Shall We Begin?

“Have you ever failed as a therapist?” For fifteen years, whenever I was asked this question, I would think of one client in particular: Jed.

Jed and his wife, Coral, had come to me with an issue of profound sexual incompatibility. He longed to explore BDSM. She did not. And she didn’t like what it brought up for her. Their differences in the bedroom stood in stark contrast to their compatibilities in nearly every other aspect of their lives. They loved each other deeply. They loved parenting their young child together. Coral and Jed were life partners in every way and they didn’t want to part.

Jed, especially, did not want to part. And, yet, he could not bear to stay. His sexual identity was core to his personhood. There was no tempering the heat inside of him, no quelling his desire to dominate. For Jed, BDSM provided not only sexual pleasure, but a sense of healing, a container for bodily agency in which he could process anxiety and shame.

Already in mid-life, I imagine it was hard for him to picture spending any more time out of touch with these parts of himself than he already had. Coral tried to meet him there but knew that her own erotic blueprint would never align with his. They were stuck at a crossroads. Graciously and generously, Jed and Coral (their pseudonyms) allowed me to tell their story in my book Mating in Captivity.

I was amazed to learn how many readers identified with Jed and Coral’s situation—not necessarily the specifics of BDSM, more so the difficulty of navigating sexual incompatibility in a relationship that has so much love and alignment elsewhere. This is one of many reasons why “should I stay or should I go?” is one of the most frequently asked questions I receive.

For Jed, “should I stay or should I go?” plagued him long after my book was published. Eventually, he decided to end their marriage but couldn’t bear the pain of hurting his wife. When I tried to help him leave, he’d say “I can’t.” When I would try to help him stay, he’d say “I can’t.” One day, as he sat across from me in my office explaining his dilemma yet again, I snapped, “Well, let’s stop talking about it then because you’re never going to leave.”

I could see the shock and pain ripple across his face and I empathized with it. So many of us wish our therapist would just tell us what to do. In the rare event that happens, however, we’re quickly reminded of how much we do not like to be told what to do.

Jed and I had one or two more sessions and then mutually agreed I would continue to see Coral alone. Through her, over the years, I learned they did indeed divorce. And then they both remarried. He went on to have more children. She did not. For years, I cited Jed and Coral’s divorce as one of the most beautiful I’d ever heard of: they remained close, emotionally and geographically. When Jed’s second wife went into labor, they asked Coral if she could come over to watch the other kids. This time, she enthusiastically consented.

As I was approaching the 20th anniversary of Mating in Captivity, I reached out to Coral to see if we could include an update to her story in the new edition of the book. For nearly two hours, we talked about how the divorce had ended Jed and Coral’s coupledom but led to a harmonious reorganization of their family ecosystem. She suggested that I also speak with Jed. I was surprised and questioned whether he would want to speak with me. “I’ll ask him right now,” Coral said.

Jed and I met on a video call fifteen years after our last conversation. He looked like an older, happier version of the man I once treated. I was not surprised at all when he effusively praised Coral for the success of their divorce and co-parenting. I was surprised, however, that he brought with him a list of things I had said fifteen years earlier—and a new perspective on what those things meant. He remembered vividly my declaration: “The day you decide you have a right to be happy is the day you’ll finally make a move.” Those words had erupted in conflict between him and me. Now, he told me, those were the very words that had mobilized him to leave. “I was angry with you for years. But for years since, I haven’t been angry or upset,” he told me. “I’ve been grateful.”

There are some situations in life we cannot see clearly until time has passed, until the story has unfolded in ways we cannot force through hard work and determination. One of the most enduring fantasies in relationships is that if we love enough, work hard enough, communicate enough, understand enough…then everything will resolve. We employ this “effort optimism” as a means of controlling the uncertainties inherent to life and love. And then we’re surprised when we consistently wonder: Will I ever be enough? Will this relationship ever be enough?

The reality is: there is no neatly packaged resolution to matters of the heart. Relationships transform, they endure, they rupture, they repair. Some relationships remain unfinished; others never end. And yet they all teach us.

Neither Jed nor Coral nor I could answer “should I stay or should I go?” at that time, though we all tried. And I could not see, for a decade and a half, that our time together had not been a failure. Frustratingly for clients, and sometimes for therapists, we can’t actually tell you what to do. We can’t answer the big questions but we can help you explore them. We can’t offer a clear cut solution to the ineffable problems of life, but we can help you navigate where they come from and potential paths forward. Ultimately, a therapist’s job is, in part, to help you sit with uncertainty, that profoundly uncomfortable feeling that happens to also be life’s most vital catalyst for growth.

When I published Mating in Captivity twenty years ago, I thought it was a book about desire. Looking back, I see that it’s also a book about uncertainty. The true stories in its pages—of heartbreak, desire discrepancy, betrayal, fantasy, parenthood, reinvention—are all stories about the limits of control. They remind us that no amount of love can guarantee a particular outcome, and no amount of effort can eliminate risk. And, yet, relationships are still worth it.

Jed and Coral’s story, in particular, reminds us that the measure of a relationship is not always whether it lasts. Sometimes the measure is what it teaches us. Sometimes the measure is who we become because of it. And sometimes, fifteen years later, we discover that what felt like failure was simply our inability to tolerate not knowing how the story ends.

Mating in Captivity was organized around a set of questions that I never really set out to answer. Can we want what we already have? Yes, we can. And, sometimes, no we cannot. Answering the big questions in Mating is not nearly as meaningful as posing them, reinterpreting them over time, and hearing all of the personal and philosophical answers people have shared with me over the last two decades. Not every love story reaches a satisfying conclusion, not right away and sometimes not ever. Our willingness to remain present in the face of uncertainty, to let our stories unfold, to allow our assumptions to be proven wrong, to resist the urge to oversimplify, to lean into the complex mysteries within and between us—each of these efforts is an act of love in itself.

Let’s Turn the Lens on You

Think about a relationship, decision, or chapter of your life that you once viewed as a failure.

Now ask yourself: What if the story wasn’t over yet?

Continue the story. Write down three wild possibilities for the future. Let yourself dare.

Next, write down 3 things that experience taught you, revealed about you, or made possible in your life today. See the story as it is now, and how it could be.

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Conversation Starters

A compendium of highly recommended sources of inspiration and information

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mating in Captivity, several of my fellow Substackers wrote reflections about the book. It’s an honor to share them here and to wholeheartedly recommend their publications.

To Read:

• A note from Dan Harris: “The 20th anniversary of Esther Perel‘s Mating in Captivity is a good moment to revisit a core truth: the quality of your relationships largely determines the quality of your life. Esther’s work keeps returning to the same friction points—how to stay connected over time, how not to lose yourself in the process, how to navigate the quiet drift that can happen even in strong partnerships. She’s one of the clearest voices I know on this. If you’ve never read it, now’s a good time. If you have, it’s worth a reread.”

• From Unsolicited Advice by Mia Schacter: “Here’s a nugget I’ll carry with me: “It takes two people to create a pattern, but only one to change it.” … [Mating in Captivity] is a book that asks you to look at yourself, the ways you operate and maintain the status quo and even contribute to it, and what kind of relationships you want moving forward while offering real world practices for getting closer to your goals.”

• From Vidya’s essay on MIC, “desire is a slow drinker”: “Esther reaches, in her work, for play, for fantasy, for the imaginative space two people can hold between them. She writes about cultivating the third, the otherness, the unknown that desire requires.”

• A note from Lana Li: “[Esther] describes a paradox about how the very ingredients that nurture love (mutuality, reciprocity, responsibility) are sometimes the same ingredients that suffocate desire, which thrives on a degree of selfishness, subversion, and the ability to stay connected to yourself in the presence of another. I adore how she doesn’t shy away from complexity and uncertainty in her work and avoids simple prescriptions. Her speaking and writing feel lush and almost musical. Very excited to revisit this classic and see what new insights I glean as I settle into a partnered life phase.”

• From Lauren Hall’s essay, “Being Alive”: “What Esther repeatedly returns to is the notion that desire requires a certain perceptual aliveness. It is the capacity to experience another person as exceeding your existing knowledge of them. To resist reducing them to role, utility, predictability, or accumulated information. In this sense, Mating in Captivity becomes something so much larger than a book about sex or relationships. It becomes a deeply practical phenomenology of intimacy: a study in how to keep another person alive before you.”