The Shadow of the Third

In chapter 10 of Mating in Captivity, Perel addresses a question central to American coupling and marriage. Love in America involves togetherness and union, but what about about autonomy and freedom? Couples are left with very little advice on how to negotiate their individual selves in the union.

Perel writes on page 189:

Armed with the idea that love advocates togetherness, we are awkward about pursuing autonomy. This is especially true of the individuality of our desire... A woman's fantasies are proof of her freedom and separateness, and that sometimes scares her partner. The 'third' points to other possibilities, choices we didn't make, and in this way it's bound up with our freedom. Laura Kipnis says, "What is more anxiety producing than a partner's freedom, which might mean the freedom not to love you, or to stop loving you, or to love someone else, or to become a different person than the one who once pledged to love you always, and now.... perhaps doesn't."

How do we foster togetherness/trust in a relationship while at the same time giving our partners the freedom and autonomy that they need in order to maintain desire and eroticism in the relationship? How do we avoid being perceived as too familiar, dull and habitual to our beloved lovers/intimate erotic choices?

Wild Things in Captivity - D.H. Lawrence

Wild things in captivity
while they keep their own wild purity
won't breed, they mope, they die.

All men are in captivity,
active with captive activity,
and the best won't breed, though they don't know why.

The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry.

And so, with bitter perversity,
gritting against the great adversity,
they young ones copulate, hate it, and want to cry.

Sex is a state of grace.
In a cage it can't take place.
Break the cage then, start in and try.