What's New

Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence by Esther Perel. Perel's account of the specific tension between security and desire in long-term intimate relationships provides the most precise available treatment of the autonomy-intimacy conflict that the Deci and Ryan mechanism predicts for the high-drive entrepreneur. Writing from her clinical research and couples therapy practice, Perel identifies the specific paradox that genuine intimacy creates for the self-determining individual: the closeness and security that love produces can erode the distinctness and mystery that genuine desire requires — and the entrepreneur who has most thoroughly built their identity around self-determination is particularly vulnerable to the loss of self in the togetherness that close relationship can produce. Her analysis of why the most intimate relationships often produce the least desire, and what maintaining genuine erotic and psychological aliveness in a committed relationship actually requires, addresses the dimension of the intimacy tension that the purely resource-management framing of the Baumeister and Gottman mechanisms does not reach: the dimension where genuine intimacy and the authentic expression of the high-drive self are not simply competing for resource but are in deeper tension over what each requires the person to be. For the entrepreneur who has noticed that their most intimate relationship has become a place where performance continues rather than a place where the performing self can be set down, Perel's account of what genuine aliveness in close relationship requires — and what it costs the identity that professional achievement has constructed — provides both the diagnosis and the direction that the resource-management argument alone cannot.