The-Double-Flame 2.pdf - Esther Perel

The Double Flame 29
real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in
having new eyes.”
The question posed earlier—“Can we want what we already
have?”—invites us to admit that we never “have” our partners. It
is our willingness to engage with the mystery that keeps desire alive.
Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond
with fear or with curiosity. We can try to reduce them to a knowable
entity, or we can embrace their persistent mystery. When we resist the
urge to control, when we keep ourselves open, we preserve the possibility
of discovery. Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between
anxiety and fascination. We remain interested in our partners; they
delight us, and we’re drawn to them. It is not mere emotional anxiety,
but rather the existential reality that there is no permanence, no
lasting holding. When we trade passion for reality, maybe we are just
trading one fiction for another. In the words of therapist Anthony
Robbins, passion is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty
we can tolerate.
EroTicism as alivEnEss, PlEasurE, imaginaTion
My interest is in the erotic, not only in the act of sex. The physical act
of sex is often too narrow and it easily degenerates into conversations
about numbers and performance. The erotic landscape is vastly larger,
richer, and more intricate than the physiology of sex or any repertoire
of sexual techniques. What people long for is radiance, beating back
deadness.
This focus on eroticism comes from my work with traumatized
populations and from growing up in a community of Holocaust survivors,
where I always observed two groups. There were those who did
not die, and those who came back to live. Those who didn’t die lived
quite tethered to the ground, pouring their energies into finding basic
trust, alleviating their fears, and guarding against a dangerous world
outside. Pleasure for them was fraught with guilt and fear. Those who
came back to live were eager to reenter the world, forge ahead, reconnect
with playfulness and pleasure and take risks. They understood
how to cultivate aliveness, vibrancy; they experienced the erotic as an
antidote to death. This distinction also applies to the couples I work
with: there are those who survive and those who are alive. I think of
eroticism beyond the sexual meaning that modernity has assigned to
it. Couples who have an erotic spark know how to cultivate a sense of
Copyright © 2010 The Guilford Press