You’ve got to admire the publicity machine organised by the publishers of Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity. Once a week, for the last couple of months, one or other of the broadsheet supplements which serve the chattering classes has featured an article, or an interview to promote the book, or both.
It’s a gift for weekend journos with space to fill: you can shout ‘sex’ in your headline; yet, taking its cue from the book, the uplifting gist of any ensuing piece will be that readers can preserve their marriages and get more and better sex – or any, in some cases – without doing the dirty on their partners. This alone doesn’t quite explain the passion with which (the invariably) female journos embrace Perel’s so-called ‘message’ (that would be ‘commonplace’ to the rest of us Europeans).
It’s hard to get at the substance of the title in question when these features tend to gush rather than analyse (though Polly Vernon’s piece in The Observer was better than most), but it appears to be pretty light fare. Perel’s point – that sex in marriage rapidly palls and declines, not only beneath the burden of the banal mutual routines of daily life, shared responsibilities and child-rearing; but also because passion is detrimentally affected by too much openness, egalitarianism and familiarity - is what her adopted countrymen would call “a no-brainer”. And her solution - to drop a bit of the pc sharing, caring, equality and candour - could only seem novel to middle-class, metropolitan Americans. (And perhaps those Brit forty-somethings in elasticated trousers, for whom the worthy tenets of second-wave feminism remain unqualified articles of faith.)
It’s a gift for weekend journos with space to fill: you can shout ‘sex’ in your headline; yet, taking its cue from the book, the uplifting gist of any ensuing piece will be that readers can preserve their marriages and get more and better sex – or any, in some cases – without doing the dirty on their partners. This alone doesn’t quite explain the passion with which (the invariably) female journos embrace Perel’s so-called ‘message’ (that would be ‘commonplace’ to the rest of us Europeans).
It’s hard to get at the substance of the title in question when these features tend to gush rather than analyse (though Polly Vernon’s piece in The Observer was better than most), but it appears to be pretty light fare. Perel’s point – that sex in marriage rapidly palls and declines, not only beneath the burden of the banal mutual routines of daily life, shared responsibilities and child-rearing; but also because passion is detrimentally affected by too much openness, egalitarianism and familiarity - is what her adopted countrymen would call “a no-brainer”. And her solution - to drop a bit of the pc sharing, caring, equality and candour - could only seem novel to middle-class, metropolitan Americans. (And perhaps those Brit forty-somethings in elasticated trousers, for whom the worthy tenets of second-wave feminism remain unqualified articles of faith.)
I understand Ms Perel is of Belgian origin – though presently a therapist in New York – and I’d venture to suggest that the “ground-breaking” and “explosive” conclusions of her book combine a bit of basic psychoanalytic theory of the Freudian ‘school’ with the sort of thing you’d pick up on any brief sojourn among the cosmopolitan middle classes of Brussels (or Paris, or Milan). I’m not saying the woman’s wrong. On the contrary, her unsurprising opinions are common sense. It’s just that, by contrast with the Anglo-Saxon fuss about the book, one can almost picture the Gallic shrug of any chic, well-heeled Parisienne; who takes it for granted that one tries to stay slim and glamorous, that you don’t compromise your mystery as a woman by permitting too much familiarity to a partner, that no, men and women aren’t actually the same, and that children will benefit rather than suffer from both parents having dynamic lives of their own outside the nuclear family. (Not to mention an unspoken conviction that, whether transient amusement or sustained affair, divertissements and liaisons for either partner do not necessarily mean the end of a worthwhile, sustaining and rewarding marriage.) In other words, grow up and get a life!
Interestingly, one (US) journalist seems to have been on the case; since he suggested the book is like Jacques Lacan meets French Women Don’t Get Fat. Spot on! So I’m not alone, then (though if it reads like Lacan, it isn’t going to be very popular). Let’s face it, there’s no clearer indication of the uphill struggle Ms Perel may have on her hands than the difficulty American women have shopping for clothes in France, where they don’t consistently stock above our size 12 (USA 10). It ain’t rocket science: no one’s going to feel erotic passion for someone who looks like a large marine mammal. Never mind, at $300 an hour (!!!) for her therapy and international best-sellerdom beckoning, there’s a shed-load of money to be made in the attempt!
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What I found decidedly spooky about some of these articles, is that their gushing authors seem to be heading straight for the rocks, their eyes wide open and Perel’s book clutched eagerly in their sweaty little hands: apparently as sincere, ambitious, self-obsessed and blinkered in this enterprise, as they probably are in every other area of their lives. They refer to incompetent husbands, as dependent and domestically inept as children, unaware that they must have chosen them like that (and chosen to keep them this way). So - not much chance of relinquishing their control-freakery for the weekend and going off for a high old time with the girls, then! They talk about essaying Perel’s precepts for “a ‘hotter’ model of monogamy”: yet seem blithely unaware that in every single instance they’re trying to initiate intimacy solely on their own terms – and haven’t paused to enquire what their partners’ terms might be. In other words, sex is merely an extension of the same controlling impulse witnessed in every other sphere (domestic, social, child-rearing, etc); rather than an enjoyment of themselves as desiring and responsively desirable. What perhaps happened here – apart from those dull domestic regimes - is that these capable, clever women unconsciously chose someone who would be dependent and amenable to control; then lived to regret the lack of more wayward masculine qualities they might truly fancy.
Worse still, we find a clue to the profundity of their predicament in their inability to relinquish what one of them - Anna Johnson, in The Guardian - calls “the child-centred model of family life”. The idea of an intense Oedipal bond between the under-fives and their mother is nothing new, going back to Freud’s Little Hans (Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, 1909). As I understand it, Perel’s populist, Stateside spin on these Freudian insights is not only that the mother is the focus of the child’s erotic interest; but also that the mother can be tempted to transfer all her sensual energies to the child; giving this new and intense relationship her playfulness and sexuality, rather than giving it to the husband. In response to this, the journalist candidly confesses that: “(b)abies create their own utterly absorbing physical rapture……a bliss beyond sex”; and admits she might be “in a selfish love-lock with (her) son”. What she fails to go on to say (so I don’t know whether Perel says it or not), is that this is something which the child always desires, but cannot continue to have. What’s more, by permitting this state of affairs, she risks damaging not only her relationship with her partner, but the child, too. It can never meet the mother’s desire and needs to be released from her oppressive desiring by the prohibition of the father. A child interprets everything in relation to itself: it is perplexed by the mother’s unsatisfied desire and assumes the shortcoming is it’s own; whereas the model of a mother’s desire being directed at, and adequately met by, the father, on the other hand, provides the map of a destiny with a happier outcome. hyperlink
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Otherwise, most of Perel’s “concepts” and recommendations are, as far as I can tell, simply the ordinary day-to-day strategems of any affair, transferred to marriage or LTR: claiming a little time for yourself apart from children and home, looking your most seductive best as often as you can, scheduling intimacy rather than hoping it’ll crop up spontaneously, ensuring it occupies a private, adult-only space away from the domestic sphere, and basing sex on play, difference and non-pc desires, rather than cuddly domestic ‘bliss’. The only thing she seems to miss from the formula, is romance. It’s this thrill from relationships which gets you high and makes you happy. Yet there’s no way in hell you’re going to inject it into a marriage, however loving - and a couple of weekends, or weeks, per year on a spa break with hubby just won’t cut it. Is one romance per lifetime enough? Apparently not: they may only be after some rough rumpy-pumpy, of course; but more likely, it’s this which accounts for up to a quarter of married women admitting infidelity (depending on the survey).
To be fair to Perel, she does appear to suggest that not only is flirting and sexual attraction outside of the relationship a healthy thing, that an affair can be survived (?duh!) - and can even sometimes benefit a marriage – and that it isn’t helpful to designate victim and perpetrator in this situation. It’s just that these bits of the book seem so troubling to British female journalists that they skip over them, rather than doing them justice. It’s distance and separateness which Perel stresses, because this prompts, or maintains, desire. Yet paradoxically – and amusingly – what some of the women writing her up do instead, is exactly what the book recommends they avoid; that is, sharing. “Too much information!” we cry – as their partners have probably done for years – while they discuss feeling “primal forces” and getting in touch with their “erotic core”, but there’s no stopping them.
The same writer (Johnson in The Guardian) seems troubled by what she calls “the spectre of infidelity”, which she claims “haunts” most couples. Most of them? Really? I don’t think so. I don’t think it even arises as a worry for a lot of people – and judging by contact/swinging sites, it’s a turn-on for many, who actively enjoy each other’s extra-curricular activities. It definitely haunts her article, though; like the stale smell of another woman’s perfume still lingering in a room. So urgent a problem is it, that she begins by trying to exorcise it, demonising and trivialising an advocate of adultery as a cynical buffoon; while herself clearly envious of the erotic power of the role of mistress; resentful, she says, of “some strumpet” getting to “wear all the high heels”. She thus implies a traditionally male division between the virtuous married woman and her debased competitor; whereas we men have moved on. We know there’s no such division: one of the other mums from the school run is going to go to work in the morning, dutifully make cakes for the bring-and-buy in her lunch-break, and be a hot slut with us for a couple of hours in the afternoon. I suspect it’s the perceived phallic qualities of this fantasy traditional mistress which appeal (and of which those heels are an emblem). Hence her understanding of Perel, is that she needs to appropriate this role as well, and become mistress to her husband. (And thus control his desire). But isn’t this another impossible fantasy? Such a dynamic and eroticised relationship can only exist apart from the nappies and bank statements and whose turn it is to do the washing-up. The truth is, that if she wants the role of bourgeois wife, with all its advantages, then that is as much as she can be to her husband – and she can only be mistress to another man.
Curiously, she claims that the traditional “mistress system is what made middle class marriage work for centuries across different cultures. Work for men, that is.” Clunk! It’s true that both covert adultery and hidden prostitution, used by either party, implicitly supported the ideological primacy of monogamous union. And the price bourgeois men had to pay for a dalliance might be measured only in pounds; whereas the price a wife might well have to pay could be her marriage, her children, her home, and her entire social situation. This wasn’t equal or fair: yet it’s also silly to suggest all bourgeois men-folk remained married without love and kept a mistress tucked away somewhere. Middle class marriage didn’t work cynically or conspiratorially. Like nationality, faith, class, imperialism, or law, it worked because both partners believed in it, subscribed to the values it embodied, and were formed, as subjects, within an ideology which represented it as both a ‘natural’ and desirable state.
In fact, the middle class (who don’t go back centuries – one-and-a-half, perhaps - nor cross different cultures, come to that) were always opposed to the immorality of what they saw as a dissolute aristocracy. From the late C18th, the increasingly confident mercantile classes were engaged in an earnest ideological conflict between their own moral restraint and what they saw as aristocratic licence. Whole rafts of European culture forged by this struggle seem to have completely passed Ms Johnson by; from Clarissa to Le Nozze di Figaro, from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, through Jane Eyre to Rebecca. (*) Within the upper classes, women as well as men continued to have freedom for dalliances and affairs, between Laclos’s time and Du Maurier’s; in part because everything, from wet-nursing to the running of their households, was managed by others. (Facilitating amours could be part of the job for a lady’s maid.) By contrast, adultery was a middle class ‘crime’ for both men and women; putting the bourgeois order at risk. Yes, men with means have always been able to take a little extra-curricular sexual gratification for granted. However many individual men secretly used prostitutes (male, juvenile and female), had affairs, or kept a mistress, though, I’d be surprised if any of it was remotely socially acceptable, or the norm; let alone a “system”, any more than was covert homosexuality. And in bourgeois art-forms like C19th novels and operas, penned by both sexes, it’s invariably punishable by death - of the mistress, of the adulteress, of either or both lovers – with occasional maiming, or social ostracism, as an alternative fate.
(* Literary critics needn’t write in – I take Christopher Hill’s point that Richardson’s art exceeded his ideological project and that Clarissa’s death indicts Puritan values as well – just as I’m aware that these other works have many other and more complicated things to say to us.)
And wasn’t it this same sweet notion of exclusive, married, romantic love - one on which all these female journos seem so hooked – which inscribed women into an unequal (and at times oppressive) social order within bourgeois culture? Surely it was this same, constricting model of idealised, virtuous wife and unacceptably over-sexed, gold-digging femme fatale, which policed women’s desire - and against which modernists and feminists alike revolted, from the late nineteenth century onwards. Wasn’t it this gilded prison, this doll’s house, from which the feminists had to free (bourgeois) women; while the moderns gave them (back) their own, dissenting voice; whether Nora, in A Doll’s House, or Molly Bloom in Ulysses?
Call me an old-fashioned pinko, but I’d understood from feminist writers that belief in a single, life-long, romantic love was a fundamental aspect of patriarchal ideology. Romantic love resolves and masks the contradictions and unequal relations within marriage and family; both of which have traditionally functioned as the site of women’s particular oppression. Romantic love, leading to marriage, blurs the reality of thankless, unpaid labour in the home and the self-sacrificing support for a man’s career. It blurs the reality that looks are a commodity, more valuable than women’s intellect or personality (a commodity to be traded by women themselves rather than by their family nowadays, but no less negotiable for that). Nor is this old hat, by any means: inequalities are still masked, because – going back to those incompetent husbands – the modern “wage-earning wife’s double day of work uncovers the patriarchal bias of (both) liberalism and (late) capitalist society”. (**) (In a report published just this week, it transpires that women with a child under eleven are 45% less likely to be employed than a man, and at the current rate, it will apparently take until 2085 to close the pay gap between men and women.) After all that ideological, artistic and feminist struggle, I’m absolutely amazed to find modern young women, like these journalists writing up Perel, naively buying into the illusion that their wedding was the entrée to a lifetime of romantic and erotic bliss! At this late date, why on earth would these sophisticated and intelligent women fondly believe that might ever be the case?
(** Eisenstein, Z (1982), The Sexual Politics of the New Right, from Keohane, N O et al (eds), Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology )
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“But what do you do when you’re away on your own?” one inquisitive female friend was asking me, in front of my wife. (A nice woman - and one clearly tempted by the freedoms I possessed - but her partner won’t be getting away without her, that’s for sure). “Don’t ask!” my lovely and wise wife advised, with a laugh; “even I don’t know what he gets up to.” Perhaps this contained a barely disguised plea to be reassured, or better informed; but equally, she may simply have been enjoying having a partner with a little bit more edge and masculinity and mystery than our friend’s tightly-leashed husband. It’s a two-way street: nor do I know what my wife ‘gets up to’, on her weekly trips away from home for work, or her little breaks to see relatives and friends. Why should I, and why would I ask, if she didn’t offer the information? Whatever she likes, as far as I’m concerned; as long as she doesn’t come to any harm. You’ve got to respect and trust a partner as an equal adult, not to betray the larger principles of the relationship; rather than tying them up in minor prohibitions, like your child. If she met someone and didn’t want to stay with me, I certainly wouldn’t want her staying because of habit, or obligation, or duty, or history, or fear of the unknown – and I love her enough to want her to be happy, regardless of my self-interest.
So as far as I can tell, Ms Perel doesn’t go far enough; very possibly because there’s no point biting the hand which feeds you. Sorry, but a successful marriage and a fulfilling romance or exciting sexual relationship just may not be the same thing. Is there any reason why they should be? And the trick isn’t juggling friendships, dalliances or romance with home/marriage/family – there isn’t usually any contest - home and marriage win every time, as far as I can see; unless people get confused. Now and then, the woman gets carried away and ends her marriage; or a man has a mid-life crisis and swaps his partner for a younger model. But then this must have been always on the cards, anyway, within their individual make-ups - and it definitely doesn’t guarantee they’ll be one jot happier on their own or with their new partner, after a while, than they were in their first marriage - it will just be different. No, the hard thing is remembering that just because someone’s given you the first proper seeing to you’ve had in the last few years, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in love with them, or they’re in love with you. The trick is to remember that just because you find yourself in a romantic situation and it’s wonderful and you adore this gorgeous other person having dinner with you in the moonlight, it does not mean you have to leave your partner and shack up with them. In other words, grow up!
Liberated and empowered by greater equality and earning power, by greater prosperity and mobility; by better health, by looking and feeling good for longer; by our children’s invariable departure for further education before they’re out of their teens - and yet still motivated by the baby-boomers’ mantra of self-fulfilment - we are in fact perhaps more in need of a mature, sophisticated attitude to marriage than ever before. No wonder we look to relationship ‘gurus’!
Yet why insist on any proposal for the conduct of someone else’s life? I’m not. I’m certainly not making an argument for routinely conducting a series of affairs: if I were, women might be most disadvantaged by such freedoms; given both the biological fact of child-bearing, and the cultural and economic tendencies which still invariably give them the burden of ultimate responsibility for household and child-rearing. I’m neither recommending exclusive monogamy, nor bed-hopping: only a bit of realism, flexibility, maturity and tolerance; instead of obsessive and anxious self-laceration. I’m definitely not making an argument for open marriage: there’s something a bit cloying, in my view, about knowing too much about someone else’s sexual or emotional life beyond you. I saw a lot of this when I was young and felt such couples can easily become like an incestuous brother and sister, or a gay/hetero friendship, in that situation – aiding and abetting one another’s conquests and amours - rather than having a desiring relationship between themselves. But a few boundaries, a sensible respect for the other person’s individuality and separateness; that’s another thing entirely: together with a mature acceptance that no one can ever be absolutely everything to someone else.
The solutions people find, the compromises they settle on, have got to be their own. I’m merely stating the obvious: that perhaps one person may not always be enough for an entire lifetime; for every erotic impulse, for every emotional, sexual or intellectual need and longing. And yet this surely doesn’t mean we have to inflict painful, costly and traumatic divorces and separations on our children, our partners and ourselves. I’m not suggesting divorce should never happen; but people who are on their third or fourth marriage have definitely got a problem. In a dynamic and successful marriage, surely all one needs to do, is get out of each other’s pockets and get on with your own lives: both sexes need to grant each other a bit more space and autonomy, a bit more real equality.
As for Ms Perel and her journalistic sycophants…. Well, perhaps I’m wrong – now and then, it may work, I suppose – but it’s very hard to believe that a few expensive sessions with a ‘couples’ therapist is going to fix a relationship in crisis; let alone two complex people, and the complicated relations between them, getting sorted merely by reading a self-help book! Why would it be that easy, how could it ever be so small a matter - when it will inevitably be the product of two entire biographies, with much of this experience unconscious? Yet so eager for answers were the reviewers and interviewers – (or perhaps they were just eager for a decent session in the sack!) - that they swallowed the PR wholesale; I didn’t read one single word of caution, let alone of criticism. If either or both partners really would benefit from therapeutic intervention, then I’d argue that it’s an entirely individual matter; which will probably take them years. (And it will take them years on their own – they didn’t share childhoods!) Just like any successful long-term relationship, it will require commitment and hard work. And just like the commitment and hard work you put into a relationship, there’s a reasonable chance that, in return, therapy will then deliver a degree of happiness, understanding and well-being. But get real, people! - expecting a quick-fix to put the thrill of romance or the excitement of eroticism back into a lifetime’s partnership may be asking way too much.
(written Feb 07)
