Mating in Captivity (30 page)

Play, by definition, is carefree and unself-conscious.
The great theoretician of play, Johan Huizinga
, maintained that a fundamental feature of play is that it serves no other purpose. The purposelessness associated with play is hard to reconcile with our culture of high efficiency and constant accountability. More and more, we measure play by its benefits. We play squash for cardiovascular conditioning; we take our kids to dinner to expand their palates; we go on vacation to recharge. Yet if we’re plagued by self-awareness, obsessed with outcomes, or fearful of judgment, our enjoyment is inevitably compromised.

When we are children, play comes to us naturally, but our capacity
for play collapses as we age. Sex often remains the last arena of play we can permit ourselves, a bridge to our childhood. Long after the mind has been filled with injunctions to be serious, the body remains a free zone, unencumbered by reason and judgment. In lovemaking, we can recapture the utterly uninhibited movement of the child, who has not yet developed self-consciousness before the judging gaze of others.

Every so often, I meet couples who get it, who maintain a sense of playfulness with each other, in and out of the bedroom. They are physically and sensually alive—two people whose desire for one another hasn’t been left to languish. Even in our culture of immediate gratification, they’re able to see seduction as an end in itself. Johanna continues to bewitch her boyfriend of ten years by setting up rendezvous in motels in a nearby suburb. Darnell and his lover pretend not to know each other when they go to a party. Eric describes making love to his wife in the alley of their apartment building when they come home late at night, a furtive pleasure they indulge in before checking on the kids. Every year, Ivan and Rachel go away for a long weekend of consensual adultery with other swingers. “Instead of having secrets from each other, we have secrets from the world.” Jessica has rescued her husband from many lonesome stretches on the road by teasing him on the CB radio. Every morning, Leo tells his wife how lucky he is to be married to her, and he still means it after more than fifty years.

For all these couples, playfulness is central to their relationship, and eroticism extends beyond the sexual act. Their lovemaking can be ceremonious or sudden, soulful or utilitarian, vanilla or transgressive, warm or hot. The point is that sex is pleasurable and
inviting, not dutiful. They revere the erotic, yet they delight in its irreverence. They like sex, they especially like it with each other, and they take the time to nurture an erotic space.

Like all couples, they go through periods when desire is dormant—when they are estranged from each other, or simply immersed in their own projects and in their own lives—but they don’t panic, terrified that something is fundamentally wrong with them. They know that erotic intensity waxes and wanes, that desire suffers periodic eclipses and intermittent disappearances. But given sufficient attention, they can bring the frisson back.

For them, love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of their romance, it’s the beginning. They know that they have years in which to deepen their connection, to experiment, to regress, and even to fail. They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli. It’s a story that they are writing together, one with many chapters, and neither partner knows how it will end. There’s always a place they haven’t gone yet, always something about the other still to be discovered.

Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion. We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while recognizing his persistent mystery; creating security while remaining open to the unknown; cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn’t swallow freedom whole.

At the same time, eroticism in the home requires active engagement
and willful intent. It is an ongoing resistance to the message that marriage is serious, more work than play; and that passion is for teenagers and the immature. We must unpack our ambivalence about pleasure, and challenge our pervasive discomfort with sexuality, particularly in the context of family. Complaining of sexual boredom is easy and conventional. Nurturing eroticism in the home is an act of open defiance.

1
The original primordial fire
:
Octavio Paz. 1995.
The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism
. San Diego, Calif.: Harvest, p. x.

3
Hence the division between the romantics and the realists
:
Ethel Spector Person. 1988.
Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion
. New York: Penguin.

4
Stephen Mitchell
:
Stephen A. Mitchell. 2002.
Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time
. New York: Norton.

8
Anthony Giddens describes
:
Anthony Giddens. 1992.
The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies
. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

10
The motivational expert Anthony Robbins
:
At a workshop in Fiji, 2005.

11
As Stephen Mitchell points out
:
Can Love Last
?, p. 44.

11
In the words of Proust
:
Marcel Proust, from
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/31288.html
.

18
Mark Epstein explains
:
Mark Epstein. 2005.
Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life
. New York: Gotham, p. 45.

19
Love and lust
:
Jack Morin. 1995.
The Erotic Mind
. New York: HarperCollins, p. 200.

20
Ethel Specter Person writes
:
Ethel Spector Person. 1988.
Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion
. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 30.

23
Dr. Patricia Love gives voice
:
Patricia Love and Jo Robinson. 1995.
Hot Monogamy: Essential Steps to More Passionate, Intimate Lovemaking
. New York: Plume. p. 95.

25
The psychologist Michael Vincent Miller
:
Michael Vincent Miller. 1995.
Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion
. New York: Norton, p. 39.

29
The psychoanalyst Michael Bader
:
Michael J. Bader. 2002.
Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies
. New York: St. Martin’s.

32
The sex therapist Dagmar O’Connor
:
Dagmar O’Connor. 1986.
How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of Your Life and Still Love It
. London: Virgin.

36
The psychologist Virginia Goldner
:
Virginia Goldner. 2004. “Review Essay: Attachment and Eros—Opposed or Synergistic?”
Psa Dialogues
, 14(3), pp. 381–96.

36
Simone de Beauvoir writes
:
Simone de Beauvoir. 1952.
The Second Sex
. New York: Knopf, p. 446.

36
The French psychologist Jacques Salomé
:
Jacques Salomé. 2002.
Jamais seuls ensemble: Comment vivre à deux en restant différents
. Québec: Éditions de l’Homme, p. 13.

38
We have no secrets
:
Carly Simon, from the album
No Secrets
, Elektra/Asylum Records, 1972.

39
Tevye, in
Fiddler on the Roof
:
Joseph Stein. 2004.
Fiddler on the Roof: Based on the Sholom Aleichem Stories
. New York: Limelight. (Reprint of original script, Pocket Books, 1965.)

40
The family therapist Lyman Wynne
:
Lyman C. Wynne and A. R. Wynne. 1986. “The Quest for Intimacy.”
Journal of Marital and Family Therapy
, 12, p. 389.

45
David Schnarch deftly illustrates
:
David Schnarch. 1991.
Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships
. New York: Holt, p.107.

51
The family therapist Kaethe Weingarten
:
Kaethe Weingarten. 1991 “The Discourses of Intimacy: Adding a Social Constructionist and Feminist View,”
Family Process
, 30, pp. 285–305.

53
No bill of sexual rights
:
Daphne Merkin. 2000. “The Last Taboo.”
The New York Times
, December 3.

59
Mordechai Gafni, a scholar of Jewish mysticism
:
Mordechai Gafni. 2003. “On the Erotic and the Ethical.”
Tikkun Magazine
, April–May.

62
Ethel Spector Person
:
Ethel Spector Person. 2002.
Feeling Strong: The Achievement of Authentic Power
. New York: Morrow, p. xi.

63
Stephen Mitchell makes the point
:
Stephen A. Mitchell. 2002.
Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance over Time
. New York: Norton, p.144.

69
They were primarily a practice of gay men
:
Anthony Giddens. 1992.
The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies
. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, p. 123.

69
The social critic Camille Paglia
:
From
www.urbandesires.com
issue 1.2 January–February 1995. Interview with Tracy Quan, “The Prostitute, the Comedian, and Me.”

71
Energy and persistence
:
Benjamin Franklin,
http://www.quotations page.com/quote/34574.html
.

72
Laura Kipnis writes
:
Laura Kipnis. 2003.
Against Love: A Polemic
. New York: Pantheon, p. 67.

73
You break the problem down to its component parts
:
Ronald A. Heifetz. 1994.
Leadership without Easy Answers
. New York: Belknap, p. 69.

73
The sex therapist Leonore Tiefer
:
Leonore Tiefer. 1995.
Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays
. Boulder, Col.: Westview, p. 51.

73
Newsweek
magazine
:
Kathleen Deveny. June 30, 2003, “We’re Not in the Mood.”
Newsweek
, p.41.

74
French author Jean-Claude Guillebaud
:
Jean-Claude Guillebaud. 1998.
La Tyrannie du plaisir
. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

74
Medicine knows how to scare
:
Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut. 1977.
Le Nouveau Désordre amoureux
. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

74
The “sexual performance perfection industry”
:
Barry A. Bass. 2001. “The Sexual Performance Perfection Industry and the Medicalization of Male Sexuality.”
Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families
, 9, pp. 337–40.

75
As Adam Phillips wryly notes
:
Adam Phillips. 1996.
Monogamy
. New York: Vintage, p. 62.

75
Octavio Paz writes
:
Octavio Paz. 1995.
The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism
. San Diego, Calif.: Harvest, p. 162.

76
We don’t always know our aims in advance
:
Francesco Alberoni. 1987.
L’érotisme
. Paris: Éditions Ramsey, p. 136.

79
There’s an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher
:
Helen Fisher. 2004.
Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
. New York: Holt.

82
It belongs to the category of existential dilemmas
:
Barry Johnson. 1992.
Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems
. Middleville, Mich.: Polarity Management Associates (PMA).

82
Barry Johnson, an expert on leadership
:
Ibid.

83
What Octavio Paz calls “a swamp of concupiscence”
:
The Double Flame
, p. 49.

87
I give him the following quotation from buddhist yoga teacher Frank Jude Boccio
:
www.judekaruna.net/yoga

88
Sex without sin
:
Luis Buñuel, quoted in Daphne Merkin. 2000. “The Last Taboo.”
New York Times
, December 3.

88
I regret to say
:
http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/i_regret_to_say_that_we_of_the_fbi_are_powerless/7865.html
.

90
Sex is everywhere, in all its permutations
:
Lillian Rubin. 1990.
Intimate Strangers: Men and Women Together
. New York: HarperPerennial, p. 9.

91
The blatant marketing of sexual images
:
Jean-Claude Guillebaud. 1998.
La Tyrannie du plaisir
. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

92
It’s also worth noting that in Europe
:
Linda Berne, Ed.D., and Barbara Huberman, M.Ed. “European Approaches to Adolescent Sexual Behavior and Responsibility: Executive Summary and Call to Action.” Washington, DC: Advocates for Youth, 1999.