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March 30, 2007
How to have fantastic sex
Couples therapist recommends just a little bit of separation.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
Jews can be sexy too – at least, according to celebrated couples
therapist Esther Perel.
Perel spoke to the Independent in a telephone interview
from her New York home, shortly before jetting off to Brazil for
the launch of her book Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic
and the Domestic. A multilingual (she speaks eight languages)
expert not only in relationships but in dealing with the trauma
suffered by Holocaust survivors and refugees, Perel examined the
subject of Jewish intermarriage for nearly two decades.
"People often, when they would talk about family, they would
talk about [having a] Jewish [family]," she said, "but
obviously, their erotic interests had not necessarily been Jewish.
There was something about going outside, about being with other,
that definitely had an erotic component but at the same time, when
they wanted family, when they wanted stability, continuity, then
they were locating it within the Jewish kind of thinking. And the
two were often quite separate. You have people who have never dated
a Jew and they absolutely want a Jewish family with Jewish kids."
She noted that, in the past, in movies and books, "When a Jew
was involved, was erotically engaged, it was usually with somebody
outside the tribe. There very rarely were stories of hot, exciting
passion among two Jews."
Sometimes, she said, "people find it harder to eroticize someone
who feels too close to them, too similar to them, too much of the
same family, the same tribe. It starts to feel slightly incestuous,
slightly taboo – it feels like going with your relatives."
And yet, she observed, plenty of people have been able to get past
that: it has to do with "the way they experience their Jewish
identity and the way they experience the members of their own family."
A sense of confidence and comfort is a pattern Perel has seen routinely
in all of the work that she's done. It's what makes the difference
between Holocaust survivors and refugees who thrive – or merely
survive. It's about "how people reconnect with life,"
she said, "how they get back a sense of creative energy, of
vitality, of playfulness, that there's not just survivors but they
actually are revivers."
A key factor, said Perel, is the life that person had before the
traumatic experience. "I think sometimes it depends if people
survive alone or if they actually have their family with them,"
she said, "how much love there was ... there are so many factors
in why some people just succeed at staying alive and some people
were able to live again.... In that sense, it became the seed of
my working on the subject of eroticism."
Mating in Captivity explores what happens when the passion goes
out of a romantic relationship - and offers some solutions for putting
it back.
Couples, said Perel, need to understand that "love often seeks
closeness ... desire wants closeness too, but it also thrives on
a certain separateness and a certain space – that in order
to want, there needs to be something to reach out to. You need to
be able to maintain some sense of space in the same place that you
seek closeness and connection. The image is always of a little child
that sits on your lap. And then when he's anchored and secured and
connected, he jumps off and goes off into the world to discover,
and he runs away and then turns around to see if you're there and
if you're OK with his independence. And if he feels that you trust
it, then he feels anchored enough and secure enough to go a little
bit further. And at some point, he's had enough and he comes back.
"The fear is often that the people who have more freedom are
going to be the ones that stray. But the fact is that the people
who stray are often the ones who have been very constrained ...
it's often the people who have been contained and controlled too
much who at some point want to burst out."
It's not that the couples she interviewed for the book lacked intimacy,
said Perel – more that they had begun to take each other for
granted. She said it's important to strike a balance between synergy
and independence: having one's own friends and interests can only
strengthen a partnership and make it more exciting.
In some ways, she conceded, it's like a contemporary adaptation
of niddah, the laws of separation. Giving each other some space
is "a way to protect us against overfamiliarity and boredom.
If there is a kind of built-in period where you cannot be together,
it will cultivate longing and yearning and anticipation and those
are essential ingredients of desire. In order to have a spark, there
needs to be a gap. If you cross the gap, then you get a sizzle.
And if there is no gap, then you get a cuddle."
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