Ten Years in the Tub (113 page)

     
  
Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century
—Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Out Stealing Horses
—Per Petterson

     
  
Ten Thousand Saints
—Eleanor Henderson

     
  
Elia Kazan
—Richard Schickel

     
  
Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies, and Domestic Bliss
—Esther Perel

I
know that you are younger than me, because more or less everyone is, nowadays. I am presuming, too, that if you have turned to this page of the
Believer
then you have an interest in books, and that if you read any of the rest of the magazine, then you are likely to have a deep passion for other forms of art. It is not too much of a stretch, then, to deduce from this information that your sexual relationships are complicated, morally dubious, and almost certainly unsavory, and I say that with as much neutrality as I can muster. So before I write about
Mating in Captivity
, Esther Perel's book about monogamous sex, I suppose I should clarify a couple of points for you.

Firstly: monogamy is this thing where you sleep with only one person. And I'm not talking about only one person during the whole length of Bonnaroo,
or an art-film screening, or a poetry “happening,” or whatever. Sometimes the commitment might last weeks, months even. (Married readers: in next month's column, I may introduce some more information, although I suspect they're some years away from being able to handle the dismal truth.) Esther Perel has cleverly recognized that a tiny minority of monogamists can occasionally feel a twinge of inexplicable and indefinable dissatisfaction with their chosen path—nothing significant, and certainly nothing that leads them to rethink their decision (monogamous relationships almost never fail, unless either partner is still sexually active)—and she has written a book that might help them through this tricky time. It's a niche market, obviously, the sexual equivalent of a guide for people whose pets have an alcohol-abuse problem. It's great that someone has done it, but it's not for everyone.

Secondly, I should also explain that I read this book for professional reasons, and professional reasons alone: I'm trying to write something about monogamy, god help me. I know that sounds dubious, but maybe you will believe me if I confess that my own marital problems lie beyond the reach of any self-help book available in a bookstore, or even on Amazon. They also lie beyond the reach of pills and tears, but perhaps I have said too much.

Mating in Captivity
is a very wise book—I was going to say “surprisingly wise,” because I have hitherto maintained the lit-snob assumption that nonfiction books that purport to improve your unhappy marriage or your failing career or your sickly spiritual well-being will actually do no such thing. (As we know around these parts, only Great Literature can save your soul, which is why all English professors are morally unimpeachable human beings, completely free from vanity, envy, sloth, lust, and so on.) Perel is very good on how the space between couples in which eroticism thrives, a space we are desperate to fill in the early days of a relationship, can be shrunk by domesticity and knowledge; there is a pragmatic understanding in her writing that is entirely winning and sympathetic.

She also has interesting things to say about the contemporary insistence that all intimacy is verbal intimacy, a cultural diktat that confuses and intimidates the kind of male whose inability to talk is then misinterpreted as an inability to commit, or a macho fear of weakness. Perel tells the rather sweet story of Eddie
and Noriko, who literally couldn't communicate because they didn't speak the same language; Eddie had been ditched by scores of women who were impatient with his apparent unwillingness to bare his soul. “I really think that not being able to talk made this whole thing possible,” Eddie tells Perel, twelve years into his marriage. “For once, there was no pressure on me to share. And so Noriko and I had to show how much we liked each other in other ways. We cooked for each other a lot, gave each other baths… It's not like we didn't communicate; we just didn't talk.”
MORE BATHS
,
LESS TALKING
… If you're a woman who is currently and unhappily single, you could do a lot worse than put that slogan on a banner and march up and down your street.