Why? Because their sex together is good, dear reader, but it is not great.
But they are in despair over what’s happening to them.” “We are terrified,” they confess. They have wonderful times, wonderful families, spectacular careers.
A typical one might go like this: One spunky young couple has it all. Perel practices couples therapy in New York, and her book’s organizing principle emerges in a series of clinical vignettes.
She is American, finally, in her unquestioning assumption that we should work like hell on our sex lives. She is American also in her self-promotion (“My husband is the director of the International Trauma Studies Program at Columbia University … My parents were survivors of Nazi concentration camps,” she tells us, as though this bore on her thesis). (As I write, I am living in Crete, where half the people who wash floors in hotels speak eight languages and don’t tell you.) Perel is American in both the best sense and the worst in which Europeans use the term: She is American in her can-do conviction that people will live happily ever after. Where Denis de Rougemont, the author of the mid-twentieth- century classic Love in the Western World, might say, “Passion is a death drive: stay away from it!,” Perel says, “Passion demands you discard all that’s dear to you-so what are you waiting for?” And she smiles.Įven though she was born in Belgium and schooled in Israel, and speaks eight languages, she is fundamentally, deeply American-indeed, announcing that you speak eight languages is a deeply American thing to do. She is, after all, to judge from Mating in Captivity, an extremely upbeat person and backs off constantly from the disturbing nature of her contentions. One might reasonably make the argument that if good sex comes at so high a price, who wants it? Or at least, who can afford it? If it comes at the price of intimacy, honesty, security, harmony, openness, and trust, shouldn’t we just pass? Of course, Esther Perel would claim that I’m distorting her argument. And the bad news-or the good, depending on your priorities-is that it’s probably true.Ĭommunication? Forget it. That, in so many words, is the theme of Esther Perel’s little red book on how to achieve sexual bliss in marriage.
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