RENOWNED RELATIONSHIP GURU Esther Perel wrote her seminal book, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, nearly two decades ago. Since then, people have sat in her office, next to her on an airplane, or pulled up a seat at a conference and asked: How do you talk about sex with your partner? How do you address your needs, preferences, fears, wishes, aspirations, and fantasies? What is sexual communication, and what is sexual candor?
“They come talk to me about it; I want more sex, but even more, I want better sex,” Perel tells Men’s Health. “How would that look? I feel blocked. My partner and I are in an erotic stalemate. We are in a complete pursuer-distancer dynamic because we have discrepant desires, and one of us seems to want it deeply. The other one just can’t be bothered.”
Or people tell her: “We’ve had affairs. How do we trust again, and how does that influence our sexuality? We have different fantasies. I’m a sexual carnivore. They’re a sexual vegan. How do we agree on dinner?”
She unpacks these questions with her clients in therapy, but most of us aren’t lucky enough to have Perel as our therapist. Fortunately, Perel has just released Esther Perel’s Desire Bundle, where she brings therapeutic tools into your home. More specifically, your bedroom.
Through a series of digestible videos and exercises, Perel provides “tools for self-awareness so that you actually get to know yourself and your own erotic self,” she explains. “I give you frameworks to understand what is the difference between sexuality and eroticism. What is the fate of desire in a long-term relationship? What is the overtaxing of desire and the underrepresenting of willingness and arousal? I give you frameworks that debunk a bunch of myths about female and male sexuality. I help to reconceptualize sexuality so that it is focused less on performance and outcome—and more focused on experience.”
The first course, Bring Desire Back, is for people grappling with erotic blocks; it’s focused on how to get unstuck. The second course, Playing with Desire, is for people wishing to bring erotic energy back into their long-term relationship. It’s not just about frequency, Perel clarifies. “Because you can have more sex and feel very little,” she says. “It’s about how you can feel a lot [of positive feelings] without having sex all the time.”
Below, Esther Perel shares her thoughts on sex and intimacy with Men’s Health’s resident sex columnist, Zachary Zane, from how to reconnect during sex when you find yourself dissociating, to her thoughts on fraysexuality, and how to play with jealousy.
ZACHARY ZANE: Working with people for 40-plus years, what are some of the biggest obstacles hindering people from tapping into their own eroticism?
ESTHER PEREL: Look, sexuality is often introduced with shame, guilt, taboos, and the word “don’t.” The most important message that most children get in America, on both the left and on the right, around sexuality, is don’t. Just don’t. So it focuses on the dangers, the disease, the dysfunction. It talks very little about trust, connection, and pleasure. Or how sexuality is a coded language for our deepest emotional needs, aspirations, fears, wounds—you know—that sex is never just sex. Especially in the media, there’s a lot of focus on how to get it done. And I keep saying that sex is not just something you do. Sex is a place you go.
ZZ: I love that metaphor of sex being a journey.
EP: Yes, it’s a voyage you take inside yourself and with others. It is a place where you go for spiritual connection, intimacy, and transcendence. It can also be a place you go to surrender, be taken care of, be vulnerable, or be strong and safely powerful. Or it’s a place to go to be naughty or to abdicate responsibility. It’s a place you go to play.
ZZ: Tell me more about how sex is play.
EP: [To clarify,] it’s not play because you have accoutrements and costumes. Sex is play because you are transcending the boundaries of the reality of who you are, of the life you live—just like children who engage in fantasy play. Our most prevalent fantasies often reveal our deepest emotional truths.
In the U.S., you often will find that sexuality is either talked about with smut or sanctimony. I want to make sex a natural subject that is respected and dignified. A subject that considers human vulnerabilities and pleasures in a kind, empathic, respectful, and creative way.
ZZ: Okay, but what about people on the flip side? How do you know when you’re talking too much about sex or potentially over-communicating with a partner?
EP: Different things start to appear when you constantly talk about sex. It starts to feel like something is missing in the relationship and the other person, when you probably want to ask yourself: what’s happening to me? Why am I sexualizing everything? Why do I feel like if I don’t have sex this amount, I feel an emptiness inside of me? When not having sex, these people may also experience stress, or they can’t relax or can’t sleep. So, people who are constantly bringing up sex are often actually talking about anxiety.
ZZ: I’ve seen this. I mean, I’ve been this person.
EP: Yeah, and these people have learned to self-soothe sexually. And if they are sex-positive, then they say, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that I want sex every day, twice a day. It’s better than drugs or drinking. There’s a whole justification system, but it’s often a lot of pressure on the other person.
And your partner doesn’t necessarily want to be your regulator. They also want to feel desired. You’re not just being sexual because you’re tense or agitated. You actually want to have sex [specifically] with them because you want to connect with them.
ZZ: I feel very called out! Moving onto something related, have you heard of fraysexuality? The best way to define it is as the opposite of demisexual, which is a more common term. Demisexual, as you know, is when you only have a sexual attraction after having an emotional connection. Fraysexual is the opposite. The moment you have an emotional connection, you’ve lost all desire to have sex with that person. So fray people like anonymous sex, group sex, and the like. While a lot of people experience a loss of desire with their partner after a few months or years, people who are fraysexual lose desire after having sex once or twice. What are your thoughts? Is this innate? Is it an intimacy issue, a fear of connecting, being seen, or being vulnerable? A trauma response?
EP: Look, I wrote Mating in Captivity without using that term, but there’s a bunch of people in there that you could call Fray or Demi. I don’t know how useful it is to bring in more terms, whereas understanding the dynamic is much more useful.
EP: One thing I do in the course is ask people to unpack their relationship between love and desire. And for some, those two experiences are inseparable. I need to [feel love], and I need to feel the connection. I thrive on that. It is what makes me wanna be with you.
And for others, the two are often irretrievably disconnected. Because I can [only] experience desire when I don’t feel any responsibility for you, when I don’t have to take care of you, when I don’t have to be worried about you. And so the more anonymous, the more emotionally disengaged, the more I can be turned on. For some people, it’s I don’t wanna know your name. For some people, I need to be afraid of you. For others, I need to feel the fear of rejection that I may not get you. And then, the moment you want me—
ZZ: You’re over it and move on.
EP: Right. So, this is about attachment. This is about the fear of abandonment or the fear of suffocation. It’s about how I enter you without worrying that I won’t be able to come out or without feeling swallowed up by you. And I’m not talking about orifices; I’m talking about the universe. Everybody grapples with the fear of losing the other and losing themselves. But for some people, it’s more extreme.
ZZ: I feel like these very same people may struggle with dissociating during sex, thinking about something or someone else. What’s a way to reconnect while having sex—to be more present and put your energy back on your partner when you find yourself dissociating?
EP: You slow down. You take a moment, breathe, look into their eyes, or close them. You basically bring yourself back. That is mindfulness. You’ve been wandering, and you’ve stepped out of you. If you have someone who knows this is happening, just say, help me come back. Hold me for a moment; don’t do anything else. Look at me, or don’t look at me. One thing you don’t do is think, oh, fuck, this happened, and it’s ruined everything. A patient of mine once gave me a wonderful analogy: It’s no different from when food gets stuck in your teeth.
ZZ: You would address it. You just let them know. That’s it.
EP: Yeah, you stop for a moment, you stop chewing, you stop eating, you make sure you get that piece out. And then you continue your meal. You don’t put your plate in the sink because food gets stuck.
ZZ: It’s a great analogy. Now, I also have the non-monogamy column, and one thing that constantly comes up is jealousy. What’s a safe and sexy way to sublimate that jealousy—to eroticize it and make it playful with your partner—instead of immediately trying to shut it down?
EP: When I’ve asked people worldwide when they are most drawn to their partner, one of the four answers is: When I see my partner through the eyes of another.
ZZ: I love that.
EP: When I see them at a public event or a party, they talk to people, and I see how others look at them. So the dyadic gaze is opened into something, into a triad, and you get to see your partner no longer just as your hubby or domestic co-parent. But you get to see them as a seductive presence that others are drawn to. That is the beginning of a script around jealousy. That doesn’t mean that it instigates jealousy in you, but it instigates the thought that you’re not just mine. I’m not the only one seeing you. Other people see you, too. And what is it that they see that I don’t see, or I haven’t paid attention to, or I should see more often? Use that energy to bring your partner back.
Jealousy is inherent to love. Jealousy is part of our archaic possessiveness. Jealousy is not a feeling you have to hide or squash because it’s so unbecoming—because it says that you are needy or dependent. To be clear, I’m not talking about pathological jealousy. I’m talking about the normal jealousy within relationships. People can play with that jealousy in a variety of ways.
ZZ: Absolutely.
EP: I think that when people play scenarios that elicit jealousy, it helps them actually disempower jealousy. Like children, when we play and experiment with something, we learn to master those experiences. We play heroes because we are afraid to be weak and want to identify with the hero. It’s the same for adults. When adults play with certain ambivalent feelings, turning them into fantasy, they can make those feelings feel less conflicting and less powerful. A good fantasy states the problem and offers a solution.
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