Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

Energy and persistence conquer all things.

—Benjamin Franklin

IN MATTERS OF LOVE, AS in much else, America is a goal-oriented society. We prefer explicit meanings, candor, and plain speech to imponderables, ambiguity, and allusion. We rely on the concreteness of words to convey our feelings and needs, rather than on more subtle avenues to closeness. “Get to the point.” “Spit it out.” “Don’t beat around the bush.” America invented assertiveness training. This penchant for clarity and unvarnished directness is encouraged by many therapists as well: “If you want to make love to your partner, why don’t you say it clearly? And tell him or her exactly what you want.”

We believe that with a well-defined goal, a good plan, solid organizational skills, and hard work, anything is possible. This is the idea behind Americans’ optimism. With the right effort and unbending determination, there is no obstacle you can’t overcome. Hard work is rewarded by success. Conversely, if you fail, you probably are lazy, unmotivated, self-indulgent, and unwilling to really try to get what you want. You lack “spunk,” and you have only yourself to blame. And there’s no reason why this boosterish, essentially entrepreneurial interpretation wouldn’t extend to any existential or romantic quandary as well. Apply this business model to romance, and you get books like Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, by Rachel Greenwald; 5 Minutes to Orgasm Every Time You Make Love, by Claire D. Hutchins; and Seven Weeks to Better Sex, by Domeena Renshaw. Americans cherish the capacity to define what we desire and then score: if you know what you want in your relationship, just go for it. Nailing it down to an exact number of steps, not exceeding ten, promises you entrance into the garden of earthly delights with hardly a minute wasted.

As a European, I have always admired Americans’ optimism. It is the opposite of the fatalism and resignation that pervade so many other, more traditional cultures, and it expresses a healthy sense of entitlement. People here don’t like to say, “That’s just the way it is; you can’t change it.”

But this can-do attitude encourages us to assume that dwindling desire is an operational problem that can be fixed. From magazine articles to self-help books, we are encouraged to view a lack of sex in our relationships as a scheduling issue that demands better prioritizing and time management, or as a consequence of poor communication. If the problem is testosterone deficiency, we can get a prescription—an excellent technical solution. For the sexual malaise that can’t be so easily medicalized, remedies abound: books, videos, and sexual accoutrements are there to assist you not only with the basics, but to bring you to unimagined levels of ecstasy. In her book Against Love, Laura Kipnis writes:

Whole new sectors of the economy have been spawned, an array of ancillary industries and markets fostered, and massive social investments in new technologies undertaken, from Viagra to couples porn: late-capitalism’s Lourdes for dying marriages. Like dedicated doctors keeping corpses breathing with shiny heart-lung machines and artificial organs, couples too, armed with their newfangled technologies, can now beat back passion’s death.

This pragmatic approach typifies how the great country of manifest destiny goes about solving problems. You break the problem down to its component parts, study each one, and come up with a step-by-step plan that you can work on, a solution that promises calculable results. Apply this to sexual problems, though, and you get a model that focuses more on sexual functioning than on sexual feeling. The sex therapist Leonore Tiefer cautions us that in this paradigm, the body is divvied into a collection of unrelated parts, and satisfaction is seen as a result of their perfect functioning.

This emphasis on physical achievement rather than desire and pleasure goes hand in hand with an emphasis on genitals, and reinforces the dominant male orientation. The penis is the new patient, having replaced its human owner, and the ability to achieve and maintain a steely erection overshadows any other kind of sexual proficiency. With Viagra, sex is too easily reduced to erections. (And the search is on for a female Viagra—good news for all the helpful husbands currently trading housework for sex, but bad news for the wives who see their own lack of desire as having more to do with romance than with tumescence.) The subjective experience of sexual pleasure is replaced by an objective list of criteria that is easily indexed but woefully truncated: erection, intercourse, orgasm.

Sexuality is besieged by quantification that provides statistics against which we can compare our own relationships to see if we measure up. Newsweek magazine tells us that the experts currently define a sexless marriage as one in which couples have sex no more than ten times a year. Those who have sex eleven times in a twelve-month period can breathe a sigh of relief. The rest must count themselves among the 15 to 20 percent of normative sexless couples. We’ve become exceedingly preoccupied with frequency of sexual activity and number of orgasms. How much sex? How intense is the sex? What’s the level of performance? The more diffuse and uncrunchable aspects of sexual expression—love, intimacy, power, surrender, sensuality, and excitement—rarely make it to the front page of a newspaper or the cover of a magazine. Eroticism as an immeasurable quality of aliveness and imagination is reduced to what the French author Jean-Claude Guillebaud calls une arithmétique physiologique—a physiological arithmetic.

But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what’s a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.

In my experience, a treatment that places a premium on performance and reliability often exacerbates the very problems it purports to solve. The “sexual performance perfection industry” generates its own inhibitions and anxieties. More often than not, the beauty and flow of a sexual encounter unfurl in a safe, noncompetitive, and non-result-oriented atmosphere. Sensuality simply doesn’t lend itself to the rigors of scorekeeping.

This is not to say that practical advice and expert solutions are never useful or necessary. If you have poor communication, of course you should work at it; if you’re too busy for sex, you’re too busy. If you lack knowledge, inform yourself. If you have a problematic physical condition—age, hormonal changes, diabetes, prostate cancer, hysterectomy—find a doctor who can offer medical support. There are many books that offer sound help in this area. But while the problem-solving model addresses important aspects of our sexual contretemps, it fails to take on the quixotic and fundamentally existential issues of human eroticism that are far beyond any neat technical fix.

When Work Doesn’t Work

We are indeed a nation that prides itself on efficiency. But here’s the catch: eroticism is inefficient. It loves to squander time and resources. As Adam Phillips wryly notes, “In our erotic life work does not work…trying is always trying too hard. Eroticism is an imaginative act, and you can’t measure it. We glorify efficiency and fail to recognize that the erotic space is a radiant interlude in which we luxuriate, indifferent to demands of productivity; pleasure is the only goal. Octavio Paz writes, “The moment of merging is a crack in time, a balm against the wounds inflicted by the minutes and hours of time. A moment totally eternal as it is ephemeral.” It is a leap into a world beyond.

This leap entails a loss of control that we’re taught from a very young age to guard against. We are socialized to tame our primal side: our unruly impulses, our sexual urges, and our rapacious appetites. Social order is built on this restraint, and lack thereof threatens to create chaos. Because loss of control is almost exclusively seen in a negative light, we don’t even entertain the idea that surrender can be emotionally or spiritually enlightening. But experiencing a temporary suspension of our discernible self is often liberating and expansive. I have seen many people stumble when they can’t simply take the problem of eros and fix it. They are left feeling bewildered and frightened by their slackened command. I help them learn how to relinquish control intentionally, as a means of personal growth and self-discovery.

Ryan and Christine have been in therapy for a year. I meet with them together and individually as they struggle through the transition from being a sexually entwined couple to being the parents of three small children. Following the birth of their twin daughters, the lovers’ erotic inspiration began gasping for air. While some couples accept fading intensity with gracious resignation, settling into affectionate companionship, Ryan and Christine don’t want to give up. The memory of what they once had is still dear to them. They make a clear distinction between having sex and making love, and they haven’t made love in a while. They’ve rented videos, they’ve taken baths together, and they are committed to their weekly date. They’ve tried a lot of things, some yielding satisfying results, others a total waste. Merely having sex is not really their issue. Of course they’d like to have it more often, but their concern is more about intensity than frequency. It’s not the diminishing amount of sex that bothers them, but its increasing dullness. They like to be proactive, and they’re shopping for new tools.

I can think of a number of things that I could suggest to this couple, joining them in their practical approach to the problem of diminishing desire. But I question the rationalist approach in matters of the heart. I think that the challenge of sustaining eros in a committed relationship over time is of a different nature. We don’t always know our aims in advance. Our desires are not exempt from conflict; nor are our passions free of contradictions. No amount of will or reason can dictate our love dreams. Reason doesn’t know the roots of our dreams; nor does it know the mysterious needs of the heart. We can’t always use the laws of profit and loss in our romantic and erotic lives. Applying the work ethos is tricky. Even the most logical approach cannot neutralize the ambivalence of love.

I tell Ryan and Christine, “I have nothing new to offer in the ‘how to’ department. You’ve had dates, you’ve been burning incense, you’ve cracked into the Astroglide. And it’s landed you a steady diet of sex that’s satisfactory without being really satisfying. Do I get it?”

“Yes, you get it, but what are you saying? That that’s it? Like the song, ‘Is That All There Is?’” Christine asks.

“There’s no logic to this. Passion is unpredictable; it doesn’t follow the dictates of cause and effect. What works on Monday might not work on Thursday. The solution is often a surprise, not the result of the kind of work you’ve been doing until now. So let’s not talk about work. Instead, let’s talk about freedom. Play.”

“Huh?”

“Try something with me,” I suggest to them. “It may seem off the beaten path; but since your path has become a dead end, you may as well give it a shot. What rigidifies desire is confinement. I’d like you to think about its opposite: freedom. Talk about it in the broad sense. When do you feel most free in your relationship? In what ways does being married make you more free, and in what ways does it make you less free? How much freedom are you comfortable giving each other? Giving yourselves?” I start the conversation in my office in the hope that they’ll continue it on their own.

I like to make suggestions that might jolt people out of their complacency, or at least bring about a different way of thinking. I try to create some discomfort with the status quo. Although Ryan and Christine are unhappy with their situation, I’m not sure if they’re unhappy enough to brave change. In therapy I throw out a lot of ideas, never knowing where they’ll land or if they’ll take root. I let the idea of freedom sit for a while, to see if it will sprout.

A few months later Ryan begins one session by announcing: “All right, you want to hear a real midlife story? You’re going to get one. My wife’s best friend from college came to visit us recently. You know I work from home, so we’ve had lunch together a few times with the babysitter and the kids—definitely not a pickup scene.” Barbara is a humanitarian worker in her mid-forties who runs programs in crisis situations all over the world. No kids, a serial monogamist, independent, she’s committed to the cause but getting a little tired of the lifestyle. He goes on, “She’s beautiful, too, did I mention that? She lives the life I didn’t live. I feel middle-age and middle-class around her. Nothing wrong with that, you’ll say, but her adrenaline is contagious. She really hits a nerve in me, and she excites me. I’ve developed this amazing crush on her. You know how I’ve been talking about this feeling of deadness, my energy dropping, my body getting heavier? It’s like when I settled down, I shut down. Well, her energy has woken me up. I want to kiss her. I’m scared to do it and scared not to. I feel like a fool, guilty, but I can’t stop thinking about her. You know, I meant it when I made my vows. I’m in love with my wife; this has nothing to do with her. It’s about something I’ve lost that I’m afraid I’ll never get back.”

When Ryan married Christine, he slammed the door on cruising. He left his struggling acting career, turned his paralegal moonlighting into a full-time job, and applied for law school. Now he works for environmental organizations as a legal consultant. As I listen to him sounding bewildered by his crush, I see an awakening of his dormant senses. I don’t discourage Ryan’s “immature” wishes, and I don’t lecture him. Nor do I try to talk reason into him or explore the emotional dynamics beneath this presumably “adolescent” crush. I simply value his experience. He is looking at something beautiful; fantasizing about Barbara is a way of living the life he hasn’t chosen. I marvel with him at the allure of the enchantment, while also calling it by its true name: a fantasy. The question I pose to him is how he can relish this experience without allowing the momentary exhilaration to endanger his marriage.

“How beautiful and how pathetic,” I say. “It’s great to know you can still come to life like that. And you know that you can never compare this state of intoxication with life at home, because home is about something else. Home is safe. Here, you’re trembling; you’re on shaky ground. You like it, but you’re also afraid that it can take you too far away. I think that you probably don’t let your wife evoke such tremors in you. There’s an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher who explains that lust is metabolically expensive. It’s hard to sustain after the evolutionary payoff: the kids. You become so focused on the incessant demands of daily life that you short-circuit any electric charge between you.

At our next session, Ryan knows exactly where he wants to start. Earlier that week, Christine and Barbara had made plans to go out to dinner. Feeling guilty, as she usually does, about going out without him, Christine invited Ryan to come along. Then she proceeded to ignore him for the rest of the evening. For once, he didn’t mind taking a backseat as he watched the women reminisce. After college they had both spent a year in Togo with the Peace Corps. Christine came home; Barbara never did. As was often the case in their conversations, each reported her envy of and admiration for the life of the other.

“We’d just finished a great bottle of Australian Shiraz,” said Ryan, “and we were all pretty tipsy, when Christine totally shocked me by blurting out to Barbara, ‘I look at you and I wonder if it’s worth it. Frankly, I don’t think I’m made for this—the kids, the house, the job. Sometimes I wonder if I did it just to prove I could.’ Then she says, ‘I find it all so oppressive.’ She wondered if it was all worth it—she finds it oppressive? I was stunned.” Ryan repeated these words in a dazed voice as if he still couldn’t quite believe hearing them. At my prodding, he told me the rest of his wife’s remarks—that she felt she had always just done what was expected of her, that this was easier than figuring things out on her own. He continued, his tone both mocking and full of admiration as he expertly mimicked his wife. “‘I know it’s not right to complain when you have it all,’ she says. ‘Where’s my gratitude? I’m blessed with the kids, with Ryan, the remnants of a decent career, good friends. When you don’t have it—the family, the marriage—you romanticize it. At least I did. But then when you do have it, you feel trapped. I have my blissful moments, but mostly I’m mired in drudgery.’”

Ryan said nothing at the time, but he was shocked. “How was I supposed to know she felt that way? She always looked happy enough to me. I thought she had what she wanted. I thought I was the only one feeling restless.” Now, he was divided. On one hand he was angry that she hadn’t lived up to his expectations; on the other, he was anxious about what her polemic said about him. “In my mind, she’s a rock, I’m the squirmy one. I’ve had to work hard at being who I thought she wanted me to be, creating this life together. I felt put down. If she feels trapped, mired in drudgery, what does that make me?”

“Do you need her to acknowledge your hard work?” I asked.

“I guess so. Somehow her doubts diminished the value of my efforts. But then, this weird thing happened.” He paused before speaking again. “I started to like it.”

“Explain,” I said.

“It’s like I did a complete 180. I couldn’t interrupt her, which I probably would have done if we’d been alone—not that she would ever say this stuff to me, anyway. Besides, I was intrigued. She felt just like I did; she was saying the very same things I didn’t dare say. She wanted more. She was hungry, too. She missed her freedom. She kept becoming more interesting to me, more foreign. The wine really loosened her tongue.”

“What else did she say?” I, too, was curious. The actor in him couldn’t resist playing her part.

“‘ I feel like we’re just stuck together,’” he said, again imitating her voice. “‘Sometimes I fantasize about other lives, other men. Not any one man in particular—I just imagine a clean slate, unencumbered, no history, no problems. Someone I could be different with. I get so resentful that I am stuck in this house, in this family, inside my body. All I want to say is leave me alone, don’t bother me.’”

Ryan shared with me the unexpected denouement of the evening. “I started out shocked and then defensive and then angry. But, weirdly, the more she was going on and on, the more I wanted her. She was on fire. At first I thought, oh, just quit the diatribe; but then I was captivated by her, I identified with her, and in a strange way I felt closer to her and more turned on than I had in a long time. My fascination with Barbara vanished. And I knew that if I’d married Barbara I’d be longing for Christine.”

“And you didn’t have to work for it,” I say. “I couldn’t have sent you home with an assignment that would have had this kind of result.” I explain to him that his renewed desire came from her reassertion of her separateness and her dreams. When she voiced her unrequited longings, she gave Ryan permission to unleash his.

It’s all highly impractical sometimes. The same scenario with a different couple might have triggered a fear of abandonment that would have caused the fight of the century. Nobody can plan for this; that’s the point. Desire is an enigma; it’s insubordinate, and it chafes at impositions. That evening, Ryan was receptive to Christine. In her honesty, he discovered her again. Even more important, he was choosing her again, and it’s the act of choosing, the freedom involved in choosing, that keeps a relationship alive.

The flambé that Ryan and Christine savored that night had nothing efficient or expedient to it. It wasn’t a task they could incorporate into their weekly routine. Christine rattled the cage, and Ryan was dislodged. She claimed her individuality, and the end result was greater intimacy. Desire emerged from a paradox: mutually recognizing the limitations of married life created a bond between them; acknowledging otherness inspired closeness.

There is no way to “institutionalize” or create a personal marital policy for this couple that will somehow ensure that they will go on having, or ever again have, this experience. As a therapist I acknowledge that setting up some kind of programmatic reinforcement to help them maintain this newfound glow is beyond my ability. But even though I can’t turn this into an assignment or exercise, the fact that it happened may wake them up to a different kind of reality. It’s my hope that it will change the way they look at themselves and each other.

“A Paradox to Manage, Not a Problem to Solve”

What makes sustaining desire over time so difficult is that it requires reconciling two opposing forces: freedom and commitment. So it’s not only a psychological or practical problem; it’s also a systemic one. That makes it harder to “work at.” It belongs to the category of existential dilemmas that are as unsolvable as they are unavoidable. Ironically, even the business world, which is all about pragmatism and effectiveness, recognizes that some problems do not have clear solutions.

We find the same polarities in every system: stability and change, passion and reason, personal interest and collective well-being, action and reflection (to name but a few). These tensions exist in individuals, in couples, and in large organizations. They express dynamics that are part of the very nature of reality. Barry Johnson, an expert on leadership who is the author of Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems, describes polarities as sets of interdependent opposites that belong to the same whole—you can’t choose one over the other; the system needs both to survive.

Ben, for example, has a new girlfriend every six months, and each time he’s convinced he’s found “the one.” But when the erotic intensity wanes even slightly, he panics and bails, thinking, “It’s all downhill from here. I guess it wasn’t love after all.” He talks a lot about wanting a stable relationship—he wants commitment, he’s ready to pair up—but his tolerance for sexual ennui is nil. In Ben’s experience, commitment and excitement are mutually exclusive.

But in his fantasy, there is an omnipotent woman out there who can make it all come together. Her enchanting powers will ensure that the sex remains vibrant—the clearest sign of enduring love. She will be a woman who is so extraordinary, so amazing, that her sheer perfection will induce him to want to settle down (as if all this has nothing to do with him). Invariably, her unavailability is her single most attractive feature. He’s been saying the same thing for years, “I just haven’t found the right person yet. I’ve met loads of women. I just haven’t met the right one, the one I could really stay with. I ask my friends who they would set me up with, and they can’t think of anyone either. So you see?” Ben is in perpetual search for the ideal woman. Of course, he’s been looking for a long time: even the most idealized creature ultimately turns out to be merely human, and therefore flawed.

At the beginning of each encounter he is swept away, and free from his inner turmoil. Invariably, when the initial ascent levels of, his phantoms reappear, as even the most beautiful princess will not deliver him from himself, or from the challenges of love. No matter how extraordinary she is, she can’t protect him from the tedium that comes with time and its disillusionments. After each failed relationship he falls into what Octavio Paz calls a “swamp of concupiscence”—what we more commonly refer to as a sex binge. These multiple encounters offer him Olympian pleasures at night, but only sea-level dialogue the next morning. So each encounter quickly starts to feel empty, and he again finds himself yearning for the fantasy of connection with a stable partner. Hungry after months of casual sex, he approaches his new conquest with no less panic. Every time Ben falls in love, he goes from zero to 100 in one swoop. He can’t pace himself. He can’t get enough. He incorporates her, and not just sexually. It’s the opposite swing of the pendulum—totally symmetrical and just as intense.

People like Ben are easily disparaged for their extreme reactions, but they’re also a compelling topic of conversation. Ben is the one people like to gossip about with a mixture of pity (mainly the women) and envy (mainly the men). He’s a live version of the conflict that so many of us experience silently, or in a more subdued fashion.

Knowing Ben’s romantic nature, I’m reluctant to prescribe concrete sexual interventions designed to recharge his libido. Ben is advice-resistant; pragmatic solutions don’t work for him, because his quandary is less something to repair than something to acknowledge. With this in mind, I borrow an exercise from Barry Johnson. I tell Ben, “I want you to breathe in and keep the air in as long as you can.” Fresh oxygen inevitably turns into suffocating carbon dioxide, forcing him to exhale. At first, the release feels wonderful, but a few moments later he craves fresh oxygen again. I explain, “You can’t choose between inhaling and exhaling; you have to do both. It’s the same thing with intimacy and passion.” I explain to Ben that the tension between security and adventure is a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve. It is a puzzle. “Can you hold the awareness of each polarity? You need each at different times, but you can’t have both at the same time. Can you accept that? It’s not an either-or situation, but one where you get the benefits of each and also recognize the limits of each. It’s an ebb and flow.” Love and desire are two rhythmic yet clashing forces that are always in a state of flux and always looking for the balance point.

Ben has been going out with Adair for the past eight months—a record for him—and something different is happening. “I think I’m in love with this woman,” he says. “OK, I think I’m in love with every woman, but this one is different. OK, everyone is different, but this one is really different. She grounds me. I can be freaking out about something—you know how I get—and she doesn’t react. Not that she doesn’t care, or doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t get in there and panic right along with me. There’s something quiet about her, and, you know, I’m anything but quiet. I think this could work. I like being with her. And the sex is still pretty good…”

“I’m waiting for the but…” I tell him.

“But I do feel it changing. I’m getting nervous, restless. I really don’t want to fuck this up. I’m forty-three-years old, for God’s sake. I want to have a kid, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to stick around.”

I have never met Adair, but something about the way she handles Ben makes me feel optimistic. Unbeknownst to him, he has a foil for his (dare I say?) fear of intimacy. In the past his girlfriends have been only too happy to merge with him; but Adair is able to hold her own—she seems to have a real sense of self that exists independently of him. Even after eight months, she is fiercely discreet about her private life. She exudes a quiet equanimity, a sober and subtle intelligence. She is a nurse in a pediatric oncology unit and works in the looming presence of death. Ben makes her laugh; he brings lightness into her world. His thirst for life enlivens her. His erotic ardor is the opposite of morbid. She likes the contrast.

Ben certainly brings an entire emotional history to his predicament, and he’s got a lot of stuff to deal with. But the difficulty of reconciling security and excitement is not purely the result of his personal problems. It is the challenge of the modern ideal of love. With this in mind, we examine what sexuality means for Ben.

Most of us lament the wilting of erotic passion with melancholy, quiet acquiescence, or severe agita; but maintaining erotic vitality doesn’t become the organizing principle of our lives. Not so for Ben. Sex is where he finds himself most alive. It has a regenerative power that allows him to go back into the world feeling enriched and renewed. In lovemaking he feels connection and nurturance that he does not get anywhere else. He is at once vulnerable and masterful, exposed and confident. Ben is a man with an active brain. Subjected to high-octane libidinal impulses, he’s driven mostly in high gear. He gets frantic and disorganized, yet his hyperactivity has served him well in running his own courier company. For Ben, sex is the ultimate regulatory experience that quells his manic energy: extreme tension is followed by total release. At no other time does he feel as calm as when he has reached the hedonistic apex. It’s a moment of perfect harmony between him and the world. And while Adair likes sex, Ben needs it. Sex is his life support—unplug it and he thinks he’s dying. No wonder he panics at the thought of sex going downhill.

Ben is a modern man par excellence. He is action-driven, and that is why his typical response to sexual restlessness is to end the relationship, start going out again, have hot sex with someone else, and start a new relationship that will, he hopes, be inoculated against erotic demise. I point out to Ben that, contrary to popular belief, taking action is not always the best course.

“The first thing is not to act instantly on your panic and shut Adair out as a way to get rid of your anxiety,” I tell him. “Less sex doesn’t necessarily mean less love.” I offer a safe container for his stirred-up anxiety, and I encourage him to think through the contradictions of desire rather than act them out. This pushes Ben out of his old way of thinking. I ask him to acknowledge his dilemma and to observe it with compassion and lucidity. Working through a conflict is not the same as eliminating it. In the recognition and management of the duality lies the survival of desire.

For Ben, acting out sexually is a short-lived solution. It provides a temporary salve to his anxiety, allowing him to duck the harder questions: What would it take for him to feel excited and safe in the same relationship? Why are exhilaration and playfulness cordoned off from love and commitment in his mind? How can he preserve a sense of freedom in the midst of an intimate relationship?

I reinterpret Ben’s anxiety by suggesting that it can serve him as an early-warning system against complacency. “In the past, you reacted to your anxiety by bolting. I want you to think of it as a tool instead. Your anxiety is your ally, a barometer of your need to take some risks. When you start to feel antsy, it’s time for something—not someone—new.” I give him the following quotation from Frank Jude Boccio, author of Mindfulness Yoga, to think about as he leaves the session: “We bitch about our difficulties along the rough surface of our path, we curse every sharp stone underneath, until at some point in our maturation, we finally look down to see that they are diamonds.”

We live in times where faster is better and control is power, where performance trumps process and risk is mathematically calculated. In our overcommitted lives there’s a temptation to simplify our existential complexities. We just don’t have the time and patience for open-ended reflection. We prefer instead to be proactive and thereby reaffirm our sense of control. In my practice I meet couples who complain about how the routine of their lives has left them feeling numb. But when we continuously invest in the kind of pragmatic solutions for “doing sex” that promise regularity—a decent average—we run the risk of exacerbating the blandness we struggle to remedy. Eroticism challenges us to seek a different kind of resolution, to surrender to the unknown and ungraspable, and to breach the confines of the rational world.