Twenty years ago, right after ending a two-and-half-year relationship, I started therapy for the first time to try and make sense of my dating decisions and a host of other things. After experiencing several failed relationships in a row, my ostensible goal was to understand the choices I was making and why, so that eventually I would be able to have a positive and lasting relationship with someone. In time, I came to learn that one of my obstacles was this overwhelming and exaggerated sense of obligation I felt whenever I found myself in a long-term relationship. The source of this feeling wasn’t difficult to ascertain. As I’ve documented many times here, my parents had a lousy marriage and fought all the time. Like, literally every day. Biting sarcasm. Raised voices. Yelling. Walkaways. Disrespect borne of frustrated romantic dreams. Like drops of water hitting stone over and over for years and years, my parents’ daily acrimony wore me down and left an unconscious indentation that I still struggle with sometimes because their marital legacy is not so easily discarded. As much as I crave connection with someone–real connection–relationships sometimes make me feel like I’m carrying around this massive weight that I can’t get rid of, a weight of obligation and feeling trapped in a jail that I can’t leave, a weight of trying to always please someone so they won’t leave.
Heavy shit. The worst part of this is I had no clue what was making me feel this way–I wasn’t able to draw any direct connection between the feeling and the source of the feeling–until I entered therapy for the first time. So it’s good that I eventually figured it out so I can at least be aware of the feeling when it pops up, name it, and not overreact to it. I doubt that this feeling will ever leave me completely. The best I can do is manage it like high cholesterol.
The other issue I uncovered in therapy was that my curiosity and perpetual desire to learn and experience new things were seemingly incompatible with a long-term relationship. When you commit yourself to one person and only one person, you close a lot of doors and consign yourself to experiencing the rest of your life (theoretically) with them and only them. Obviously, there are many reasons why people choose to do this, which I don’t think I need to belabor. Finding a life partner with whom one can raise a family, share life experiences, and get emotionally deep are rare and beautiful things. Who hasn’t looked at two old people walking on a beach, or holding each other’s hand as one of them passed away and gotten a little teary? That kind of life connection is truly special. As difficult as it is to find, it’s what most of us strive for and want for ourselves. No one prefers to be alone in perpetuity.
But there are some human needs that conflict with long and committed relationships, such as the need for passion, desire, and new experiences. I wrote about this six years ago, and these persistent, seemingly incompatible needs are an aspect of relationships that continues to fascinate me. What I was trying to get at back then, and probably not doing a great job of it, is that we enter into relationships with the best of intentions, but over time, passion dies down and sometimes needs change. People change . Or sometimes there’s no “change” at all, you just learn about things that were always there until you uncovered them in a conversation or a crisis. As much as we can love anyone, as much as we crave the stability and security that a good relationship brings, I don’t think we ever stop wanting or needing passion and desire in our lives. That thrill of the new and unexpected. The excitement of the unknown.
Successful couples are able to navigate these needs/changes/discoveries and reach a new level of intimacy and understanding with each other, which elevates the relationship. It may not happen overnight. There may be fits and starts. Two steps forward, one step back. But they get there, or as close to it as possible. Other couples never figure this out and either learn to live without passion and desire, relegating them to feelings that only exist at the inception of a relationship, or they cheat, or they leave the relationship at some point. But I think most people believe that desire, passion, and eroticism in a relationship are fleeting and unnecessary. What matters most to them is the emotional connection, stability, and security that a relationship brings. You can’t have everything. You gotta pick one or the other.
I don’t think I’m one of those people.
In addition to my parents’ shitshow of a marriage and its effect on me, these stubborn questions were another part of my therapy twenty years ago: How do I commit to someone and stay with them for a long time while discovering new things about them and about myself, while managing our respective changing needs over time, and while trying to retain some semblance of the passion and desire we had in the beginning? Was a committed, long-lasting relationship incompatible with my persistent curiosity and desire for novelty? Why did I eventually get to a place where I felt trapped by, or bored with someone? Why did I eventually lose attraction to people and crave my sexual freedom? Why did eroticism and adventure disappear from my relationships the longer they lasted? Could these things ever be reconciled, or was I going to be relegated to living a life of either: (1) a loving, deeply-connected, long and committed relationship accompanied by routine, de-eroticized, and boring-as-fuck sex (or no sex at all), or (2) unpredictable and intermittent but hot-as-fuck sexual experiences with different people, accompanied by an absence of emotional intimacy and perpetual solitude with interminable dry spells?
It was quite the Catch-22. I wanted both. Was it even possible to have both?
As we peeled back the layers of this quandary, my therapist recommended a book that had just come out called Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, by Esther Perel, where she discusses all of these questions. She recommended it more than once in fact. I didn’t read it, mostly because I wasn’t in a relationship at the time, so it seemed irrelevant, and also because I was more focused on figuring out how badly my parents’ relationship had fucked me up. I’m reading it now, twenty years later, and God damn, is it revelatory. I’m not even halfway through it, and every paragraph is a smack in the face, answering questions I’ve had about myself for most of my adult life.
Am I asking for too much? Am I the only person who feels this way? Is this abnormal? Am I just too sexual, or God forbid, deviant or commitment-phobic? Do I place too much emphasis on this one part of a relationship? What is causing this feeling in the first place? I can only blame my parents for so much, and one of them is dead, for fuck’s sake. How do I deal with this?
Perel, who’s a therapist herself, frames the issue so well and answers all of these questions, in part by using examples of couples in crisis who came to her for therapy. I can’t do her sage words justice, so I’m just going to quote a few paragraphs from her book that have resonated with me so far and make the point far better than I can.
First, let’s orient the issue. Why did Perel write this book in the first place?
I want to know how, or if, we can hold on to a sense of aliveness and excitement in our relationships. Is there something inherent in commitment that deadens desire? Can we ever maintain security without succumbing to monotony? I wonder if we can preserve a sense of the poetic, of what Octavio Paz calls the double flame of love and eroticism. (p. 2)
Me too!
Then she presents the two sides who clash when it comes to this subject, the Romantics and the Realists.
The romantics refuse a life without passion; they swear that they’ll never give up on true love. They are the perennial seekers, looking for the person with whom desire will never fizzle. Every time desire does wane, they conclude that love is gone. If eros is in decline, love must be on its deathbed. They mourn the loss of excitement and fear settling down.
At the opposite extreme are the realists. They say that enduring love is more important than hot sex, and that passion makes people do stupid things. It’s dangerous, it creates havoc, and that’s a weak foundation for marriage. In the immortal words of Marge Simpson, “Passion is for teenagers and foreigners.” For the realists, maturity prevails. The initial excitement grows into something else–deep love, mutual respect, shared history, and companionship. Diminishing desire is inescapable. You are expected to tough it out and grow up. (p. 3.)
The one thing realists and romantics agree on? Passion cools over time. They just disagree on how important this is. Perel’s thesis is that love and desire are EQUALLY important and necessary in a relationship. The problem is they’re incompatible and it’s up to the two people to try and reconcile them.
[W]e all need security: permanence, reliability, stability, and continuity. These rooting, nesting instincts ground us in our human experience. But we also have a need for novelty and change, generative forces that give life fullness and vibrancy. Here risk and adventure loom large. We’re walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other. (p. 4)
Only four pages in, and I’ve never felt so validated.
Eventually Perel gets to the nub of the issue. Familiarity breeds security and stability, but it also ruins passion and eroticism.
First, she sets the table of initial attraction and building relationship:
You meet someone through a potent alchemy of attraction. It is a sweet reaction and it’s always a surprise. You’re filled with a sense of possibility, of hope, of being lifted out of the mundane and into a world of emotion and enthrallment. Love grabs you, and you feel powerful. You cherish the rush, and you want to hold on to the feeling. You’re also scared. The more you become attached, the more you have to lose. So you set out to make love more secure. . . . You make your first commitments, and happily give up a little bit of freedom in exchange for a little bit of stability. You create comfort through devices–habit, ritual, pet names–that bring reassurance. But the excitement was bound to a certain measure of insecurity. Your high resulted from the uncertainty, and now, by seeking to harness it, you wind up draining the vitality out of the relationship. You enjoy the comfort, but. . . . [y]ou miss the spontaneity. In your attempt to control the risks of passion, you have tamed it out of existence. Marital boredom is born. (p. 10)
Damn, yo.
And there’s the tension set forth in a single paragraph. Attachment and emotional intimacy can only grow through familiarity, habit, predictability, and certainty. But what drives passion, desire, and eroticism are uncertainty and unpredictability. The unknown. Mystery.
There’s a powerful tendency in long-term relationships to favor the predictable over the unpredictable. Yet eroticism thrives on the unpredictable. Desire butts heads with habit and repetition. It is unruly, and it defies our attempts at control. So where does that leave us? We don’t want to throw away the security, because our relationship depends on it. A sense of physical and emotional safety is basic to healthy pleasure and connection. Yet without an element of uncertainty there is no longing, no anticipation, no frisson. . . . [P]assion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate. (p. 10)
Desire is fueled by the unknown, and for that reason it’s inherently anxiety-producing. . . . Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity. We can try to reduce the other to a knowable entity, or we can embrace her persistent mystery. . . . Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination. We remain interested in our partners; they delight us, and we’re drawn to them. But, for many of us, renouncing the illusion of safety, and accepting the reality of our fundamental insecurity, proves to be a difficult step. (p. 18)
Just page after page of revelations about questions I’ve been pondering for decades. Mating in Captivity crystallizes issues that have plagued me for years and which plague many relationships, even the ones that continue and never break. How do you balance security and desire? How do you keep eroticism alive in your relationship? Too much of one risks killing the other, so I think most people, 99% of people in troubled relationships, learn to live without one of these two things. Almost always, it’s desire and eroticism that die, not security.
This just isn’t a sacrifice or a choice that I’m willing to make. Not any more. I did it for years in my marriage, brutally so. I’ve personally experienced where this unreconciled tension, this over-prioritization on security and stability, to the exclusion of desire and a mutual, non-judgmental acceptance of the other person’s erotic, sensual side lead. Now I can’t be in a relationship without it. Not just in the beginning, but always. I’d rather be alone than live without it, but I do believe it’s possible to find it with the right connection, the right person. It just takes a lot of patience, adaptability, openness, acceptance, and a real love for the person, Which means the whole person, not just the “respectable” parts of them that make you feel safe and secure. The trick, according to Mating in Captivity, is to retain a certain amount of separation, individuality, autonomy, and mystery between the two of you. Objectify them a little bit. Leave room to keep them at some distance from you, like a total stranger. It sounds counterintuitive and even dangerous, but all of this will leave enough space for uncertainty and risk to breathe, and this is what allows desire and eroticism to survive in a long-term relationship.
A lot of people can live without these things. A lot of them do. Most people view desire, passion, and eroticism in a relationship as disposable luxuries. Things that only exist in the beginning. Things that only belong to teenagers and foreigners.
I’m just not one of those people.
