Mating in Captivity

By making herself indispensable, she has hoped to counteract the vagaries of love.

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.

This exercise, though simple, is remarkably illuminating. First, because it lays out exactly how love and desire are parsed in each partner’s mind—how separate they are and how interwoven. Second, it enables me to look at the congruence of these arrangements between partners. As

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.

We do an exercise in which they divide a piece of paper by drawing a line down the middle, then separately write their immediate associations of the word “love” on the left-hand side. I give them prompts: “When I think of love, I think of . . .” “When I love I feel . . .” “When I am loved I feel . . .” “In love, I look for . . .” As soon as they fi

When the erotic mind senses criticism, it goes into hiding. No longer private, it becomes secretive.

Paradoxically, ruthlessness is a way to achieve closeness.

It is so complete—and our need to feel safe is so profound—that we will do anything not to lose them.

Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.