“MATING IN CAPTIVITY” by Esther Perel

My friend Gabriela was the one who told me about Esther Perel and her book “Mating in captivity”.

After I read it, I was lucky enough to listen to Esther Perel at a conference in Bucharest.
While Esther was shocked to find out what our Romanian parents taught us about masturbation: that either we are going to get blind because of it or we are going to get crazy!!! Yep, this was the way our parents thought that we are going to be scared and we will remain immaculate.

Esther Perel was the one who taught me that:
“Love flourishes in an atmosphere of closeness, mutuality, and equality.”
While:
“Eroticism requires separateness”.

And from her book, I understood that we are looking “to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling.”

For her mother’s generation (the people who survived the Holocaust) things were simple:
“You need two things in a marriage. You need the will to make it work, and you need to be able to make a compromise.
It’s not hard to be right, but then you are right and alone.”

For my generation, things are more complicated. We want to have professional success, and we want to travel, but we also wish to love in our relationship, and we want those feelings to remain the same after we are having the children.