Mating in captivity - Esther Perel
And what is true for human beings is true for every living thing: all organisms require alternating periods of growth and equilibrium. Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risks falling into chaos; but one that is too rigid or static ceases to grow and eventually dies. This never-ending dance between change and stability is like the anchor and the waves.
When we love we always risk the possibility of loss---by criticism, rejection, separation, and ultimately death---regardless of how hard we try to defend against it.
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
Eroticism is risky. People are afraid to allow themselves these moments of idealization and yearning for the person they live with. It introduces a recognition of the other's sovereignty that can feel destabilizing. When our partner stands alone, with his own will and freedom, the delicateness of our bond is magnified.
We see what we want to see, what we can tolerate seeing, and our partner does the same.
Love, by its nature, is unstable.
Desire is fueled by the unknown, and for that reason it's inherently anxiety-producing. In his book Open to Desire, the Buddhist psychoanalyst Mark Epstein explains that our willingness to engage that mystery keeps desire alive. Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity.
Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination.
Beginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Through love we imagine a new way of being. You see me as I've never seen myself. You airbrush my imperfections, and I like what you see. With you, and through you, I will become that which I long to be. I will become whole. Being chosen by the one you chose is one of the glories of falling in love. It generates a feeling of intense personal importance. I matter. You confirm my significance.
You present the facts, I connect the dots, and an image is formed. Your singularities are gradually revealed to me, openly or covertly, intentionally or not. Some places inside of you are easy to reach; others are encrypted and laborious to decode.
But my point is that perhaps the way we construct closeness reduces the sense of freedom and autonomy needed for sexual pleasure.
Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness. One does not exist without the other. With too much distance, there can be no connection. But too much merging eradicates the separateness of two distinct individuals. Then there is nothing more to transcend, no bridge to walk on, no one to visit on the other side, no other internal world to enter. When people become fused---when two become one---connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy of sex.
Some of us enter intimate bonds with an acute awareness of our need to connect, to be close, not to be alone, not to be abandoned. Others approach relationships with a heightened need for personal space---our sense of self-preservation inspires vigilance against being devoured. Erotic, emotional connection generates closeness that can become overwhelming, evoking claustrophobia. It can feel intrusive.
We want closeness, but not so much that we feel trapped by it.
In fact, the intense physical and emotional fusion they experience is possible only with someone we don't yet know. At this early stage merging and surrendering are relatively safe, because the boundaries between the two people are still externally defined.
It is all the space between them that allows them to imagine no space at all. They are still enthralled by the encounter, and they have not yet consolidated their relationship.
In the beginning you can focus on the connection because the psychological distance is already there; it's a part of the structure. Otherness is a fact. You don't need to cultivate separateness in the early stages of falling in love; you still are separate.
pleasure demands a degree of selfishness.
"You're so afraid to lose him that you've alienated yourself and you've lost your freedom. There isn't a separate person here for him to love."
Sexual desire does not obey the laws that maintain peace and contentment between partners. Reason, understanding, compassion, and camaraderie are the handmaidens of a close, harmonious relationship. But sex often evokes unreasoning obsession rather than thoughtful judgement, and selfish desire rather than altruistic consideration. Aggression, objectification, and power all exist in the shadow of desire, components of passion that do not necessarily nurture intimacy. Desire operates along its own trajectory.
I suggest that our ability to tolerate our separateness---and the fundamental insecurity it engenders---is a precondition for maintaining interest and desire in a relationship. Instead of always striving for closeness, I argue that couples may be better off cultivating their separate selves. If cultivating separateness sounds harsh, let's think of it instead as nurturing a sense of selfhood. The French psychologist Jacques Salomé talks about the need to develop a personal intimacy with one's own self as a counterbalance to the couple. There is beauty in an image that highlights a connection to oneself, rather than a distance from one's partner. In our mutual intimacy we make love, we have children, and we share physical space and interests. Indeed, we blend the essential parts of our lives. But "essential" does not mean "all." Personal intimacy demarcates a private zone, one that requires tolerance and respect. It is a space---physical, emotional, and intellectual---that belongs only to me. Not everything needs to be revealed. Everyone should cultivated a secret garden.
Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.
Through sex, men can recapture the pure pleasure of connection without having to compress their hard-to-articulate needs into the prison of words.
What passes for care is actually covert surveillance---a fact-finding approach to the details of a partner's life. What did you eat for lunch? Who called? What did you guys talk about? This kind of interrogation feigns closeness and confuses insignificant details with a deeper sense of knowledge. I am often amazed at how couples can be up on the minute details of each other's lives, but haven't had a meaningful conversation in years. In fact, such transparency can often spell the end of curiosity. It's as if this stream of questions replaces a more thoughtful and authentically interested inquiry.
When the impulse to share becomes obligatory, when personal boundaries are no longer respected, when only the shared space of togetherness is acknowledged and private space is denied, fusion replaces intimacy and possession co-opts love. It is also the kiss of death for sex. Deprived of enigma, intimacy becomes cruel when it excludes any possibility of discovery. Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.
While we expect to experience these discrete moments of recognition in ongoing relationships, they are not necessarily bound to any overarching narrative. They can be circumstantial, spontaneous, and without follow-up. I no longer look at relationships as being either intimate or not. Instead, I track each couple's ability to engage in a series of intimate bids tendered over time.
What rigidifies desire is confinement.
"It seems OK to ask for what you really need, but to ask for something just because you want it or like it is selfish. Pleasure itself, unless you've earned it, is dubious. It also raises the question of how much you feel you deserve and are worthy of receiving---just because you're you. But eroticism is precisely that: its pleasure for pleasure's sake, offered to you gratuitously by the partner."
Things get tricky when you consider that one of our greatest needs, developmentally spaeking, is autonomy. From the moment we can crawl, we navigate the treacherous paths of separation in an attempt to balance our fundamental urge for connection with the urge to experience our own agency. We need our parents to take care of us, but we also need them to give us enough space to establish our freedom. We want them to hold us and we want them to let us go.
Frustration that people can experience when the body is not touched, stroked, held, and pleasured drives people up a wall.
Loving another without losing ourselves is the central dilemma of intimacy. Our ability to negotiate the dual needs for connection and autonomy stems from what we learned as children, an often takes a lifetime of practice. It affects not only how we love but also how we make love. Erotic intimacy holds the double promise of finding oneself and losing oneself. It is an experience of merging and and of total self-absorption, of mutuality and selfishness. To be inside another and inside ourselves at the same time is a double stance that borders on the mystical. The momentary oneness we feel with our beloved grows out of our ability to acknowledge our indissoluble separateness. In order to be one, you must fist be two.
The smaller we feel in the world, the more we need to shine in the eyes of our partner. We want to know that we matter, and that, for at least one person, we are irreplaceable. We long to feel whole, to rise above the prison of our solitude.
When we validate one another's freedom within the relationship, we're less inclined to search for it elsewhere.
I believe that longing, waiting, and yearning are fundamental elements of desire that can be generated with forethought, even in longterm relationships.
Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion. We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while remaining open to the unknown; cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn't swallow freedom whole.