relationship, we hold onto this. Additionally, what hurts us as children can often be what excites as most in our adult sexuality (desire is irrational).
Example #1: Lena grew up in a conservative, devout household that held women to traditional values. Lena became a giver, and she puts the needs of her partner above her own.
Example #2: Melinda’s father was a philanderer, which made her mother miserable. Melinda grew up to be a seductress and for her, desire is related to establishing power over men. Seducing unavailable men is a gender-swapped version of what Melinda’s father did to her mother.
We’re introduced to gender stereotypes early in life, from the colors of our clothes to how we’re taught to socialize. By the time we reach adulthood, it’s possible to make a few generalizations about how each gender approaches sex.
Women commonly make their sexual identity about how their partner feels about and desires them. Women sometimes have trouble owning their sexuality.
Male desire has two extremes (debatably):
When James was a child, his mother relied on him rather than her husband for support, and James always found it hard to balance pleasing his mother and living his own independent life. This childhood relationship influenced his adult relationship with his wife, Stella. Though Stella and James’s mother are very different—Stella dislikes James’s attempts to be responsible for her and doesn’t like to be smothered—James still experiences the same tension between dependence and independence that he experienced with his mother. James feels he can't have independence, which is selfish, without hurting someone. In his relationship with Stella, this translates to him being so concerned about maintaining his erection that Stella feels like he’s not even focusing on her, even though she’s the whole reason he’s trying. James finds sex so stressful he avoids it.
Stella has been in charge of their sex life throughout the whole relationship, which she doesn’t like, but she does because she feels like if she doesn’t take charge, he won’t. When Stella hits menopause and her sex drive decreases, she discovers she’s right—now that she’s not initiating things, they’re not happening.
James is only able to experience anxiety-free sex alone. He’s not being selfish if he’s not with someone. The author suggests he experiment with masturbating next to Stella, which might allow him to be self-centered and realize that it doesn’t hurt her. This might also help differentiate James’s relationship with Stella from the one with his mother, because he never would have masturbated next to his mother.
Stella and James experiment, but they have a more important experience on their own. Stella is upset and James’s impulse is to hold her. James isn’t sure this is what she wants, but he pushes himself to hold her, even when she doesn’t respond right away. For the first time, James didn’t take his cue from Stella, and taking control allowed him to lose control.
We learn about dependence and independence during our childhood, and we carry what we’ve learned into our adult relationships.
As a child, in what areas did you depend on your parents?
In what areas did you want to be independent?
Are these the same areas you depend on/are independent from your partner?
What did you learn about your gender and sexuality from observing your parents?
In addition to childhood experiences, another factor that influences our individual sense of desire is our fantasies. Sexual fantasies are imaginings that create desire and excitement. Historically, Christianity viewed sexual fantasy as a sin, and psychology viewed it as a perversion. Today, though, psychologists consider fantasies as natural, healthy parts of adult sexuality. Eroticism thrives on imagination and creative freedom. Fantasy fits naturally into eroticism, whether the fantasy is unique to the individual or shared by the couple.
When most people think of fantasies, they tend to think of cowboys, kilts, or threesomes. However, fantasies aren’t always scripted, articulate, or wildly different from real life—they’re simply fictions that create desire. Women tend to have more trouble owning their sexual thoughts, so they may think they don’t fantasize even if they do.
Example #1: Lucas spent his adolescence pretending to be straight, going so far as to sleep with a cheerleader because he thought it would be suspicious if he turned her down. Once he grew up, he moved away and came out. He knows that many gay guys fantasize about turning straight men, so he does still pretend to be straight sometimes, so other gay men will desire him.
Example #2: Claudia imagines how her husband Jim might approach her in a way that’s totally different from how he comes onto her normally. Instead of going straight for her breast, he touches her arm first, and then asks if he can touch her breast. Even though it’s perfectly possible that Jim could approach Claudia this way in real life, it’s still a fantasy, because he doesn’t.
Sexual fantasies express truths about ourselves and reveal what we want, but not in the way most people think they do—they’re more symbolic than literal. Regular, non-sexual fantasies have a simple connection between fantasy and reality. If you daydream about buying a new car, you probably want a new car.
But sexual fantasies have a more complicated connection—the whole point of a sexual fantasy is that it’s pretend. It’s probably never going to be real, and there’s a good chance you don’t want it to be. Fantasies tend to be irrational (like eroticism in general) and are often very different from our values and behavior in real life. If most people fantasized about getting flowers from their lover, fantasies probably wouldn’t have such a bad reputation. Instead, people have fantasies that are at odds with their self-image and/or moral compass. Faithful people think about sleeping with the babysitter; feminists are dominated. We feel like there’s something wrong with us for coming up with (and enjoying) these scenarios.
However, fantasies are a way of restraining the potentially dangerous feelings inherent in eroticism (aggression, jealousy, and so on) to a safe place. Fantasy takes a conflict (for example, fear of our own aggression) and gives us a solution. While we wouldn’t apply the fantasy solution in real life, working through conflict in our heads can have a healing quality and help us manage difficult emotions in real life.
People often keep quiet about their fantasies. Chapter 3 will discuss how talking is the new intimacy, but many people make a distinction between talking about what they do and talking about what they’re thinking. Reluctance to share fantasies can be because of embarrassment, shame, or fear of judgement. Because so few people talk about their fantasies, there’s no benchmark for what’s normal. People don’t know if everyone else is thinking the same things they are.
Sharing fantasies can be a turn on, but it can also make them less powerful as aphrodisiacs, or at worst result in devastating judgement. The author doesn’t think it’s necessary to share our fantasies if we don’t want to.
If you do want to share, you need to be sensitive and tactful. Certain fantasies, especially those that involve violence or power imbalances, might frighten or offend your partner. Even if the fantasy isn’t that intimate, sharing it can be an intimate experience.
You also need a healthy sense of separateness to enter someone else’s fantasy. You might not find their fantasy sexy or you might not like it, but however you feel about it, your reaction will have an impact on your partner. Eroticism doesn’t thrive in a critical and judgmental environment.
There are many common fantasies and we’ll talk about two below: unemotional sex and aggressive sex.
Fantasies sometimes involve stock characters with no emotional complexity. Consider heterosexual pornography, which is mostly created by and for men. Pornographic fantasies are usually about unemotional sex. This can be a way of separating real relationships from aggressive urges that might be a detriment to them. Fantasy unemotional sex can also be a barrier against male insecurity. Female characters are invulnerable and always responsive and wanting sex. Men in porn are never inadequate, because they always fully satisfy the woman.
It’s not uncommon for women to fantasize about sexual aggression. Sexually aggressive women don’t fit into cultural norms, so much so that sometimes women can only express their aggression in their imaginations—and even then, sometimes only vicariously. An invented man in a fantasy can be a woman’s stand-in for her own aggression if she’s not comfortable imagining herself being aggressive. There’s obviously some tension here—real sexual abuse happens, and it’s horrible. But in fantasies including sexual aggression, the assault isn’t real, and it's usually nonviolent.
In real life, Joni’s with Ray. She knows she’s not getting what she wants from Ray, but she doesn’t know exactly what she does want. In her latest fantasy, her husband (who isn’t Ray) dresses her for dinner with a group of cowboys. After eating, her husband asks her to undress, and she does, and then he challenges the cowboys to bring her to sexual ecstasy. Joni worries this means that she’s a masochist because she follows her husband’s orders and lets the cowboys do whatever they want. That’s a literal interpretation though, and sexual fantasies are more symbolic. In Joni’s fantasy, she’s actually the one who has control, as she’s the one scripting the scene. The fantasy is more about attention and vulnerability than pain.
Joni is a recovering alcoholic and has trouble with dependency. In real life, she denies a need for support and doesn’t ask for help, even though privately, she’d really like both. Her cowboy fantasy gives her both—she’s at the mercy of others but she’s not actually powerless. Importantly, the qualities she doesn’t like about herself are why she’s liked in her fantasy. In her fantasy, she’s passive. The cowboys’ “power” over her is in fact caring about her. The cowboys don’t need any care themselves, so Joni doesn’t have to worry about the social pressure to be a caretaker herself.
Once Joni realized what her fantasies were actually about, her relationship with Ray changed. Ray had always thought all women wanted a gentle approach and was confused whenever he asked what Joni wanted and she was annoyed by the question. Joni started asking for things and invited him to be more assertive. Joni found that owning her desire to be ~passive was a form of agency. This worked for Ray too—he didn’t have to guess anymore or stress about whether he was doing things right. Joni didn’t ever tell Ray the details of her fantasies, but figuring out what they meant allowed her to talk to Ray about what she wanted.
In Part 1, we looked at the factors that contribute to our individual sense of desire. In Part 2, we’ll look at the factors that influence our desire for our partners.
There are at least two ways to approach a bad, boring, or non-existent erotic life: quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative approach has merit in certain situations, but because eroticism is abstract, looking at it qualitatively will nearly always be more revealing.
Many people approach desire problems using the same methods they would to approach any problem in their life: break the problem into small steps, create a concrete plan, and work hard. However, this approach reduces sex to physical achievement—successful sex becomes a matter of whether or not a man has an erection. This definition of success not only bypasses desire, it places the importance on the man’s genitals rather than the man himself, and it focuses on the person with the penis rather than whomever they’re with.
Additionally, mainstream solutions for bad sex are usually aimed at performance, reliability, and regularity. However, this focus can actually make a struggling sex life worse. Numbers and averages are just one more thing to worry about in addition to waning desire. And anything resembling routine can diminish desire, because the ingredients for desire are mystery and the unknown.
This approach recognizes that eroticism is subjective, contradictory, illogical, and sometimes inarticulate. Eroticism doesn’t respond well to time management, explicit communication, or quantification. Eroticism is about play, and you can’t win play or attach goals to it—the whole point is to have fun.
That said, however, there are times when the quantitative approach can be useful. If you have physical limitations, communication problems, lack knowledge, or have no free time, a practical solution such as consulting a doctor, working on your communication, informing yourself, or better managing your time may be necessary.
There are several forces that make it difficult to maintain desire within domesticity. Three of the forces are inherent tensions between desire and the modern values of long-term relationships: commitment vs. desire, intimacy vs. desire, and egalitarianism vs. desire. We’ll address the first tension in this chapter and the next two in subsequent chapters.
Are commitment and desire mutually exclusive? Commitment is based in predictability, certainty, and security, while desire thrives on mystery, uncertainty, and risk. Commitment and desire seem to be polar opposites, and according to most people, passion fades over time in long-term relationships. Even biochemistry agrees—the romance hormones (PEA, dopamine, and norepinephrine) don’t last more than a few years, while oxytocin, the hormone released by cuddling, lasts far longer.
Most people think you have to choose between commitment and desire, and different types of people choose one or the other:
Many couples therapists think that it’s normal for desire to fade and that lust is immature or based in fear of commitment. However, the author believes you can have both commitment and desire in the same relationship, they just may not always take place at the same time.
When you first meet someone, you feel excited, intoxicated, high—and scared. As you become more attached to them, you start to fear losing them, so you try to make your relationship more secure. For example, you turn a previously spontaneous activity into a habit. However, the scared feeling was what made you excited, and as you banish it, the excitement is banished too.
Fear of loss isn’t only fear of losing love. Historically, marriage and passion were separate. People used to find love outside of the relationship, and they used to find security, order, meaning, community, and belonging in traditional institutions like religion and extended family. In modern times, however, individualism is a core value of American society, and while it comes with freedom, it also comes with loneliness. These days, we expect our partners to not only love us and sleep with us, but also to provide everything traditional structures used to, including saving us from existential vulnerability. If the relationship were to end, we’ve lost not only love, but also a large part of our world.
As a result, many people are least experimental and adventurous with their partners because we don’t want to lose them. People might be willing to do anything outside their relationships, but at home, they’re almost puritanical. Anything “naughty” can feel risky or inappropriate for a committed relationship.
Having established just how much some of us rely on our partners, you might be thinking desire’s doomed, because we can’t give up even a little of that critical security. However, rekindling desire can be more about perception. You acknowledge that the other person is the other person—a separate individual from you. It’s scary to do this, because it makes your connection with them feel weaker. However, they have always been and always will be a separate person from you, so there’s not a lot of literal risk. Fear is a driver of desire, but so are curiosity and mystery—if you can find a way to look at your partner in a new light, in which they’re no longer a person you know, there’s space for desire.
For example, Adele and Allan have been married for seven years. Adele wants to keep the security they have—she never has to worry about whether or not Allan likes her, or if he’s sleeping around while he’s away on business trips. However, she also wants a relationship that includes desire. She started to figure out how to have both when, one day, she looked at Allan as a man instead of as her husband. She managed to forget everything she knew about him (annoying, messy, and so on) and saw him from the point of view of someone else. And she thought he was as attractive as she had when they’d first met.
Though we’re reluctant to give up security, it’s not something we actually have a lot of control over, no matter how established the relationship. Even if you’re willing to trade every whiff of eroticism for security, it’s impossible to guarantee. Relationships can fall prey to rejection, conflict, and separation, and even if you manage to bypass all of that, there’s always death.
Ironically, when you strive to create certainty, you also create boredom—and boredom can create instability. A boring sex life is more of a reason to leave a relationship than to stay in one.
The myth of security also relies on the idea that we know our partners completely, which we don’t. It’s impossible to know another person completely; the closest we can get is to simplify them so they fit into a mold we understand. This involves ignoring certain parts of them. This also involves ignoring certain parts of yourself, to make yourself into the sort of person who can believe your partner fits a mold. So while you might choose to neutralize your partner’s complexity in your mind, it still exists. And either of you can break out of your molds at any time.
For example, Rose and Charles have been married for almost four decades and have been confining themselves into molds almost the whole time. Charles has always wanted more from his sex life, but both he and Rose expected him to put that aside. For Rose’s part, she squelched her vulnerability. However, when Charles experienced several major life events—his mother and a friend died, and he had a health scare—he wanted to stop suppressing himself. Charles broke out of his mold, prompting Rose to break out as well, and the relationship’s security evaporated. As a result, their desire for each other came back and they began making love again after years of celibacy with each other.
Like security, intimacy is another modern-relationship-intangible that conflicts with desire. Intimacy is based in familiarity, closeness, compassion, and comfort, potentially polar opposites of the fundamental ingredients of desire: novelty, distance, and selfishness.
Establishing intimacy necessitates eliminating otherness and shrinking the distance between two people. Intimacy makes you care about the well-being of the other person and makes you afraid to hurt them. However, sexual excitement requires a lack of worry, and pleasure needs to be a little selfish. When you care about another person, it can be hard to focus on your own needs.
However, like commitment vs. desire, the author believes it’s possible to create desire in a relationship that’s also intimate. Intimacy isn’t consistent, and even in the strongest long-term relationships, its strength differs at different times.
When you first meet someone, you don’t know them. That’s why budding relationships are so intense, both physically and emotionally. You don’t know what kind of connection you have yet, so you’re working with imagination and potential—ingredients for desire. You idealize the other person and focus on their positive qualities. They do the same to you, and you feel validated and transcendent. Additionally, because you don’t know each other, there are strong boundaries between the two of you. You each have a distinct sense of self that’s unmixed with the other person’s.
As you get to know each better, either by talking to each other or observing each other, you start to establish routine. Maybe you move in together, which brings you closer both physically and emotionally. You become familiar to each other. As the distance between you closes, the space where desire used to flourish shrinks.
Intimacy is a fundamental human need and you need to get it from somewhere, but historically, that place wasn’t always your lover. Like looking for security in our partners, looking for intimacy with them is also a relatively new idea. Two or three generations ago, people married for practical reasons and the central emotion was respect—if they fell in love later, it was a by-product or a bonus. People found intimacy in relationships outside of their marriage, often same-sex ones.
As social structures changed and work and family separated, people spent more time apart. They were lonely and looked for intimacy in romantic relationships. Notably, in social structures where people are close to other people (living with your extended family, living with a bunch of roommates), they have built-in closeness, and they’re less inclined to look for more intimacy in their romantic relationships.
When you and your partner get so close that you’re now a fusion rather than two separate people, you no longer have anyone to connect with. You have to reintroduce distance if you want to reintroduce desire. This can be psychological distance, for example, asking your partner to ignore you rather than immediately greet you when you get home from work. Or it can be literal—one of you leaves for a while. Either way, it can be helpful to think of the distance-creation as sexual play rather than a rejection. It can also help to remember that the closeness you and partner have established gives you a strong foundation to return to.
Everyone has different requirements for closeness, often based on the dynamics of our childhood. As children, we had to balance our connection with our parents or caregivers with growing up and becoming our own person. However you balanced these tensions as a child will follow you into your adult relationships. For example, some people seek closeness because it helps them deal with the fear of being alone or abandoned. For others, closeness is overwhelming or claustrophobic because their personal sense of self is being swallowed up by coupleness and merging. Too much closeness feels like being engulfed.
You’ll likely feel most overwhelmed right after sex. People want to lose themselves in sex and the oneness that you feel while you’re doing it can make you feel engulfed. You probably won’t notice this consciously; instead, you’ll feel the urge to leave and go do something else, or you’ll think about random things like sandwiches or chores. This is you trying to separate yourself from the other person.
John and Beatrice spent their first six months together enthralled by desire, but as soon as they moved in together, they stopped having sex.
For John, intimacy can feel constricting. He grew up with an alcoholic, abusive father and he acted as his mom’s emotional caretaker. As a child, he learned that love was about responsibility and duty, and he doesn’t know any other way to do it. The closer he gets to a woman emotionally, the more trouble he has having an erection. This has happened to John in all his long-term relationships and he always thought it meant he’d fallen out of love with that woman, but it’s actually the opposite. He cares for her so much he feels responsible for her well-being.
Beatrice has tried very hard to get closer to John. She changed her interests to match his and no longer sees her friends. This heightens John’s feelings of responsibility—as Beatrice gives up the things that separate her from him, she gives up her own personal support system. It’s hard to desire someone who isn’t their own individual person anymore.
Beatrice moved out and worked at reestablishing her autonomy. It worked—Beatrice realized she didn’t have to give herself up to be loved, and John realized she didn’t need him; she could support herself. The space they created made room for desire.
Like security and intimacy, there are inherent conflicts between egalitarianism and desire. Egalitarianism is based in fairness, respect, and compromise, while desire fundamentally thrives on obsession, aggression, objectification, and power plays. However, unlike security and intimacy, egalitarianism in the bedroom is primarily cultural. Also unlike security and desire, or intimacy and desire, egalitarianism and desire don’t have to be a balancing act. As long as everything is consensual, you can dispense with egalitarianism in the bedroom in the pursuit of desire.
There are plenty of good reasons to try to neutralize power imbalances—crimes based in sex trafficking, violence, and child pornography being some of the most compelling examples. There was also the sexist social culture that the women’s movement took a crack at equalizing. Some of their achievements include:
Political equality is important in sex and the author agrees that all of the above is important. Where she suggests we reflect is the poetics of equality in sex.
It’s impossible to completely neutralize power in a relationship. Power dynamics are most obvious when they’re outright, like bullying or aggression, but there’s power in weakness too, such as withholding and deference. Love and hate exist together and there’s no getting around that. This is why we get angrier at our partners or parents in a way we don’t with anyone else.
The closest we can get to total equality is to clamp down on any feelings that create imbalance—love, hate, aggression, longing, and so on—which leaves us only with boredom.
If an erotic relationship isn’t equal, most people see that as a problem. This is because egalitarianism is such a fundamental value in American society that its absence in any context feels uncomfortable. For example, many people think that domination and submissions are degrading, undignified, and antifeminist, and have no place in a healthy relationship, particularly a marriage. A woman submitting is too politically incorrect, and if women submit in their sex lives, will this spill over into regular life (business, politics, and so on), undoing everything early feminists fought so hard for?
However, eroticism is a separate, compartmentalized space from the rest of our lives, separate even from our emotional relationships. Eroticism is about getting away from who you normally are, being free, and surrendering. Forbidden and taboo things come with an inherent rush, and a woman who wants to submit can in fact be expressing her freedom. It wouldn’t be play if it controlled her.
For example, consider Jed. In regular life, he’s a shy architect who puts others first. Sexually, he’s into sadomasochism, because it gives him the opportunity to be aggressive and demanding without any risk of actually hurting someone.
Our ideas about what’s acceptable in the bedroom are strongly influenced by our culture. The American cultural values—democracy, compromise, tolerance—that are so important in regular life, when translated to the erotic life, tend to make for boredom. Latin Americans and Europeans have different cultural values, and these spill into love and sex just as the Americans’ ones do. But those values, when transferred to the new context, tend to result in complementariness, seduction, and sensuality.
For example, consider the dynamic between Elizabeth and Vito. Elizabeth lives in New York and is a responsible, feminist, take-charge woman who’s a school psychologist. Vito grew up in southern Italy, where there’s a culture of manliness. When they met, Elizabeth discovered that she likes sexual submission. She’s responsible for 400 children and is in charge of most things in the home, so she prefers not to be the leader in the erotic setting, because she already does much of this in the rest of her life. She needs a place to let go and be free. She wants to be ordered around and manhandled. She would find this totally unacceptable in her emotional relationship or in a professional context, but that unacceptableness is what’s exciting erotically.
Sadomasochism and domination and submission used to be unconventional, but these days, they’re a more common practice. The author suspects the practitioners are less into violence than they are into playing with power. In fact, because kinky sex often involves a pre-agreed upon contract, the boundaries are clear and everyone involved has a lot of control over what will happen. You’re only giving up power if you want to.
Some people want to take on different roles in their sex lives than in their day-to-day lives.
What kind of person are you in your day-to-day life? Do you like to be in charge? Are you shy? Do you start things, or react to them?
In what ways are you a different person in the bedroom? Why do you think these traits show up in the bedroom and not outside of it?
If your personality is the same in your sex life as in your day-to-day life, what new trait might increase your desire?
In addition to the inherent tensions between desire and the modern definition of love, there are a few external forces that make it challenging to enliven desire in modern times: talking as the sole language of intimacy, mixed messages about sexuality in American culture, parenthood, and infidelity. We’ll address talk intimacy in this chapter and the other factors in subsequent chapters.
In modern times, our concept of intimacy has become more precise—we consider it to be achieved mainly through verbal communication. Modern relationships demand self-disclosure, sharing our feelings, and being good listeners (non-judgemental, validating, and so on). We want to feel known and expect our partners to share as much as we do. However, talking isn’t the only (or even best) way to develop intimacy. There are two methods of communicating intimacy, verbal and physical.
Women tend to be good at verbal communication because, throughout history, they haven’t had access to power. Instead, they became experts at building relationships. Even today, girls are taught to develop relational skills.
The emphasis on talking as the primary method of developing intimacy started up at the same time that women began to grow their economic independence. As women became less financially reliant on their husbands, they began to expect more from marriage. Women wanted an emotional connection in a relationship, and because they were so comfortable with verbal communication, they used it to develop intimacy.
However, men haven’t been socialized the same way as women. Men are taught to compete and perform, and to be in control, fearless, and invulnerable. For men, expressing feelings is sometimes not only not in the curriculum, but actively discouraged. Trying to create intimacy only through talking can leave men trying to cram a language they don’t speak.
Some of the restrictions on men’s socializing have led them to self-express and communicate with their bodies. Most people are aware of the stereotypical aggressive male sexuality, but not everyone considers that sexuality can also tap into tenderness. Sex is a way of connecting without words.
People who value verbal communication have trouble understanding that there’s any other way to express intimacy. This leads to the talker trying to get the non-talker to switch languages. However, nonverbal communication can be just as important as verbal, and the talker could work on a second language too.
For example, Eddie was dumped by many women because he didn’t talk to them. They thought he had a fear of commitment and was reluctant to be open about himself. He ended up marrying a Japanese woman who spoke little English (he spoke no Japanese). The two literally couldn’t talk, so they communicated their love in other ways, such as showing each other art, washing each other, and cooking for each other. They communicated, just not by talking.
There are four downsides of engaging only in talk intimacy:
One: Women’s sexual repression. Men might have more trouble talking than women, but focusing on talk has negative consequences for women too—repressed sexuality. If women talk only with their voices, not their bodies, they’re cutting out an entire language. Single-mode communication also gives weight to the idea that women have to love someone to be allowed to sexually desire them (historically, men could like sex but women who did were immoral). Women are still trying to figure out how to be everything they want to be today, and focusing only on speech, rather than all forms of expression, only makes this harder.
Two: Tension. There’s a spectrum of communication: pure physical communication on one side, and pure verbal communication on the other. Some people hate communicating physically—their body is confining. They feel self-conscious and awkward, and for them, words are much safer. Other people feel freest and least inhibited in expressing themselves through their bodies. When two people on opposite ends of the spectrum are together, there’s often tension, because for the speech-preferring person, sex creates anxiety, and for the nonverbal-preferring person, sex is a balm for their anxiety.
Three: Control. Talking, and having no secrets, doesn’t necessarily lead to intimacy. In fact, it can lead to things like coercion, intrusion, and control. The person who’s less inclined to communicate verbally might feel forced to share because their partner is sharing and they need to reciprocate. Additionally, pushing for details about where your partner goes and who they meet can turn into surveillance and erode personal boundaries. And ironically, knowing every detail of your partner’s life doesn’t necessarily even create intimacy. What time your partner left work probably doesn’t give you much insight into their personality.
Four: Loss of distance. The better you get to know your partner through talking, the less distance there is between you. Remember Chapter 4: Intimacy vs. Desire—desire requires distance to flourish.
When two people on opposite ends of the communication spectrum are together, there can be tension. There are a few possibilities to working through it:
For example, Mitch and Laura speak totally different languages, each conforming to gender stereotypes. Laura thinks Mitch is the usual sex-obsessed man, and Mitch thinks Laura is sexually inhibited and feels disgust or contempt about sex. What’s really going on is this:
For Laura, sex comes with a lot of baggage. As a child, the only things she can remember her father saying about her body were comments about her breasts, and her mother always told her that boys are only interested in sex. She grew up thinking she could be pretty or smart. Laura’s lack of connection with her body has nothing to do with Mitch.
Mitch is completely comfortable with sex. His childhood experiences with sex were very different than Laura’s. He fell in love with a girl named Hillary at eighteen. Hillary had a lot of experience with sex and Mitch’s first experiences were all positive. He’s not very good at verbal communication and prefers to communicate via his body. Sex makes him feel emotionally safe.
The first step for Laura and Mitch was to understand that each of them speaks a different language. Next, with the author’s guidance in therapy, they communicated nonverbally, playing games like leading each other around the room, trust falls, and mirroring each other’s movement. It was physical communication, but it was non-sexual, and this helped them both see their areas of resistance. Laura learned that when she doubts her own appeal, it’s harder to believe that Mike desires her. Mike learned that he was dependent on another person to make sex feel safe for him.
There are two ways to communicate, verbally and physically.
Do you prefer to communicate verbally or physically? How do you know?
Does your partner communicate verbally or physically? How do you know?
If you and your partner don’t communicate the same way, how might you start learning to speak their language? (For example, if they’re a physical communicator, you might try to communicate physically by playing a game. If they’re a verbal communicator, you might try expressing a feeling using words.)
The second outside factor that affects desire is culture. American culture has mixed feelings about sex, and when this culture pervades our relationships, it can impair our desire. American culture tends to look at sex from two extreme points of view, hedonism and Puritanism—sometimes even at the same time.
Sex has never been more public. It’s used in advertising, it’s a regular subject on TV, and porn’s all over the internet. Sexual freedom fits nicely with the American values of individualism and personal freedom. However, the media focuses on single sex, not domesticated sex. With all this potential for single, freely available, idiosyncratic sex, can a monogamous modern relationship compete? The author doesn’t know.
This hedonism or “openness” toward sex isn’t indicative of liberal sexual attitudes. It’s more about economics than enlightenment. Even though we see sexy images used for marketing all the time, the foundational beliefs about sex—that it’s dirty—hasn’t changed.
The idea of sex as something dirty stems from Puritanism. The Puritan approach to sex is conservative—if sex isn’t for reproductive purposes within a monogamous marriage, it’s immoral. There’s no place for pleasure. Puritanism prioritizes the family and prescribes that marriage be reasonable and mature and moderated.
Puritanism is also big on policing sexuality. Abstinence, gay marriage, and abortion laws are still points of contention today. Sex education in schools is hotly debated. For example, many Americans view teenage sex as deviant behavior and a large group of people thinks that limiting sex education and birth control will stop teens from having sex. They think abstinence will solve teen pregnancy and STIs.
Europeans view teenage sex differently—as a normal developmental stage. Actual sex isn’t a problem; there’s only a problem when its unsafe. Interestingly, in Europe, teenagers begin sexual activity two years later than American teenagers, on average, but American teenagers get pregnant eight times more than European teenagers.
Either extreme—sex as taboo, or excessive sex—makes us want to mentally dissociate from the physicality of sex. When sex becomes guilty, or shameful, it’s more comfortable to separate the act from emotions. And this doesn’t just refer to long-term relationships; the loss shows up in any relationship that involves caring for another person.
For example, Ratu is a college student at a prestigious university. She and the other students don’t have the spare time to date, so instead they hook up (defined as anything from fooling around to sex) on weekends. Their ideal “relationships” are booty calls and friends-with-benefits arrangements—relationships that purposefully exclude emotions. The students don’t want commitment; it’s scary and restrictive and results in a loss of independence. They’re uncomfortable enough with even the sex, because they have to get drunk first and don’t want to remember it the next day. Hook-up sex fits in with hedonistic culture, but wanting to pretend sex never happened is somewhat Puritan.
You might think that having sex with multiple people is good training for maintaining an erotic relationship with a single person, but it doesn’t tend to be. Many people approach single sex and committed sex as totally different acts, and if you view single sex as a last hurrah, it’s going to be a very different experience from committed sex.
Lots of people feel shame and anxiety about their sexuality. They don’t want to be judged or rejected by their lovers, so they pull away, or settle for passable or unemotional sex. However, this kind of sex isn’t nearly as rewarding as intimate sex. To make steps towards intimate sex, consider these possibilities:
Maria had just broken up with a man she thought she would marry. Her friends set her up with Nico. Maria loves Nico and feels safe and trusting, but their sex life isn’t great. Maria wonders if that even matters because everyone’s sex life fades in long-term relationships, right?
In therapy with the author, Maria talks about her upbringing. She was heavily influenced by Puritanism. She was taught that sex outside of marriage is sinful, that you have to earn everything, that you have to sacrifice for the good of others, and that fantasies are disgusting. All this created shame and as Maria grew up, she had trouble letting go of the idea that lust could be anything but sinful. It was easier to get around these feelings when she was with someone she didn’t care about.
For Nico, sex is about love, and when Maria rejects him, he feels unloved. He doesn’t push, because that way he doesn’t get rejected.
Part of Nico and Maria’s trouble is that while Nico likes sex, he’s not so big on seduction. Maria needs time to warm up, but because she’s trying to be selfless, she has trouble asking Nico to slow down or give her more time. Their sex becomes purely about mutual orgasm.
Maria develops her sense of entitlement in her quest for eroticism. She tries to cast off what she learned in childhood by acknowledging what she wants and accepting that it’s fine to be selfish sometimes.
A third outside force that affects desire is parenthood. For many couples, once they have a child, almost everything about their lives changes: their relationships with themselves and the people they know, their bodies, roles, and amount of resources (finances, time, energy, and so on). Many of these changes affect the erotic life as well, usually in a suppressive way.
It can take years to adjust from couple life to family life, but once we get into a routine (for example, starting to sleep through the night again, visiting our adult friends, and so on), for some couples, eroticism starts to return.
For others, it doesn't. That’s not necessarily a problem—it’s perfectly possible to have a good relationship without sex, as long as both people agree to forgo it. If one person misses sex and the other’s not interested though, there’s a problem. The person who wants sex has three options: find sex outside of the relationship, leave (sometimes not until the children are grown), or stay, but be so miserable, resentful, and bitter their partner wishes they'd just leave instead.
There are many reasons why parenthood can have such a strong effect on our erotic lives: it creates a renewed need for security and expectations of full-on parenting, and it can desexualize the mother.
Once we have children, we increasingly value security and routine. This is partly for the kids, so they have a secure base and therefore the confidence to explore the world. This is also partly for us—parenthood is inherently uncontrollable, so we look for things we can control. We take serious jobs and plan for college funds and don’t go out partying. Even if we hate every chore on our to-do lists, ticking off all the items gives us a sense of achievement and control. Children are chaotic, and you can’t tame them, but you can make sure the vacuuming gets done.
Family life does best in this secure, predictable environment, but as discussed in Chapter 1, erotic life does best among unpredictability and risk. Once we’re parents, we have far less tolerance for unwieldy emotion, and eroticism doesn’t do well in a controlled environment. Controlled environments are boring. Sometimes, boredom can even morph into repulsion.
There has always been a bond between parents and their children—from an evolutionary point of view, parents are the best chance a child has for survival. However, the expectations around this bond have changed. In previous generations, children were free labor. Now, they give us meaning instead.
Parents are expected to prioritize their children’s happiness over their own. This can mean that resources parents might normally put towards eroticism—time, imagination, and so on—are entirely used up by their kids.
The individualism of American culture makes full-on parenting even harder. We don’t have the same community we used to, such as close extended family we can ask to babysit. Additionally, services such as daycare and medicine are expensive, and individualism makes some people consider the inability to afford daycare as a personal failing rather than a broken system. This adds an emotional burden to an already existing financial one.
Everyone benefited when sexuality separated from reproduction. Having sex no longer comes with such a risk of unplanned pregnancy. However, the benefits are different and unequal for men and women.
A man with a baby is sexy. He demonstrates nurturing and stability.
A woman with a baby is sacred, moral, and selfless. The women’s movement hasn’t reached motherhood yet, and desexualization of the mother is very common in patriarchal cultures. This could be for several reasons:
For example, after Carla had children, her husband Leo saw her differently. He watched her give birth and thought it was weird and gross. Once Carla had a baby, she changed from being a lover to a mother in Leo’s eyes. He became more cautious and respectful, and less aggressive. Carla got him to change his perception by asking him to pay her for a blow job. A mother or wife wouldn’t ask for payment, so it put her in a different role.
While some mothers experience desexualization, plenty of women come into their sexuality in motherhood. For example, Renee found self-acceptance in pregnancy. As a child, she was sexually abused and was so worried about looking womanly that she developed an eating disorder. But when she became pregnant, it became acceptable to look womanly because she’d need a powerful, well-equipped body when it came time to give birth.
Gay and lesbian relationships aren’t constrained by traditional gender roles, but they do seem to slip into two roles similar to those you’d find in a heterosexual couple. Whichever parent takes charge of the kids tends to focus on the children, have trouble getting away from chores, and loses their sense of self. The other parent steps into a reminder role. They help the caregiving parent refocus on the couple and separate from the kids.
Full-on parenting is more than a lifestyle; it’s emotional too. We can fall in love with our kids. Children can give us the same things we get (or used to get) from our partners—meaning, love, and devotion. However, expecting this kind of fulfillment from our children is a huge burden.
Additionally, when we try to hide sex to protect our children, they’ll learn that sex is something dangerous or bad. (Remember that our childhoods shape our feelings about desire.) Kids who learn to appropriately and easily express their affection are going to have a healthier relationship with sexuality when they grow up.
Some of the possibilities to help rekindle desire within the context of family are:
For example, Warren and Stephanie have two kids. Stephanie’s life revolves around the kids, and she’s given up her freedom and independence for them (remember that freedom and independence are important for desire). She feels like she’s a bad mother if she does anything selfish. This leads to her feeling like she’s on call all the time, and if she ever gets a free moment, she wants it for herself. Her husband Warren is just another person who needs something from her, because she’s no longer very interested in sex. She’s stuck in caretaking mode—she can’t see that sex would be about her too.
Warren is lonely and frustrated. For him, sex is a way to express emotion and connect. Every time Stephanie rejects him, he’s hurt. He takes her lack of desire personally.
If you think of eroticism as creative energy and playfulness, Stephanie still has plenty. She’s simply redirected it towards her kids. She’s always thinking of fun new things to do with the kids, and her life is full of novelty. She also gets a lot of touch from her children. (Not in a sexual way. Sensuality with children is totally different from adult sexuality.) Female eroticism isn’t localized in the genitals the way men’s is. Women feel it all over their body and through all senses. So though Stephanie and Warren don’t have the same connection they used to, Stephanie may not even need it—she’s getting very similar things to what she used to get from him elsewhere.
With the help of therapy, Warren and Stephanie have found a few ways to move toward rekindling their desire for each other. First, they schedule dates. Second, Stephanie practices being selfish. She leaves Warren with the kids and goes away for a weekend with her sister. Third, Warren and Stephanie try to create an environment where desire can flourish. Even before Stephanie had children, Warren was always the one to approach her. He’s still the initiator, and her main agency is in refusal. Now, however, sometimes Stephanie says “Maybe” or “Convince me” instead of “No.”
The final outside factor that affects desire is infidelity. All relationships have the possibility for infidelity and the author calls this possibility the “third.” The third is a manifestation of desire for someone, real or imaginary, outside of the relationship. They can be an ex or a fantasy. The third is intrinsic to all relationships, because fidelity wouldn’t be meaningful if it was the only option.
Fidelity is so entrenched a lot of people don’t even want to talk about it—the act of bringing it up suggests it’s open for negotiation. If it’s breached, the whole relationship can blow up, not only the erotic aspect. However, ignoring the third can be just as detrimental. In this chapter, we’ll explore why we value monogamy, why people in monogamous relationships cheat, and how to handle the third that exists in every relationship.
Traditionally, monogamy was defined as having only one sexual partner over the course of your entire life. It was used to control women’s reproduction. Fidelity kept things simple—if your wife only ever sleeps with you, you know who’s next in line for your cows when you die. Monogamy wasn’t above love; it was about property and a clearly defined lineage.
Today, the definition of monogamy has become one sexual partner at once. Fidelity is less about practicality and is now an expression of love rather than a control measure for women. Both men and women choose monogamy because it means committing to one person, and that commitment shows love. To have you, your partner has rejected everyone else.
Even though over the past fifty years we’ve become far more open to new family structures such as childless relationships and same-sex marriage, monogamy is still the default, and, arguably, only option. We find divorce more acceptable than infidelity, even though divorce can have huge consequences for a family. We would rather end a relationship than restructure it. We make fidelity about an individual rather than the system (relationship or marriage). If we divorce someone, we think it’s because we chose the wrong person to be with. We don’t consider that it could instead be because a monogamous, high-expectation union has limitations, such as waning desire.
Interestingly, our culture only emphasizes monogamy in relationships. The values that lead to monogamy—being happy with what you have and commitment—are totally different from consumer culture—new, different, better.
Our obsession with monogamy, like much of our lives, goes back to our childhoods. As babies, our primary caretakers were utterly devoted to and connected with us (as far as we knew). No one else existed, just us and them, and we seek this same kind of connection—total merging—with our partners. People who didn’t have a connection like this with their mothers as children often want this connection even more than those who did experience it.
Of course, this connection wasn’t as exclusive as we thought when we were babies who didn’t know any better. Our mothers knew plenty of other people besides us, including their partners, who also wanted their love.
People are unfaithful for many disparate reasons, ranging from revenge to healing. Unfaithfulness doesn’t necessarily mean that a relationship has deeper problems. Lots of cheaters are happy with their relationships.
By nature, affairs have many of the qualities that generate eroticism—risk, danger, jealousy, and so on. Only two people know about the affair, so their bond is strengthened by the secret. Additionally, secrecy frees you from many of the pressures of your regular relationship, such as meeting friends and family, or everyday chores. Having an affair also requires work—you have to maintain the secrecy—and by doing this work, you’re proving that the other person is worth it.
It would be difficult to create this same sort of energy in a relationship, particularly one with a family, because it’s very volatile. In fact, if an affair turns into a relationship, the relationship often ends. Everything that made the affair exciting—possessiveness, jealousy, and risk—no longer exists.
Even therapists, who often challenge common beliefs, tend to agree with the general population about monogamy. Nonmonogamy, even when consensual, is never viewed as a viable possibility, only as a lack of commitment or fear. There are many common fears associated with nonmonogamy: How can your partner love you but sleep with someone else? What if they fall for them? Once they’ve crossed one line, why not cross all of them?
The author believes nonmonogamy can work—she’s seen couples let in the third and maintain relationships that are just as committed as more traditional arrangements. Sometimes, people open relationships to strengthen them (remember that distance and mystery are ingredients for desire, and a threat to a relationship can kickstart desire). In these relationships, fidelity is about commitment, and the relationship boundaries are emotional rather than physical. The arrangement is often very clear, with strict rules that can be renegotiated if necessary.
Even open relationships aren’t immune to betrayal, though. Since fidelity in open relationships is about trust, even though the rules are different, they’re still breakable.
Perhaps the general population’s views on nonmonogamy will change. Many things that used to be taboo, such as premarital sex and homosexuality, are now accepted. Open relationships might make the shift from side-eyed to normal too.
As established above, the third is ever-present in all relationships. The author thinks we should look at monogamy not as the default but as one option. Ignoring the third entirely usually creates problems, so she suggests acknowledging the third (to whatever degree you and your partner are comfortable with), rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. There are three possibilities for how to deal with it:
Talk intimacy implies that we should confess our affairs, and most American couples therapists believe that confession is necessary for healing. Some people are more upset by the secret than the actual cheating. Americans conflate respect with honesty. Other cultures view respect differently. It might be kinder not to disclose an affair, because you’re saving your partner humiliation and preserving their honor. The author thinks you should consciously choose to tell or not tell, instead of going with the cultural default.
For example, Doug and Zoe have been married for several years and their sex life has declined. Zoe has many people in her life, and Doug feels that if she’s not sleeping with him, there’s nothing to distinguish him from her family or friends. He’s no longer special.
Doug has a five-year affair with Naomi. Transgression is inherently exciting, as it contains many ingredients for desire such as selfishness and risk. But the affair wasn’t just about sex—Doug received attention, and Naomi confirmed that Doug is important. The affair ends when Naomi asks Doug to stop sleeping with his wife, and Doug refuses. Naomi then starts seeing someone else, which makes Doug jealous. (He is aware of the double standard.)
Doug wanted to sleep with Naomi, but never had any intention of leaving Zoe. He wasn’t having an affair to get out of the marriage. He decided not to tell Zoe because it would hurt her and could potentially end their marriage.
There are three ways to approach the threat of infidelity: try to control it, acknowledge it, or invite it into your relationship.
Who or what is your third? Remember that the third can be a real person, a fantasy, or the life you might have had if you’d chosen to be with someone other than your partner.
Would you prefer to ignore your third, acknowledge it, or invite it in? Keep in mind that whichever you choose, your partner would do the same with their third.
Consider one of the options that you didn’t choose in the previous question. How would your relationship change if you chose that option instead?