Esther Perel seeks to reconcile the erotic and the domestic.
Photo by Marilyn Silverstein
April 08, 2008
A single dilemma dominates the offices of marriage therapists everywhere, said New York author/therapist Esther Perel: the loss of sexual desire.
“The sexlessness of contemporary couples is the number one complaint in every sex therapist’s office,” Perel said. “The issue itself of the breakdown of desire is the number one issue among couples worldwide.
“It’s just the presenting issue,” she stressed. “What makes it so difficult to sustain desire? This one small question is the most important thing among people who have become utterly dull to each other.”
Perel, author of Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, brought her questions to a March 11 program in Princeton sponsored by the Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Mercer County. Some 36 participants, most of them clinicians, attended the all-day workshop at the NJ Hospital Association Conference Center.
“It’s a spicy topic, a different topic,” said Debra Levenstein, director of prevention and support services for JFCS and coordinator of the program. It gives therapists “new ways to think about an old issue.”
Perel’s perspective will be a useful tool for JFCS clinicians as they counsel couples, Levenstein added. “It’s about healthy relationships, and that’s what we’re about,” she said. “That’s what I love about working for this agency. We’re on the cutting edge of things that can assist in relationships.”
Linda Meisel, executive director of JFCS, said she decided to bring Perel in to lead a workshop after attending a previous one. “She has a very unique take on this,” she said.
“One of the things I feel as an agency is wanting to support families,” she added. “My goal is to have our people be the best trained they can be.”
Perel, a native of Belgium whose parents are Holocaust survivors, brings to her work a bachelor’s degree in educational psychology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a master’s degree in psychology and expressive therapy from the Lesley College Graduate School in Cambridge, Mass.
She conducts a private practice in New York as a cross-cultural psychologist, treating both heterosexual and same-sex couples in interracial, intercultural, and inter-religious relationships.
As she listened to many of those couples over the years, Perel told the gathering, she became more and more interested in the question of how to sustain erotic desire over time. “I wanted to explore the fear and obstacles we face when our pursuit of security clashes with our quest for adventure,” she said. “How can we want what we already have?
“We straddle two sets of fundamental needs that seem to be contradictory,” she said. “We have a need for security, predictability, reliability. That’s what propels us to seek a committed relationship in the first place. But we also have a need for freedom — novelty, risk, independence, adventure. This duality is part of human development.”
Love is about having, but desire is about wanting, Perel said. “It’s two very different verbs with a very different energy. Love seeks to contract differences, but desire thrives on the mysterious, the unknown, the unexpected.
“Passion is commensurate with the amount of insecurity you can tolerate,” she added. “It is not that romance fades over time, but that it becomes riskier. Making hot, lustful sex with your partner is probably the last taboo.… Slowly, in securing the relationship, we will often trample the erotic reality that brought it into being.”
So, what does it take to sustain desire over time?
Sometimes, all it takes to rekindle desire is to look at one’s partner with new eyes, or through another’s eyes — “when this person who is so often seen as familiar is seen as separate and unknown,” she said.“Mystery is often nothing more than a shift in perception.”
In a separate interview with NJ Jewish News, Perel reflected on the connection between her childhood in Antwerp, growing up in a community of Holocaust survivors, and her professional interest in the life force of eroticism.
“Growing up in a community of survivors,” she said, “I was exposed in very literal ways to two groups of people — those who had not died, and those who came back to life.
“Those who did not die were often people who lived quite settled to the ground, not able to lift themselves up, and very rarely able to experience pleasure — and their children were not able to experience pleasure without guilt,” she said.
But those who came back to life, like her parents, Perel said, were people who lifted themselves up and embraced life — creativity and the life force and energy and exhilaration.
“They understood the fundamental meaning of eroticism, which is a sense of aliveness,” she said. “What really always gratified me was to see people who were able to defy death. Death means also deadness, and deadness is what people complain about in their relationships.
“When couples complain about the listlessness of their sex life, what they seek is to reconnect with the eroticism of things — to the renewal and vitality that sex used to afford them.”
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