Mating in Captivity
Paradoxically, ruthlessness is a way to achieve closeness.
Esther Perel • Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships
the tension between security and adventure is a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve.
Esther Perel • Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships
probably don’t let your wife evoke such tremors in you. There’s an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher who explains that lust is metabolically expensive. It’s hard to sustain after the evolutionary payoff: the kids. You become so focused on the incessant demands of daily life that you short-circuit any electric charge between you.
Esther Perel • Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships
lived. The evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher says that the hormonal cocktail of romance (dopamine, norepineprine, and PEA) is known to last no more than a few years at best. Oxytocin, the cuddling hormone, outlasts them all.
Esther Perel • Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships
By making herself indispensable, she has hoped to counteract the vagaries of love.
Esther Perel • Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships
But Lena’s niceness is precisely what turns her husband off.
Esther Perel • Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships
It is so complete—and our need to feel safe is so profound—that we will do anything not to lose them.
Esther Perel • Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships
Even more important, he was choosing her again, and it’s the act of choosing, the freedom involved in choosing, that keeps a relationship alive.
Esther Perel • Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships
When the erotic mind senses criticism, it goes into hiding. No longer private, it becomes secretive.