Coaching practices for Mating in Captivity Sustaining Desire in Long Term Relationships in a New Job

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • Everything between us has gone so safe and predictable
  • I’ve folded so completely into us that I’m not sure I have a life of my own anymore
  • After the baby, the move, the hard year, we just quietly stopped reaching for each other
  • We’re comfortable and we still do plenty together, but it’s the same loop every week
  • We share everything — same friends, same schedule, every thought as it lands — and somewhere in all that togetherness the wanting evaporated, like there’s no distance left to feel any pull across.

Practices that may help

  1. Mating in Captivity: Sustaining Desire in Long-Term Relationships
    Esther Perel argues that the conditions that make love secure — closeness, familiarity, predictability — are structurally at odds with the conditions that sustain erotic desire — mystery, distance, and the thrill of unpredictability. Sustaining desire is not about technique but about holding the paradox: you can be deeply known and still be a little unknown, still be an object of curiosity for each other.
  2. Expanding eroticism beyond sex
    Recognize and cultivate the erotic in non-sexual moments: risk, play, creativity, surprise.
    Mating in Captivity: Sustaining Desire in Long-Term Relationships
  3. Cultivating mystery: becoming interesting to yourself first
    Invest in your own aliveness — your pursuits, pleasures, and personhood — not primarily to attract your partner, but because your vitality is the resource desire draws from.
    Mating in Captivity: Sustaining Desire in Long-Term Relationships
  4. Rekindling after a drift: returning to aliveness
    Recognize a drift in erotic connection as normal — and name it as the beginning of a renewal, not a failure.
    Mating in Captivity: Sustaining Desire in Long-Term Relationships
  5. Regularly share novel and enjoyable activities
    Do new things together — not only comfortable or habitual ones.
    Relationship Maintenance Behaviors
  6. Creating space: the paradox of distance and desire
    Build deliberate separateness — apart time, separate interests, separate friendships — as the condition desire needs to regenerate.
    Mating in Captivity: Sustaining Desire in Long-Term Relationships
  7. Cultivating complicity: shared secret aliveness
    Build a private world of in-jokes, gestures, and references that only you two share.
    Mating in Captivity: Sustaining Desire in Long-Term Relationships
  8. The erotic gaze: seeing your partner freshly
    Deliberately practice seeing your partner as a stranger might — with curiosity, not familiarity.
    Mating in Captivity: Sustaining Desire in Long-Term Relationships
  9. Protect expansion by resisting the slide into pure comfort
    Long relationships naturally slide toward comfort and predictability — expansion requires deliberate re-injection of novelty.
    Self-Expansion Model: How Relationships Grow (and Stagnate) Us
  10. Pro-relationship maintenance behaviors
    Actively do things that maintain and strengthen the relationship, rather than expecting it to run itself.
    The Investment Model of Commitment: Why People Stay (and Why They Leave)

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