"The ingredients which are essential to love are not necessarily the same ones which fuel desire," says psychotherapist Esther Perel. Photo / 123rf
The celebrated psychotherapist on how to restore sexuality and desire to a long-term relationship.
Esther Perel is quite clear when it comes to sex. It’s not about getting it on come what may. “I am not interested in helping people just do it,” says the world-leading expert in human relationships. “I am interested in people experiencing aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, curiosity. All ingredients of the erotic. That can come from talking about books, art, and nature as much as having sex.”
Over her 45-year career, the 66-year-old psychotherapist has spoken with extraordinary intelligence and clarity about love, marriage, relationships, infidelity and sex.
It’s no wonder that this demure, softly spoken woman, whose lilting Belgian accent leaves one hanging on her every word, was named on Forbes inaugural 50 Over 50 in 2021 and is feted by Oprah, who calls her a “rock star”.
Perel’s 2006 book Mating In Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence is a global bestseller, translated into 24 languages, with more than a million copies sold according to some sources. Her podcast, Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel has drawn an equally engaged following, while her Instagram fans number in excess of two million – and all this while she continues to practise as a couples and family therapist in New York.
I’d half-expected Perel to be forthright, imperious and sharp, but in fact her every word is carefully and precisely chosen, imbued with a tone so caring that you almost miss the steeliness underneath which says “disregard me at your peril”.
“I’d never have thought I’d still be here, next year we’ll celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my book,” she says, with a shy smile when we meet on a hot summer’s day at the chic Parisian apartment where she is hosting a series of salons.
“It wasn’t an instant success,” Perel admits, of her now chart-topping volume. “It took quite a few years before it became a hit with readers. As times changed, I think people began to understand it, and there began to be a different conversation about sexuality within the context of committed relationships.”
Much has changed since Mating In Captivity was published but the central thesis holds true:
“The things that nurture love – closeness, responsibility, worry for the wellbeing of your partner, anxiety, caretaking – are not the same ingredients which nurture the erotic,” Perel summarises. “When I am responsible for you, I am not letting go. I am focused on you, I am not inside myself. Responsibility and pleasure do not necessarily go that well together.”
As marriage has evolved into more of a romantic institution where couples place more emotional needs on each other, perhaps it’s inevitable that the mystery and intrigue vital for desire to flourish start to diminish.
“The ingredients which are essential to love are not necessarily the same ones which fuel desire,” she continues. “Love wants closeness, love wants to contract the distance, it wants to minimise the tension. Desire thrives on those things.”
“The first question I always ask couples is this: when were you last drawn to your partner?” she says.
In all of the hundreds of couples from around the globe she has worked with, Perel says she encounters only four answers:
“The first is when I see him radiant, competent, in his element,” she says. “The second is when we’ve been apart and we reunite. The third is when he surprises me – that can be a surprise of any kind, whether he’s telling me something I didn’t know about him or if he shows a side you don’t often get to see. And finally, when I see him in the eyes of another; when I see how other people look at him or listen to him when he holds forth.
“In each of these descriptions this person who is so familiar is momentarily somewhat mysterious, somewhat unknown, and in this space between you and him is this erotic element,” Perel explains.
When it comes to restoring sex and desire into a long-term relationship, the trick is to create differentiation. “Back in 2006, I’d have called that distance, but people misunderstood: you don’t have to play at being distant,” she says. “It’s about differentiation, it’s about remembering that your partner is a different person to you.”
Perel believes good relationships are like accordions: they need both closeness and distance, oneness and differentiation, similarities and difference.
“A separate bed, a separate trip, all these things can help,” the psychotherapist advises. “You don’t have to go to everything together, leave together, go to bed together, wake up together. Desire needs space: it needs freedom, it needs mystery, it needs the unknown so that there’s something to explore. It needs a bridge to cross to go visit somebody. If you’ve become intertwined, you can’t have a relationship because you’re already the same person.”
What this differentiation might look like will depend on the couple. In Mating In Captivity, Perel discusses a couple who learn to rediscover the erotic charge simply by avoiding physical contact for a week, while others find it by exploring separate hobbies.
Though Perel acknowledges that couples are generally thinking about maintaining vibrant relationships more now than ever before, things have deteriorated too.
“Between 2006 and today, presence is the most important thing we have lost,” she answers. What started as couples watching television together, morphed into couples scrolling on the sofa side-by-side with the TV in the background. “Then at some point one of you wants to say something to the other but the other is still scrolling and says ‘uh huh, uh huh’ and gives you this kind of digital lag response. The person is there but they’re not present. That’s normal now, and we wonder why people are having less sex?”
In her research around the process of mourning, psychologist and family therapist Dr Pauline Boss coined the term “ambiguous loss” to describe a type of loss when someone is physically or psychologically absent, such as in missing persons or dementia, or even divorce. Perel thinks it applies equally to relationships where people don’t really engage with each other.
“Sex is not just something you do; it’s somewhere you go, with another,” Perel explains. “So where do you go? What parts of you do you connect with when you experience sexuality?”
“Is it a place for spiritual union?” she continues. “Is it a place to be mischievous? Is it a place to finally be taken care of and not to have to take any responsibility? Is it a place to express your aggression and dominance safely? Is it a place to surrender? A part of you is being expressed there and presence is vital for you and your partner to see it.”
In short, if you’re obsessively scrolling on your phone, you can’t simply expect to suddenly snap into a passionate, erotic headspace.
“Sexual needs are codes for deeper needs,” she says. “Sex means something, even if it’s a hit-and-run. What is the meaning for you? What do you want to experience there? If you know that emotional need, you’re much more likely to stay connected, so it’s no longer an issue of mismatched desires. ‘I want, I don’t want’, all that goes out the window.”
It’s a tale so well-trodden that it’s practically a cliche: the once-passionate couple who marry, have kids, live in perfect harmony for years, eventually find themselves never having sex at all. Perhaps one partner would like to have more but the other is less inclined, and over years resentment festers and grows until sex becomes a sore point.
In that situation, how can long-term partners put sex back on the table? “There are several parts to this which I try to instil in people,” Perel says.
“The first thing is willingness,” she says. “Willingness is different from desire or arousal. When we focus on those, we want people to be matched. The reality of many couples is that they’re not always matched, neither in timing nor in energy nor in the subtext or emotional meaning of it. But we don’t always eat because we’re hungry, do we?”
Perel conjures up an image of a couple in the kitchen. One is making food, the other says they’re not hungry. But once the food is prepared, the not-hungry person tastes some and enjoys it. They get a plate for themselves, and even though they weren’t hungry and didn’t need the food, they enjoyed it nonetheless. “So it goes with sex,” she says.
“Learning to say ‘let me see where this takes me’ instead of either ‘I’m in the mood’ or ‘I’m not in the mood’ is an important thing we can do,” Perel explains.
Sexlessness, Perel contends, is rarely about sex itself. “Ask yourself: when do you turn yourself off, shut yourself down, extinguish yourself – and why?” she advises.
“People often say it’s when they’re on the phone, when they’re working, when they’re worrying about money or the kids, when they’re bloated, when they’re overworked, when they overeat, when they feel bad about themselves, when they fought, when they don’t talk,” she continues. “And often what it turns out to be is: ‘I turn myself off when I’m not feeling well, when I don’t take care of myself, when I don’t feel connected to you.’
“So how do you reverse it? Ask yourself: when do you awaken? When do you get in the mood?” Perel questions. “That might be: ‘when I’m in nature, when I go dancing, when I sing, when I see my friends, when I laugh, when I go to comedy, when I see you naked, when I like my own body, when I’m in a hot shower.’ Again, very little is essentially sexual. It’s really about how I feel about me, you, and life.
“Once you have that list then ask yourself: when was the last time you did those things to feel alive? You don’t get turned on if you just sit there for 27 years then look at each other.”
Preparing for sex doesn’t just mean foreplay. “It is the whole thing, it’s about feeling energised so you can be responsive and available and put your energy into it,” Perel observes.
Today we have recontextualised sex as romantic and passionate, and in that shift we became fixated on the idea that desire must be spontaneous and all-consuming.
Nowhere is that change more clearly displayed than in our open disdain for couples who schedule sex, and that has to change, thinks Perel.
“When you say ‘schedule’ people think it’s boring, an obligation,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’s being intentional. And that’s good because intentionality conveys value. Intentionality says ‘this matters to us’. We make space for it, we set time for it, we clean the room for it, we clean ourselves for it: whatever it is we do.
“Couples who plan their sex lives, who make a ritual of it are prioritising sex and putting effort into it. That’s how you keep sex alive.”
“Infidelity has existed since marriage was invented and people stray for a multitude of reasons: sometimes those have to do with the relationship – sometimes it’s rejection, betrayal, disconnection, alienation. Loneliness is a big one,” she says. “Sometimes it has reasons which have very little to do with the relationship: the reasons are internal.”
Ultimately, Perel thinks infidelity is a reaction against the “deadness” of a relationship. That might be because the couple’s intimacy has smothered their passion. It might be that their lack of presence has convinced their partner that they no longer care. “It could be any number of things,” Perel says. “Most people today in the West are going to have two or three relationships or marriages in their adult life. Some of us will do it with the same person. The story of an affair is that your first marriage is over. But you can create a second one.”
Perel’s first ever European retreat in Paros, Greece, this October is entitled “Cultivating Desire and Aliveness in Your Relationships” and part of that focus on ‘aliveness’ is recovering a relationship which has died.
The solution? “Curiosity,” says Perel. “It means exploration, it means discovery, it means active engagement with the unknown, it means being alive. It’s a good entry door.”
And creating a new sense of curiosity about your partner is best done by creating risk. “It’s about opening yourself up to the possibility that you don’t know your partner as well as you think,” she says. “Instead of settling into a cosy existence, why don’t we, instead, have a conversation about something interesting besides what we want from each other?
“Do you know how many people go out with friends, they see their partner talking, talking about the movie or the band or the experience, and then they get into the car or the subway and they say ‘who is picking up Johnny tomorrow after school?’ or ‘did you pick up the groceries?’ From there to not wanting to have sex, the distance is not far.
“It’s about curiosity, it’s about playing,” she continues. “Play is when taking risks is fun. It could be telling interesting stories, creating new rituals, trying new food. It’s about giving your partner the chance to see you and themselves in a new context.”
As our time together draws short, I ask Perel what the ultimate secret to maintaining a long-term relationship is. She thinks for a second and then looks me straight in the eye.
“People often say ‘I want what is important to me to be important to you too’,” she answers, before. “You can’t make someone be the same as you. You accept your differences and you accept that someone can do something for you that means nothing to them, and you can do things for your partner even if you’re not interested yourself. You don’t have to change but you should try to accommodate.”
Esther Perel hosts Erotic Intelligence: Cultivating Desire and Aliveness in Your Relationships in association with luxury retreat company Travelgems from October 8-13 at Parīlio Hotel on the Greek island of Paros.