Tag: intimacy

Mating in Captivity – A Review

I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the concept of marriage counselling, for at least two main reasons. One is that the problems that couples have derive from two individuals who themselves have problems. While work on oneself may certainly help to see relationship issues in a new light, it was, and I guess still is, less obvious to me that there is anything specific to work on in the space between the individuals, the relationship itself. Symptomatic of this lack of real material to work on, marriage counselors have always seemed to me to come at their task with entirely unquestioning devotion to the inherited narrative of monogamy. Their task has seemed to me primarily to consist in assigning blame and soliciting repentance, with the blame invariably assigned to whomever it might be who has stepped outside the bounds of sexual fidelity. This sounds like an insane exercise in self-flagellation of the kind that powerful American men (yes, it’s always men) predictably resort to when their sexual dalliances enter the public record.

I have no idea if this is a fair characterization of the profession or if attitudes are changing, but I nonetheless found myself spellbound by the wisdom and compassion on almost every page of Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity – and this notwithstanding that, while not judgmental, the author remains to my taste disappointingly coy on non-monogamy. On page after page, Perel brilliantly deconstructs the meaning underlying how partners behave in relationships. Particularly refreshing to generations of men accustomed to being portrayed by feminists as untrustworthy sexual predators is her real insight into how men think and feel about relationships, which is expressed with a rare lucidity and a genuine compassion. Not only women should read it for this reason – men should too, for we are just as much a victim of the social stereotypes which, even if we do not entirely believe them, cloud us to an understanding of and pride in our real nature.

Particularly poignant and illuminating is her observation that, for many men, sex is a privileged language of intimacy. She notes that women expect men to share with them in ways which many men simply are not equipped to do, whilst at the same time failing to observe the messages of affection and commitment contained in the language which men do master, or at least where they feel freer, the sexual language of the body. “It is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side… for a lot of men it remains the only language for closeness which hasn’t been spoiled.” She notes also that many women take refuge in words as a way of purifying their carnal impulses, an idea she finds disturbing. “Sometimes, the emotional weaving is done through talk; often, it is not. Building a bookshelf for your lover, changing the snow tires on your wife’s car, and learning to make his mother’s chicken soup, all carry the promise of connection.”

Another point she makes strongly echoes something I wrote in my recent article “Cycles of sexual history” about patriarchal biases in the evaluation of sexual practices. She puts it like this: “Taboo-ridden sexuality and excess-driven sexuality converge in a troubling way. Both lead us to want to dissociate psychically from the physical act of sex… What is missing is a sexuality that is integrated, in which pleasure flourishes in a context of relatedness. I’m not talking only about deep love; I’m also talking about basic care and appreciation for another person.” (emphasis added). Referring to compulsive casual sex within the college hook-up scene she describes it as “less an expression of liberation than an acting out of underlying insecurity“; for my money, exactly the same conclusion could be drawn in relation to much that goes on within the swinger community. Unless you have this kind of obsessive sexuality, it’s decidedly unsexy, and over time deadening for the erotic imagination.

At the end of the book, I still don’t know how enthusiastically I would recommend counselling to sexually estranged couples; I doubt there are many therapists exercising this profession with the wisdom and compassion of Ms Perel. But to all couples, regardless of how happy they are with their relationship and their sex life, the book is certain to be an enriching read.

Self-doubt and the other

When I was 19, I had my first real intimate relationship with a girl. She was 17, we were not really in love, but I liked and cared for her a lot. We lived in different parts of the country, so I didn’t get to see her a lot. We had spent a few evenings kissing, cuddling and petting, and an evening came when we took it a bit further. For me it was a beautiful and very pure experience, it had seemed to me that she felt the same way, and so I was shocked when, a few days later, I got a letter from her which was angry and bitter, in which she said she had felt violated, that it was disgusting and dirty and so forth. This outburst of shame took me quite by surprise, as there had been no hint of it before, and it really knocked me for six, undermining my anyway precarious self-confidence vis-a-vis the opposite sex for many years to come.

Today I know how to give pleasure to a woman and have done so with many different partners. I believe I have a sense of boundaries and of tempo and can tune into what is going on in the body and mind of whoever is receiving my touch. I feel female arousal in my own body. This sense is not infallible, but even with persons who have difficulties articulating their desires and boundaries, it rarely happens that there is such a breakdown in communication that, ex-post, I and my partner have totally different assessments of what has gone on. Yet something similar happened recently, and it exposed this old pain. It is not simply the pain of rejection: much more important is the existential self-doubt engendered. How is it possible that I was so wrong about what was going on? If I cannot trust my own instincts, how can I navigate relationships with the openness, tenderness and respect to which I aspire? Am I doomed to bring pain when I want to bring pleasure, and suffering when I want to bring healing? Is my caring self-image just in fact, as perhaps the other accuses, a rationalization of cynical pursuit of my own desires?

A certain degree of skepticism in this regard is undoubtedly healthy. There are always moments when we misread signals and are caught up in our own discourse. The experience of the other is a vital reality check and it is precious when there is enough trust and openness that neither party feels compelled to distort their experience out of fear of the sensitivities of the other.

Nevertheless, the notion that there can be one event, but two different experiences of it, is to be mistrusted. Experiences of intimacy go largely beyond the boundaries of the self. When we think like this, we are unaware that we posit a notion of mind and will which is absolutely culturally determined and very clearly wrong. People are not, as we are assuming, atomic actors with single points of view: they are, as we know, complex and self-contradictory.

Sexual arousal does not bring us into an altered state of reality in which we cannot make safe judgments; it brings us into a state where we abandon to our desires. Whether the judgments we make in this state are the ones we rationally should wish to make really depends on how integrated our personality is, or to put it another way it depends on our level of consciousness. Although in sexual arousal we are more authentically and fundamentally us than how we are likely to behave under other conditions, this does not mean that this authenticity cannot generate fundamental conflicts in the psyche which lead us to view, and even to recall, an event ex-post in a way inconsistent with how it was lived in the moment. Nor, of course, does it mean that momentary consent morally suffices; a caring and compassionate partner should always form their own view of what is in the best interests of the other and allow this view to override, if necessary, even the perfect harmony which the moment may engender.

If I got it wrong all those years ago, it was not in the way I long supposed. My first girlfriend gave consent, and the experience was beautiful, for both of us, in that moment. Knowing what I know now, I could have detected the fragility in her psyche which was to force her subsequently to reevaluate that event in a way inconsistent with the truth of her own experience, and thus negate her own authenticity. This is anything but uncommon: it is, indeed, a frequently reoccurring pattern of events. We all feel shame ex-post and a need to project the responsibility for that shame onto the other. I could have said, at that time, yes, we are perfectly in tune and I perfectly perceive what in that moment she desires, and yet chosen another and wiser path. Except of course that I was totally unprepared by my experience of life to exercise such wisdom and far too caught up in the beauty of my own creation of the moment, as contingent intimacy fused in my perception with cosmic oneness. Even still, had I at least perceived her later reaction for what it was – one which her psychological integrity fully required of her, and which had nothing to do with me at all, I could still have both salvaged my own self-confidence and, perhaps, the relationship. My instinct could be trusted, but it also had limits only wisdom could overcome.

Many of us deeply desire to be great lovers, or therapists, or fathers, or leaders in whatever walk of life. We deeply care about the well-being of others. This is our highest goal in life, and we are totally dedicated to it. But we are brought up with the notion that only perfection is enough and we are deeply insecure. We do not realize that this desire of the heart is its own perfection, and so the reaction of the other challenges our sense of self, we become defensive, and create walls between ourselves and the other. What is imperfect about us in that moment is only our wounded ego – not our technique, sensitivity or value as a human being. If we aspire to be true healers, we should acknowledge and heal that wounded ego in ourselves with at least the same compassion as we would do so in the other.