From an interview with Esther Perel, the author of Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, by Courtney E. Martin in Alternet.
Martin: What can parents do to avoid replacing their need for adult intimacy and passion with play dates and car pools?
Perel: When I say “sex” to people with children, they say, “You must be kidding.” Then I say, “OK, let’s not talk about sex in the narrow sense; let’s look at the erotic ingredients.”
Playfulness! I see you play with the kids, so imaginative, but with your partner it is the usual routines where you are locked in the same character. With the kids you are constantly looking for new things to do, to discover; with your partner, it is the same old, same old. Comfortable, perhaps, but also predictable.
Your kids are dressed in the latest fashion even to go to bed; you are walking around the house in sweatpants. Your kids are blessed with languorous hugs while you, the adults, are living on a diet of quick pecks. The erotic energy seems to be alive and well, it’s just that it is Eros redirected. At some point, some of that erotic energy needs to be brought back to the couple. You need to cordon off an erotic space where you can meet as adults, for the sake of being together, not as responsible citizens who join to go over their to-do lists. It is a space where you can experience pleasure for its own sake and where sex can happen, but it does not have to.
Meet your partner for lunch when you are actually awake and dressed. Close the bedroom door once in awhile. No need to feel guilty. When kids play, they have fun; when they can be slightly naughty on top of it, they are gleeful. Adults, too, experience freedom when they break rules. For example, the rules that mature, marital sex must be serious, that moms and pops don’t do these sorts of things. Any small incursion into the illicit and the transgressive with your partner can be really enlivening. That means skipping a soccer game once in a while as well.
Martin: Do you believe in soul mates? Why or why not?
Perel: Yes, I think some people share a deep mutual sense of recognition, identification, complicity, partnership, muse, shared vision, shared gaze onto the world, shared humor. All these are features of what I guess one would attribute to a soul mate. It is a word that I don’t connect with, however, even though I share many of these features with my life partner. I guess I like to include in a relational description elements that attest to the individuality, the freedom, the separateness, the otherness, and these are usually not included in the image of soul mate, which is more fusional, and thrives on oneness.
There are lots of concepts raised in this interview that I love including play, privacy, independence, separateness and transcendence and then also, some fascinating new ones for me, too, about what might be falsehoods of relationship communication and emotional work. It’s a thought-provoking interview.
The only thing I struggle with in reading this is the assumption that a good/loving marriage must necessarily be sexual. I’m taking it on faith that this is underwritten by the author’s experience with couples struggling with sexual intimacy/desire, but for my own part I’m just not in a place in my life where I worry overmuch about my libido or lack thereof, so a lot of this just doesn’t resonate with me.
That said, this bit:
Yes, yes and amen to that. I had not thought of that energy I have been seeking as particularly erotic, though, and seeing it written in there is making me question myself – maybe it is just redirected eros after all. It is the one place I find it most difficult to get with my partner, who – despite having some beliefs and experiences I would call spiritual – does not place a whole lot of value on the whole “mystery and transcendence and awe” sort of stuff. It’s been difficult to set myself on a journey that he is not interested in sharing.
Yes, we have had times like you’re describing too, where we really weren’t seeking a lot of sex. Low libido in the first 6mths after each baby was born and not bothered by it one bit. http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/the-question-on-nobodys-lips/
Yes, those are my sentiments exactly – “who gives a shit?!” Obviously some folks do, or the conversation wouldn’t be happening in the first place, but it’s still one of those places where I’m … more bothered by not being bothered, if that makes sense.
And your final paragraph I totally get and it is something I questioned as well – being with someone who is very practical and quite dismissive of awe at this stage of his life and what that means for me, who loves being transported by things and finds it exciting to be around others who are similarly transported by things.
Exactly. It goes back to another point of hers, that
Even though our relationship model explicitly denies/refutes that expectation, I still find myself falling into the trap of it, and expecting/hoping that he’ll get more directly involved even as I know that intellectually it’s just not his thing, and moreover, that it is okay and even healthy for us to have differing interests and pursuits.
I find this quite interesting. I tend to agree with this: “the conditions that create intimacy — closeness, familiarity, constancy — are actually diametrically opposed to those that create desire — distance, novelty, spontaneity”. In some ways the experience of breaking up with my ex and finding a new partner really highlighted how desire works for me. Having a baby while still in a fairly young relationship has meant that, even though my libido was impacted as per usual, there is still enough excitement there that it’s been a very different experience to the first 2 babies. It’s a tricky thing to figure out how to incorporate distance, novelty and spontaneity into a relationship that involves children and very little money!
I quite enjoyed reading the interview. It did give me pause for thought, but in a nice way. I found it refreshingly non-judgmental. I particularly liked the idea of playfulness and showing your partner other sides of yourself sometimes. I know that something I’ve really missed with DH is playing sports together – since kids (ours are 5, 3, and 1), we’ve always arranged to play our sports separately to avoid the cost and hassle of babysitting. And thinking about that in the context of this interview, it can see how that regret fits her model.