Ask yourself who the most famous living psychologist is right now, and you’d probably land on Esther Perel. Her podcast, Where Should We Begin?, in which she speaks to one couple per episode in an attempt to untangle some central issue, has amassed hundreds of thousands of listeners. Her two Ted Talks, 2013’s “The secret to desire in a long-term relationship” and 2015’s “Rethinking infidelity,” have garnered a combined 40 million views. But it’s her 2006 book Mating in Captivity, a New York Times bestseller, that is one of her most defining and oft-referenced works. Released 20 years ago and re-released this month, Mating in Captivity’s central argument is that a deliberate balancing act between connection and, crucially, separateness is required for maintaining desire in a long-term relationship.
As a perennially nosy person who is also fascinated by the granularity of relationships, I have long been a fan of Perel’s work. But I had somehow never read Mating in Captivity. Would it still make sense today, I wondered, in this era of dating apps and AI girlfriends? Would it ring true to me, specifically, as a queer woman? Was there any need to actually read the book, when so much of Perel’s line of reasoning has become common knowledge to those who follow the 67-year-old psychologist, or indeed couples therapy more generally?
As it happens, there is so much to be gleaned from Mating in Captivity in 2026. Its ideas have not aged, so much so that I had to double-check whether I’d got the original publishing date wrong. To that end, here’s everything I learned about long-term relationships, and long-term desire, from Perel’s seminal text.
Many of us can be divided into “romantics” and “realists”
Perel makes a distinction between two types of people. There are the romantics, who refuse a life without passion (“They swear they’ll never give up on true love. They are the perennial seekers, looking for the person with whom desire will never fizzle”) and the realists, who are at the opposite end of the spectrum (“They say that enduring love is more important than hot sex, and that passion makes people do stupid things”).
Wherever you sit, Perel says, “both agree with the fundamental premise that passion cools over time.” As a result, “both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.” Instead, then, we must embark on a “never-ending dance between change and stability,” one in which passion and stability ebb and flow over time, and not always in perfect synchronization.
Security and certainty is an illusion
We like to think that, in our long-term relationships, we have amassed a certain level of certainty. That we know our partners inside-out and can therefore predict their behavior. This, Perel suggests, is merely an illusion. We never know our partners as well as we like to think we do. “When we trade passion for stability, are we not merely swapping one fantasy for another?” she asks, pointing out how any relationship carries with it an element of risk. This is actually a good thing. We must lean into this unknowing, because if we are to maintain desire over time, Perel says, “we must be able to bring a sense of unknown into a familiar space.”
Good intimacy doesn’t always equal good sex
There’s a widespread belief—both now and when Mating in Captivity was released—that the better a couples’ intimacy is (as in, emotional connectedness), the better their sex lives will be. Though this is true for some couples, Perel asserts, it’s not true for everyone. “Ironically, what makes for good intimacy does not always make for good sex,” she writes. “It may be counterintuitive, but it’s been my experience as a therapist that increased emotional intimacy is often accompanied by decreased sexual desire.” Instead, we’d do better to understand sex and intimacy as a “parallel narrative.”
#Truths #LongTerm #Desire #Esther #Perels #Mating #Captivity
