Free Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel Page A

closeness—intimacy with an injunction. “You have to listen to me.” “Take care of me; tell me you love me.” Something that should develop normally, that is part of the beauty and the wisdom of a loving relationship, is forced on the partner who is less inclined to communicate verbally. In his book
Passionate Marriage
, David Schnarch deftly illustrates how the wish for intimacy can lead a person to impose forced reciprocity as a way to stave off the threat of rejection. The bargain of reciprocity goes something like this: “I’ll tell if you will, and I want to, so you have to.” We don’t like to be intimate alone.
    Some couples take this one step farther, confusing intimacy with control. What passes for care is actually covert surveillance—a fact-finding approach to the details of a partner’s life. What did you eat for lunch? Who called? What did you guys talk about? This kind of interrogation feigns closeness and confuses insignificant details with a deeper sense of knowledge. I am often amazed at how couples can be up on the minute details of each other’s lives, but haven’t had a meaningful conversation in years. In fact,such transparency can often spell the end of curiosity. It’s as if this stream of questions replaces a more thoughtful and authentically interested inquiry.
    When the impulse to share becomes obligatory, when personal boundaries are no longer respected, when only the shared space of togetherness is acknowledged and private space is denied, fusion replaces intimacy and possession co-opts love. It is also the kiss of death for sex. Deprived of enigma, intimacy becomes cruel when it excludes any possibility of discovery. Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.
Bodies Speak, Too
    If one consequence of the supremacy of talk is that it leaves men at a disadvantage, another is that it leaves women trapped in repressed sexuality. It denies the expressive capacity of the female body, and this idea troubles me. Favoring speech as the primary pathway to intimacy reinforces the notion that women’s sexual desire is legitimate only when it is embedded in relatedness—only through love can female carnality be redeemed.
    Historically, women’s sexuality and intellect have never been integrated. Women’s bodies were controlled, and their sexuality was contained, in order to avert their corrupting impact on men’s virtue. Femininity, associated with purity, sacrifice, and frailty, was a characteristic of the morally successful woman. Her evil twin, the succubus (whore, slut, concubine, witch) was the earthy, sensual, and frankly lusty woman who had traded respectability for sexual exuberance. Vigorous sexuality was the exclusive domain of men. Women have continuously sought to disentangle themselves from the patriarchal split between virtue and lust, and are still fighting this injustice. When we privilege speech and underplay the body, we collude in keeping women confined.
Bilingual Intimacy
    When it comes to letting the body speak, Mitch and Laura are at opposite ends of the spectrum. They’ve reduced their sexual selves to stereotypes. Laura describes Mitch as the classic sex-obsessed man, demanding his rights regardless of how she feels. “The only time he really wants to get close to me is when he wants sex, and he wants it all the time,” she says resentfully. Laura, who is strong-willed and sometimes domineering in their everyday interactions, is seen by Mitch as a sexually inhibited woman who repeatedly rejects his advances from some unfathomable feelings of disgust or contempt. “She acts as if I were some sort of crude animal, and shrinks away from me every time I touch her—it makes me feel like shit,” he says, sounding bitter.
    For Laura, sex is the sum of all the cultural and familial restrictions she absorbed as a child; her body is a gathering place of multiple taboos and anxieties. Like many girls of her generation (she’s in her early fifties)