But as the encounter evolves from the fantasy of an idealized romance to the reality of an actual relationship, the projection begins to dim. In this imaginative act, we project ourselves into a fantasy of who we can be to and with the other. Through love we imagine a new way of being. Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.īeginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Drawing on decades of her own work with couples and a vast body of psychological literature, Perel offers an illuminating and consolatory perspective on intimate relationships and our conflicting needs for security and freedom, warmth and wildness. How to live with those paradoxes, rather than succumbing to the self-defeating urge to treat them as problems to be solved, is what Belgian psychotherapist and writer Esther Perel explores in Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence ( public library).

One chief reason we flounder in this supreme human aspiration is our unwillingness to accept the paradoxes of love - paradoxes like the necessity of frustration in romantic satisfaction and the seemingly irreconcilable notion that while love longs for closeness, desire thrives on distance. “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his 1965 classic on mastering the art of loving.

Mating in captivity book