TED Talk: Esther Perel: Rethinking infidelity

On Amazon, stumbled across this book title by the woman who did that TED talk:

Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence
by Esther Perel
Link: amzn.com/0060753641

The blurb:

One of the world’s most respected voices on erotic intelligence, Esther Perel offers a bold, provocative new take on intimacy and sex. Mating in Captivity invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home.

Drawing on more than twenty years of experience as a couples therapist, Perel examines the complexities of sustaining desire. Through case studies and lively discussion, Perel demonstrates how more exciting, playful, and even poetic sex is possible in long-term relationships. Wise, witty, and as revelatory as it is straightforward, Mating in Captivity is a sensational book that will transform the way you live and love.

I might have to read it... with my next wife.

She does have some interesting stuff to say. This quote is from a different talk, but it resonates strongly with what I feel about it at the moment:


But more importantly, for me to begin to understand who are the couples who have an erotic spark, what sustains desire, I had to go back to the original definition of eroticism, the mystical definition, and I went through it through a bifurcation by looking, actually, at trauma, which is the other side. And I looked at it, looking at the community that I had grown up in, which was a community in Belgium, all Holocaust survivors, and in my community, there were two groups: those who didn't die, and those who came back to life. And those who didn't die lived often very tethered to the ground, could not experience pleasure, could not trust, because when you're vigilant, worried, anxious, and insecure, you can't lift your head to go and take off in space and be playful and safe and imaginative. Those who came back to life were those who understood the erotic as an antidote to death. They knew how to keep themselves alive. And when I began to listen to the sexlessness of the couples that I work with, I sometimes would hear people say, "I want more sex," but generally, people want better sex, and better is to reconnect with that quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of renewal, of vitality, of Eros, of energy that sex used to afford them, or that they've hoped it would afford them.

And so I began to ask a different question. "I shut myself off when ..." began to be the question. "I turn off my desires when ..." Which is not the same question as, "What turns me off is ..." and "You turn me off when ..." And people began to say, "I turn myself off when I feel dead inside, when I don't like my body, when I feel old, when I haven't had time for myself, when I haven't had a chance to even check in with you, when I don't perform well at work, when I feel low self esteem, when I don't have a sense of self-worth, when I don't feel like I have a right to want, to take, to receive pleasure."

And then I began to ask the reverse question. "I turn myself on when ..." Because most of the time, people like to ask the question, "You turn me on, what turns me on," and I'm out of the question, you know? Now, if you are dead inside, the other person can do a lot of things for Valentine's. It won't make a dent. There is nobody at the reception desk.