How you view sex as an adult comes from experiences you had when you were a child, and you can work through the difficulties those may bring.Here are 3 of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from this book: So don’t resign yourself to a lackluster sex life, with her help you will find ways to become vulnerable with your partner and enjoy exciting and fulfilling intimacy for the rest of your life. In her book Mating In Captivity: In Search of Erotic Intelligence, Perel expertly teaches couples the formula for keeping sexual passion alive. It is possible to keep the passion and eroticism alive in a long term relationship. According to psychotherapist Esther Perel, it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s just natural, right? You surely can’t keep the passion fire going forever.

By this point, you are emotionally connected but you don’t have much time and energy for physical connection. Then throw in a stressful work life and maybe some kids. Remember when you first met your partner? How jittery and excited you felt to be with them? Each new milestone like the first kiss and the first “I love you’s” brought so much joy and passion.īut then you moved in together. Give me predictability, give me surprise.Īnd we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that.1-Sentence-Summary: Mating In Captivity explains the best sex advice that couples therapist Esther Perel has discovered in over twenty years of experience, and explains the barriers that can kill sexual desire in our domesticated society and what you and your spouse can do to remove them so you can enjoy better emotional and physical intimacy together. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship.

So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire. “.this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term, not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty.

Mating in captivity