Let me say, before anything else, that Esther Perel changed the conversation. Mating in Captivity, first published in 2006 and reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition in 2026, remains one of the most intellectually provocative books ever written about desire, domesticity, and the peculiar predicament of long-term couplehood. I have recommended it to clients. I have quoted it in supervision. I have dog-eared its pages until the spine gave up entirely.
But here is the thing about books that genuinely move us: they also earn the right to be argued with. And the longer I sit with couples in my consulting room on Harley Street — couples at the end of their tether, couples quietly drowning, couples who love each other fiercely and have absolutely no idea how to want each other — the more I find myself pushing back on some of Perel’s central assumptions. Not because she is wrong, exactly. But because she is not quite right enough, and in a field this intimate, the gap between almost right and actually right can matter enormously.
This article is my honest reckoning with Mating in Captivity. It is also, I hope, a contribution to a richer conversation about desire, eroticism, and what contemporary couples therapy in Britain in 2025 — informed by neuroscience, trauma theory, attachment research, and the lived experience of diverse bodies and minds — actually needs to say.
What Perel Gets Brilliantly Right
Begin with the generous reading, because it is also the accurate one. Perel’s central paradox — that the very security and closeness we crave in intimate relationships can be the enemy of erotic desire — is not just theoretically elegant. It is clinically true, again and again, in ways that still feel surprising no matter how many times I encounter it.
The couple who describe themselves as best friends, who finish each other’s sentences, who have merged their social lives, their finances, their parenting styles, and their Netflix queue — and who cannot understand why, somewhere between the dishwasher and the school run, the spark has gone out. Perel names this precisely. Desire, she argues, requires a gap to cross. It requires the Other to remain, in some sense, other. When we collapse the distance between ourselves and our partners entirely — when we achieve the total merger that our attachment systems seem to want — we inadvertently extinguish the very thing we were hoping to protect.
This is insight of the first order. It has clinical utility because it reframes the absence of desire not as a symptom of relational failure, but as a predictable consequence of relational success of a particular kind. The couple who have become too fused are not broken. They have simply prioritised one dimension of love — security, companionship, mutual knowing — at the expense of another. That is a workable problem. It invites a very different therapeutic conversation than the one that begins with ‘there must be something wrong with one of us.’
Perel is also brilliant on the erotic imagination. Her insistence that fantasy, play, and a degree of healthy transgression are not pathological but essential — that eroticism is not merely a biological drive but a form of meaning-making — runs counter to the relentlessly goal-oriented, performance-focused discourse that still dominates too much of popular sex advice. She gives couples permission to be complex. She gives sexuality permission to be strange. That matters.
Desire requires a gap to cross. When we collapse the distance entirely, we inadvertently extinguish the very thing we were hoping to protect.
Where I Start to Diverge
Here is where my discomfort begins, and it starts with something subtle: whose eroticism is Perel actually describing?
Mating in Captivity is steeped in a particular cultural aesthetic — European, cosmopolitan, intellectually playful, and, beneath its inclusive surface, rooted in assumptions about embodiment, autonomy, and erotic agency that do not map cleanly onto all the people who actually walk through therapy doors. When Perel invites couples to embrace distance, mystery, and the productive tension of ‘otherness,’ she is writing for people who already feel a secure enough sense of self from which to experiment with separateness. But for many people — particularly those with insecure attachment, complex trauma histories, or neurodivergence — the experience of ‘otherness’ in a partner does not feel erotic. It feels dangerous. It activates the very nervous system responses that make desire impossible.
This is not a peripheral critique. In my practice, a significant proportion of the couples I see are navigating relationships in which one or both partners carries a trauma history — developmental trauma, relational trauma, sometimes both. For these clients, Perel’s prescription of cultivating mystery and distance can land not as liberation but as re-wounding. The therapist who encourages a trauma-organised client to ‘stop trying to know your partner so completely’ risks inadvertently reactivating the attachment wound that created the anxious over-merging in the first place.
Healthy erotic distance is only achievable from a foundation of felt safety. Perel, to her credit, does not entirely ignore this — she acknowledges that the project of sustaining desire requires a bedrock of trust. But she does not dwell on it. The architecture of her argument assumes that safety is already there, that it is mere familiarity rather than unresolved fear that is dampening desire. For many of the people I work with, that assumption is wrong, and the therapeutic priority has to be the safety first.
The Neurodiversity Dimension
There is a dimension of Perel’s framework that is almost entirely absent from Mating in Captivity, and it is one that has become increasingly central to my own clinical work: neurodivergence.
I was diagnosed autistic in my fifties. That experience — of understanding, retrospectively, how a different neurological wiring had shaped my experience of intimacy, desire, sensory connection, and communication across decades — fundamentally changed how I think about erotic life. And it has made me acutely aware of how much of the standard discourse about desire, including Perel’s, is written for and about neurotypical nervous systems.
Consider sensory experience. Sensate focus — the technique developed by Masters and Johnson and widely used in sex therapy — rests on the premise that removing performance pressure and returning attention to embodied sensation will naturally reawaken desire. For neurotypical couples, this is often transformative. For autistic or sensory-sensitive individuals, however, the instruction to ‘focus on physical sensation without any expectation’ can be experienced as profoundly destabilising — not because they lack erotic capacity, but because their relationship to sensory input is fundamentally different. Overwhelming rather than grounding. Anxiety-inducing rather than pleasurable. The intervention needs adapting, not abandoning, but that adaptation requires a framework that Perel’s book does not offer.
Or consider the erotic template — the concept, drawn from the work of psychologist Jack Morin, that our deepest erotic preferences are shaped by formative early experiences, often involving some combination of longing, prohibition, power, and transgression. Perel draws on this idea implicitly throughout Mating in Captivity. But for neurodivergent individuals, the erotic template is frequently complicated by years of masking, social confusion, and a fragmented sense of self. Understanding one’s own desires — let alone communicating them to a partner — can require a different kind of therapeutic exploration than Perel’s relatively fluid, improvisational model suggests.
This is not to say that autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people cannot have rich, complex, deeply satisfying erotic lives. Of course they can, and do. But they need a therapeutic framework that meets them where they are, not one built on assumptions of neurotypical embodiment and neurotypical social-emotional processing.
Healthy erotic distance is only achievable from a foundation of felt safety. The architecture of Perel’s argument assumes that safety is already there. For many of the people I work with, that assumption is wrong.
Power, Inequality, and the Limits of the Erotic Frame
There is a passage in Mating in Captivity that has always made me uneasy. Perel argues that eroticism inherently involves power — surrender, dominance, the frisson of asymmetry — and that the modern couple’s commitment to equality and emotional transparency is, paradoxically, antithetical to erotic desire. She writes with characteristic elegance about how ‘good sex often requires stepping away from equal participation,’ and about the necessity of allowing ‘power dynamics’ to surface in the bedroom even when we work to eradicate them everywhere else.
I understand what she is pointing at, and she is not wrong that erotic life is not politically tidy. The fantasy life of even the most committed egalitarian is rarely a paragon of feminist principle, and the therapeutic instinct to pathologise this misses something important about the nature of imagination. Perel is right to push back against the tendency to flatten erotic complexity in the name of ideological consistency.
And yet. And yet.
The couples who sit in front of me are not abstract embodiments of erotic paradox. They are real people with real histories, and for some of them — particularly women who have spent years navigating relationships in which power differentials were not playful but coercive, not consensual but imposed — the invitation to ’embrace power dynamics’ lands very differently than Perel intends. The woman who was controlled by a previous partner. The client whose sexual experience has been shaped by a culture that did not believe her desire was hers to own. For these clients, the therapeutic project is not about introducing a little productive tension — it is about rebuilding a sense of erotic selfhood that was never securely established in the first place.
Perel’s framework, at its weakest, can inadvertently romanticise the very dynamics that bring people to therapy in distress. The line between productive erotic tension and the echo of relational harm is not always as visible as the book implies, and a therapist who does not maintain that distinction carefully is not doing their client a service.
What the British Clinical Context Adds
I trained and practice in the UK, under the supervision of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) framework and the existential-phenomenological tradition of Professor Del Loewenthal. This matters because the clinical culture in which one is formed shapes the questions one learns to ask — and the British tradition, at its best, has a particular attentiveness to context, to the social and political dimensions of psychological experience, and to the danger of universalising frameworks that were built in one cultural setting and exported to all others.
Perel is Belgian, educated in Israel, and practises in New York. Her intellectual formation is European, her clinical context American. Neither is superior to the British experience, but each produces different emphases. Perel is sometimes dismissive of American therapeutic culture — she is fond of pointing out, with barely concealed amusement, that American clinicians tend to pathologise erotic complexity — but she rarely turns the same critical gaze on the assumptions embedded in her own framework.
A British clinical lens adds, I think, a few things of value. First, a greater comfort with ambiguity and incompleteness — the recognition that some erotic difficulties do not resolve, that some couples will not achieve the playful, mysterious, distance-cultivating eroticism Perel describes, and that this is not a therapeutic failure but a reflection of the genuine complexity of human life. Second, a stronger commitment to the social and political context of desire — to asking not only ‘what does this couple need individually?’ but ‘what has the culture told each of them about their bodies, their desires, their worth?’ And third, perhaps, a somewhat less evangelical relationship to the idea of transformation — a willingness to say that some couples might be better served by clarity and acceptance than by the pursuit of a rekindled erotic life.
So What Would I Write Instead?
If I were writing the book — and perhaps one day I will — it would begin not with the paradox of desire and domesticity, but with the question of self. Before we can talk meaningfully about erotic connection between two people, we need to know something about each person’s individual relationship to their own body, their own pleasure, their own permission. So much of what presents as ‘mismatched desire’ in couples therapy is not actually a mismatch between two people’s libidos. It is two people, each of whom has an unresolved, often largely unconscious relationship with their own eroticism, trying to negotiate a shared intimate life without the vocabulary to name what they actually need.
My imagined book would also give much more space to the body as a site of knowledge rather than merely a site of pleasure. Trauma lives in the body. Shame lives in the body. So does desire, when it is allowed to. The somatic dimension of erotic life — what it means to actually inhabit one’s own physical experience during intimacy, to stay present rather than dissociate, to feel rather than perform — is under-explored in Perel’s framework, and it is, in my experience, where the most important therapeutic work often happens.
And finally — I would write with more tenderness about the couples who do not make it. Mating in Captivity is, at heart, an optimistic book. Perel believes that desire can be sustained, rekindled, reimagined. I share that optimism, in general. But I have also sat with couples for whom the honest, loving, courageous conclusion was not ‘let us find our erotic selves again’ but ‘let us part with dignity, and understand ourselves better for what this has taught us.’ That story deserves space too.
Before we can talk meaningfully about erotic connection between two people, we need to know something about each person’s individual relationship to their own body, their own pleasure, their own permission.
A Final Word
None of this diminishes what Perel has given us. Mating in Captivity opened a door that was firmly shut — it made desire a legitimate subject of serious clinical and public conversation, it named the paradox at the heart of modern couplehood with extraordinary precision, and it gave millions of people a language for something they had felt but could not articulate. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, a very large thing.
But the best intellectual gifts are the ones that invite us to keep thinking, to push further, to ask what the framework misses as well as what it illuminates. Perel’s work merits serious engagement precisely because it is serious work. And serious work, in this field as in any other, is not served by reverence. It is served by honest, rigorous, compassionate inquiry.
Which is, when I think about it, not entirely unlike what I try to offer my clients.
About the Author
Dr Olena Edwards-Skadowska PhD MA PGDip MBACP Accredited FMBPsS is the Founder and Clinical Director of London Trusted Therapy, a specialist psychotherapy and assessment practice at 115A Harley Street, London W1G 6AL. She is also the Founder of the London Academy of Modern Psychology (LAMP) and author of Anxie the Hedgehog (2024). She trained under Professor Del Loewenthal in existential-phenomenological psychotherapy and holds an Advanced Diploma in Relationship and Psychosexual Health (COSRT-accredited). She was diagnosed autistic in her fifties and draws on lived experience in her clinical and public-facing work.
