Mating in Captivity

Oftentimes when I am at parties, and people learn I am a writer, they’ll tell me they have an idea for a book. Many writers claim that to hate this conversation, but I enjoy talking book ideas. It’s much preferable to discussing peoples’ children, or their home renovations, or where they’re taking the family for spring break.

When people have a book idea, three out of four times it is a memoir, and this is the best of all, because then they will proceed to describe to you something utterly wild about their life, which they would never otherwise tell a stranger.

Take, for example, Aiden, who is the father of another child at my daughter’s preschool. (I’ve fictionalized the details to protect his identity).

One day, at a parent’s night, Aiden told me that he wanted to write a book of advice for men who were experiencing ‘dead bedrooms’ (i.e. sexless marriage).

His experience was that after the birth of his second child, Aiden’s wife lost interest in sex, and for the next four years they didn’t really touch each other. This was difficult for Aiden, because he had promised to only ever have sex with one woman, his wife, for the rest of his life.

It was a problem. She just didn’t feel like having sex with him anymore. He would love to do something to engender that feeling in her. But he hadn’t really known why she wanted to have sex with him in the first place! It was such a mystery! Most people that he met didn’t have any desire to have sex with him. Then he had met this one woman, and she did (seemingly) have that desire. He just hadn’t questioned it.

Nowadays, if he was being honest, he didn’t have the world’s strongest compulsion to have sex with his wife either. His desire for her wasn’t an overpowering desire. But he could still be roused to the occasion. And he felt like it behooved them to try. Having sex was a team effort (he thought). But his wife wasn’t necessarily on the same page—she felt the impetus was on him to put her in the mood.

Luckily, there was a popular nonfiction book that addressed this very conundrum, Mating In Captivity. In this text, therapist Esther Perel recommended that you rekindle your spouse’s attraction by cultivating an air of mystery. If you became a stranger again, and your wife realized that she didn’t really know you, then she’d become aroused, because women enjoy having sex with strangers.

During this time, he also read The Ethical Slut and Sex At Dawn and a number of other books that implied people were biologically compelled to seek novelty in sexual partners, and that it was natural for married people to have sex with others besides their spouse. He felt somewhat suspicious of these books, because it’d been hard enough to find one person to have sex with! He would really love, ideally, to just keep having sex with that one person.

But now he was being told that perhaps this wasn’t an option, because women didn’t want their husbands. They wanted strangers.

He had a coworker, a woman, and they were often thrown together at conferences. One day, at one of these conferences, they were drinking, and they were the last at the bar. He hadn’t worn his wedding ring, and she asked why:

“It slips off,” he said. “Because I lost some weight.”

“I’m sure,” she said.

This coworker was a little younger than him, and he found her fairly attractive. This coworker was cheerful and bright-eyed, and she always had a very confidential tone with him, like they were two people against the world.

After a few drinks, this coworker began complaining about her husband, saying he didn’t go down on her.

“I read a book,” Aiden said. “He should read this book: She Comes First.”

“What’s this book?” she said.

“Oh it’s a great book. All about how to go down on a woman. I never use it anymore.”

“What?” he said. “Why not?”

“You know…” he said. “My wife got really self-conscious about her body, after she had kids—I don’t know.”

“That’s hard,” she said. “It’s true, what people say—we aren’t built for monogamy!”

“Yes but nonmonogamy also seems complicated. I’d hate to launch into it, and maybe lots of people want to sleep with my wife, but nobody wants to sleep with me. That really wouldn’t feel good, and I highly suspect that would happen.”

“Well, my husband and I have this type of nonmonogamy,” she said. “Where I don’t tell him when I’m sleeping with someone, and I just make sure he never finds out, and if he does, then he’s allowed to divorce me.”

“That’s really high-stakes,” he said.

“It’s a new kind of open relationship,” she said. “There’s a book about it. Or there will be eventually. It’s great because normally when you open up your marriage, there’s a conversation at the beginning and this conversation is really difficult, and maybe you get divorced. But here, with this form, you only have that conversation if you get caught. And maybe that never happens—maybe you just have your fun and take it to your grave.”

“Hmm,” Adrian said. “I don’t know about that. It does seem better than the other forms of nonmonogamy. But…hmm…”

The lights turned on and then off.

“I think the bar is kicking us out,” his coworker said. “What are you up to?”

“Just back to my room.”

They were in the hotel bar, so they walked silently to the elevator. And she leaned against him, sending a thrill through Aiden’s body.

“You’re on the…what floor?” she said.

“18th,” he said. “1802.”

“Oh, 611 for me,” she said. “You’re higher up.”

That was the last he remembered. But he woke up in his own bed, in his own room.

When Adrian got home, he told his wife a summary of this encounter.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Yeah…it was a really strange night.”

“It sounds like she was hitting on you!”

“I don’t know about that,” Adrian said.

“She definitely was! Who is this? Nina—I don’t know her.”

“You know her,” Adrian said. “Hmm…I don’t know…I really think maybe it was just a joke.”

They didn’t talk about this conversation again, but a month later, apropos of nothing, his wife made a move. She kissed him. There was gradually increasing stimulation that was very successful! And over the next few months, they slowly built up a rhythm of doing things, and that seemed to work out very well.

One day, for her book club, his wife read a memoir called Strangers, about a husband who decided to leave his wife for no apparent reason. He abandoned their children as well, and he became a complete stranger overnight.

“Can you imagine?” his wife said. “Having an affair is one thing, but to just cut someone out of your life. And you have kids together!”

“That’s what women want,” he said. “According to Esther Perel.”

“Who?”

He explained this book, and how you needed to become a ‘stranger’ to your wife in order to re-enchant her, and now his wife blinked a few times. “That’s horrible,” she said. “That’s not true. You don’t believe that do you?”

Aiden was silent.

“When did you read this?” she said.

They conversation spiraled around the topic, as these things do, and it got a little heated, and eventually they landed on the subject of Nina, his old coworker.

“What really happened?” she said.

“I told you everything I remember,” he said.

“But did you ever…?”

“Look, I was so drunk. But probably not. Because I would remember something like that, don’t you think?”

“Are you sure?” she said. “If something happened, that’s fine. It would really be okay. I’d understand.”

“You know…I am pretty sure nothing happened,” he said. “Ninety percent sure.”

Except that wasn’t true. He was actually one hundred percent certain that he’d stayed faithful to his wife. And that was because his conversation with Nina had never happened at all. He’d invented the whole thing just to make his wife jealous. Part of him really wanted to come clean, just so he could be saluted for his cleverness, but he knew the consequences would be terrible. Still, he kept thinking that he really ought to write a book.

“How does that sound?” Aiden asked me.

“So it’d be a book about how to manipulate your wife into having sex with you?” I said. “And it’d be framed as an explicit response to all these other sex & marriage books you’ve read?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I have shelves of them.”

“I am definitely intrigued,” I said. “But one major problem is that a lot of people wouldn’t buy it. Somehow it’s just too pat. You had one conversation with your wife—got her a little bit afraid about losing you—and that was enough to rekindle the spark? No. What would be more likely—I am not saying this happened—but what would be more believable was that she just started sleeping with other men.”

“What?” he said.

“Yeah, you know…like that’s the obvious twist. You told her this thing with Nina, and your wife decided to give ‘unethical non-monogamy’ a try, and now she’s sleeping with other people and just not telling you. You said yourself the problem was that she didn’t feel good about her body, and now she does, so you two are having sex more often now too. Problem solved.”

“Except this is a true story,” he said. “This is a nonfiction book.”

“But either way it works, right? You got what you wanted.”

“N—no,” he said. “That’s nowhere in the story I told.”

“You’re telling a story about the interior of your wife’s mind. And that’s a story you can never truly know.”

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