Love vs. Desire

By on November 25, 2008 in Love & Sex, Relationships

Whenever I ask people, "What do you think of when you hear the word love?" I am met with countless variations on the same theme: warmth, intimacy, kindness, tenderness, support, care, safety, protection, calm, trust. The answers are quite different when I ask about desire: hardness, heat, power, exciment, a sense of being alive, feeling sexy, hungry, sweaty, tingly, full, energized, driven, abandon, free — and these are the attributes missing from the most loving and closest of relationships. Like fire, desire needs air. Many couples fail to leave each other enough air, confusing intimacy with fusion; this is a bad omen for sex.

Love and desire, they relate, but they also conflict. Love flourishes in an atmosphere of reciprocity, mutuality, protection. Desire is more selfish — and we come with a whole list of injunctions against selfishness in love. Sometimes the very elements that nurture love block desire. The familiarity inherent in intimacy, the comfort we so desperately crave, can extinguish the flame of desire. My work with couples is to elicit strivings, longing, and novelty — to make interesting what is sufficiently available.

These elements we seek, the ones that combined, light the flame of eroticism, exist and thrive in a space I think of as otherness. The best intimacy is the one that respects this otherness. Individuality and difference are accentuated, and you actually see the other person as a separate being. As expressed by the great narrator, Proust, "The true voyage of discovery is not about discovering new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes." In those moments we stand on opposite ends of this space we see each other with new eyes. Our separateness is what allows for risk, vulnerability, and erotic charge of the unknown.

When we do manage to create space for desire, with it comes an inherent anxiety. In the face of this anxiety we can respond with fear and as a result, close ourselves off from the very thing we crave. We can reduce our partner to a completely knowable entity, and then spend years complaining of boredom.

Or we can respond with curiosity and embrace our partners’ mystery. It is our willingness to engage that mystery that keeps desire alive. Far too often, people sacrifice playfulness and discovery for the illusion of certainty. Instead, why not exchange illusion for fantasy in this mysterious space? Sure, on some level we trade passion for security; we are trading one illusion for another. But it is a matter of degree. We can’t live in constant fear, but we can feel dead without any.

Like the child who jumps off a mother’s comfortable lap, running off to discover and explore, before returning to the safety of home base, we adults continuously seek to balance our contradictory needs for connection and freedom, comfort and fear, the grown-up version of hide and seek.

And so what should we do? How do we go about sustaining love and desire, and both with the same person? While igniting that flame of desire is not simple, it is definitely doable. It requires active engagement and planning — and I’m not talking about the kind of planning we do with our blackberries.

First, we would be wise to give up the idea that sex needs to be spontaneous or not at all. When you want to cook a nice meal, you choose the ingredients carefully, taking pride in every nuance of flavor. When there’s a room to be painted, you laboriously pore over swatches, before finally choosing a color. Why would you make love without thinking about it beforehand? Without anticipation? Without imagination? Without careful attention to detail?

Desire has an imperious need for attention. To sustain desire is to actively engage with the erotic. It’s not just sex — animals have sex; as humans, we are blessed with the capacity for fantasy and wonder. And the sex has to be worth wanting: sex that does not reveal its ending right away; sex that is fun, playful, naughty, rebellious — and accepted.

But acceptance is not synonymous with predictability. It is not about acceptance in a way that means you are settling, and then complaining to your friends about how dull it is. Complaining of sexual ennui is conventional — everybody’s doing it. Bringing lust home is an act of open defiance. And yes, desire has a rebellious spirit.

About esther.perel

Esther Perel is a licensed marriage and family therapist. An acknowledged authority for nearly 25 years on wartime, post-war, and refugee families; cultural identity; cross-cultural relations; and ethnic and religious intermarriage, her clinical teaching and interests center on culture and sexuality with a focus on couples. Perel is fluent in eight languages and her private psychotherapy practice in New York City serves multilingual clients. Her expertise has been sought after by victims of conflict as well as by therapists and crisis counselors in training. She has led private and public interventions around the world, and also coaches, consults, and trains organizations and lay and professional audiences.

 

Perel's innovative strategies and models for leadership have won her an international clientele of nonprofit organizations, foundations, schools, community groups, and corporations, including: New York University Medical Center; Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Psychosocial Centre for Refugees at the University of Oslo, Norway; the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute; the Wexner Foundation; the 92nd Street Y; the Skirball Center; and United Jewish Communities. A frequent keynote speaker, she regularly addresses therapeutic and lay communities at conferences, cross-cultural forums, and workshops. In New York City, Perel hosts the Downtown Salon, a capacity crowd forum on zeitgeist issues that grew out of the Ideas Cafe she launched at the Skirball Center in 2003.

Born and raised in Belgium, Perel holds degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Lesley College. She was trained and supervised in family therapy by Dr. Salvador Minuchin and serves on the faculties of the department of psychiatry, New York University Medical School, and Columbia University's International Trauma Studies Program, Mailman School of Public Health.

As a media commentator, Perel has been a guest on popular radio shows, such as The Brian Lehrer Show, and has been interviewed in leading publications, such as the Washington Post, Tikkun, New York Magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Self, and Working Woman. She has also appeared on television programs including the Oprah Winfrey Show, the Today Show, Good Day New York, and Women Aloud.

Perel has written numerous articles and chapters about intermarriage, the families of Holocaust survivors, cross-cultural couples, and cultural and religious identity. Her 2002 essay, "Erotic Intelligence: Reconciling Sensuality and Domesticity," was featured on the front cover of the Utne Reader and was included in the anthology, Best Erotic Writings 2004. She is the author of Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, which Ladies Home Journal calls a "a sweet relief" and the New York Family Review says is an "oasis of insight and inspiration."

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One Response to Love vs. Desire

  1. burcidi November 26, 2008 at 9:14 pm #

    This was very insightful. I will not pretend I know much about this subject because I don't. I was raised in a culture in which it is not acceptable to know or experience these things until you are married. I have been happy with that decision, but very recently, in a relationship, I felt the contradiction you mentioned about love and intimacy. My conscience and my desires seemed to tell me to do exactly the opposite things. My conscience always won out.

    I would like to ask you however about the implications of cultural and religious rules on relationships, intimacy and sex. For example, I am certain that I will never be able show my desires to the person I marry in the future because I was raised to believe that women were not supposed to do that, men always have to be the aggressor . I somehow link any expression of desire by a female with dishonor. I know it sounds ridiculous and it really isn't logical or just. A woman should be able to live her desires just as men do. How might it be possible to overcome this contradiction without being burdened with feelings of guilt?