8 Ways to keep desire alive in long-term relationships

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 a 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.

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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. 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”).

Regardless of which end 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 synchronisation.

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 behaviour. 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), then 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”.

Everyone should cultivate a “secret garden”

Perel writes a lot about the need to become individuated from our partners and to avoid becoming too enmeshed (a surefire way to kill desire in the long-term). “Instead of always striving for closeness, I argue that couples may be better off cultivating their separate selves,” she writes. In our partnerships, “we make love, we share physical space and interests. But ‘essential’ does not mean ‘all’”. In other words, it’s important to foster a sense of selfhood – not just for ourselves, but for the sake of maintaining the erotic.

Talk isn’t always king

We like to think that every relationship problem can be solved by talking about it transparently until we land on a solution, but sometimes, Perel argues, we talk too much, and forget about other means of communication – like physical touch or actions. The constant glorification of verbal communication, she writes, “minimises the importance of nonverbal communication: doing nice things for each other, making attentive gestures or sharing projects in a spirit of collaboration”. At a time in which we can connect in endless ways, she points out, “we need to honour and recognise the ways we can reach out and touch someone”.

Intimacy is not static

It would be helpful if intimacy within our relationships – both emotional and physical – could be achieved and maintained forever more. But this, Perel stresses, is not realistic. Instead, she writes, “intimacy isn’t monolithic; nor is it always consistent. It is intermittent, meant to wax and wane even in the best relationships”. While this might sound tiresome, it can be surprisingly liberating. Stages are merely stages; a dry period isn’t a relationship death sentence.

Maintaining a healthy sex life is good for the kids

In the book, Perel speaks about parents who have come to her, as patients, and described the ways in which they put their all into raising their children: play-dates, baking, sports. To cordon off time as a couple makes them feel guilty, as if they are abandoning their offspring. But Perel argues that, on the contrary, maintaining a healthy sex life is only ever a good thing when it comes to parenting. “Children who see their primary caregivers at ease expressing their affection (discreetly, within appropriate boundaries) are more likely to embrace sexuality with the healthy combination of respect, responsibility and curiosity it deserves,” she writes. “By censoring our sexuality, curbing our desires, or renouncing them altogether, we hang our inhibitions intact to the next generation.”

Sex needn’t be as politically correct as our lives are

In our day-to-day lives, most of us support equality, denounce any type of violence and try to move throughout the world in a way that upholds our values and ethics. And, while sex ought to always be consensual and ethical, obviously, the realm of fantasy and play allows for a sense of transgression that we may otherwise denounce outside of that space.

“The poetics of sex are often politically incorrect,” writes Perel, “thriving on power plays, role reversals, unfair advantages, imperious demands, seductive manipulations and subtle cruelties.” This, Perel argues, isn’t something to be afraid of. “I do believe that the emphasis on egalitarian sex – purged of any expressions of power, aggression and transgression – is antithetical to erotic desire for men and women alike.”

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