“Lovers Need More Air”

Psychologies: It is generally accepted that desire is inseparable from love. Is it really true?

Esther Perel: We have always been assured that they go hand in hand, that they rise and fall together. But more and more often I see couples who love each other, understand each other wonderfully, but at the same time they no longer want to make love.

This is all the more painful because sometimes they may feel desire for someone else and do not understand why their desire flares up in relation to an outsider, but not to the one or the one they love. They suffer because they were sure that love would guarantee their desire. But the laws of desire and love are different. Love exists where there is a sense of security, where everything is familiar; desire requires surprise, surprise, uncertainty. The couples who retain desire are those who manage not to perceive the other as belonging to themselves. Where love requires closeness, eroticism wants distance.

Why do modern couples face such difficulties?

The romantic ideal on which ideas about marriage are based today assumes that the beloved is the only person to whom you can tell everything and who will give you everything you want. We want to receive from him everything that an entire community gave to a person in ancient times. Needs for intimacy were not previously focused on one person who was supposed to free us from existential loneliness, they were distributed among different people.

We are looking for a couple of love passion, emotional security, social status, eroticism. Destruction of desire results from this closeness of lovers to each other, from their emotional isolation as a couple. And desire lives only where there is air, space.

But we are more independent, we have more space than our grandparents, who grew up together, married each other, worked side by side…

The space that we seem to have is imaginary. Once it was possible to live ten together in one house. Three generations lived together, but in this large family, everyone had their own space, their own thoughts.

And today – what do the couples who contact me say? “He doesn’t talk to me,” “She doesn’t tell me about what she feels,” “I never know what he’s thinking about” … We want to know everything about the other, we categorically demand complete nudity. Personal space no longer exists.

Where does this lack of distance come from?

From the need for security. To tame external threats and our own fear, we take refuge in intimacy. But if love needs closeness, then desire requires distance, dissimilarity. Desire is the vital force by which we are alive. In a child, this power begins with the desire to explore, to make discoveries. It is a passion for new things, curiosity, a need for adventure. If parents suppress this desire, they thereby stifle life itself.

In a couple, something similar happens: desire is not limited to sex, it is based on an ever-emerging desire to discover a partner. “If I am glued to you, I cannot see anything in you, I do not seek to discover anything new, I do not desire anything.” Today’s couples do not need a spiritual flame, they have it. But fire needs air to burn…

Is that why some people regain desire when their partner has a desire for another (or another)?

Wanting another man or another woman, the partner recreates the distance. Moreover, adultery launches one of the powerful engines of desire. My partner’s gaze on someone else gives me erotic feelings because I have to fight again to be chosen. The fantasies of our partner prove to us that he is a free person, possessing an irreducible dissimilarity, an integral individuality. It’s scary, but it’s also exciting.

Why is it so difficult to maintain sexual desire?

Because it is a paradox that we must satisfy the need for security and the need for the unknown within the same relationship. Because desire involves emotions that pose a threat to love: jealousy, aggression, animality – just to name a few. Because fear prevents us from opening up to the person on whom we are so dependent.

We fall into complacency, forgetting that sexual desire and eroticism must be maintained, otherwise they fade. And finally, because our desire is often directed not to our partner, but outside – to work, friends, children.

See what we can do to see our friends! And look how we caress our children, how we help them, how we are constantly looking for what could please them. We play with them, we kiss them, we hug them. If we paid at least half of this attention to our partner, the desire would not be dulled!

So the return of sexual desire is not limited to eroticism alone?

Sex without desire has always existed: ask the many generations of women who made love out of a sense of duty! But then the question was put differently. Society, the church, the family charged them with one duty: to give birth to children. Today, there are no longer any marital obligations or social obligations to procreate. We have moved to a marital model, where sexual relations are based solely on sexual desire, which must be cultivated, maintained, lured and anticipated.

If desire is nourished by lack, how long can you want what you have?

No, of course, it is impossible to want what we have. But who are we to be sure that the other belongs to us forever, until the end of time? This is the main question to ask yourself.