Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books by Esther Perel
Esther Perel is a Belgian psychotherapist based in New York who has spent four decades working with couples across cultures and languages. She is fluent in nine languages and has built a practice that pays close attention to the particular cultural assumptions that shape how people understand love, desire, and commitment — assumptions that most relationship advice treats as universal when they are not. Her TED Talks have been watched more than twenty million times. She has written two books. Both of them changed the conversation they entered.
By Lisanne Swart · 2 books · Nonfiction · Psychology · Relationships
Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic
The central question of Mating in Captivity is one that almost every long-term couple has encountered and few have a satisfying answer to: why does desire so often fade in relationships that are otherwise loving, stable, and close? Perel’s answer challenges the assumption that intimacy and erotic desire are naturally aligned. She argues the opposite — that the conditions that create intimacy (safety, familiarity, predictability, domesticity) are often the very conditions that extinguish desire. Desire, she argues, requires distance, uncertainty, and a degree of mystery. The problem is not that couples stop loving each other; it is that they become so fused, so known to each other, so utterly safe, that the erotic imagination has nowhere to go. The book was translated into twenty-five languages and became one of the most widely read books about long-term relationships published in the last twenty years. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Perel reflects on how the cultural conversation about relationships has shifted since 2006.
Mating in Captivity is the book I recommend to anyone who is in a long-term relationship and feels the gap between loving someone and wanting them. Perel does not offer a ten-step programme. She offers a reframe — and the reframe is the insight. Once you understand her central argument, you cannot unknow it, and it changes how you think about the relationship between security and desire in every relationship you have ever been in or will be in. It is also, unlike most books about relationships, genuinely pleasurable to read: Perel writes with the precision and warmth of someone who has been listening carefully to people for a very long time.
→ More on desire and what love actually requires: my books about love list → Find Mating in Captivity on AmazonThe State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity
The State of Affairs does not treat infidelity as a problem to be solved or a failure to be explained. It treats it as a subject to be understood — one of the most common and least examined experiences in long-term relationships, surrounded by moral clarity that functions largely to prevent the harder questions from being asked. Perel draws on her therapy practice, on anthropology, and on the specific experiences of couples from dozens of different cultural backgrounds to explore why affairs happen (including in otherwise happy relationships), what they do to the people who have them and the people who discover them, what they reveal about the relationship, and what it is possible to do with them afterwards. The book became a New York Times bestseller and extended the conversation that Mating in Captivity began — this time into territory that is considerably less comfortable.
The State of Affairs is harder to read than Mating in Captivity, and deliberately so. Perel is not interested in reassuring anyone. She is interested in the question of what an affair is actually about — not the act, but the meaning that the person having it is, consciously or not, reaching toward. Some of that meaning is uncomfortable for the betrayed partner to sit with, and Perel does not pretend otherwise. What makes the book worth reading is exactly that discomfort: it asks you to hold the moral weight of infidelity and the human complexity of it at the same time, which is what the people inside these situations actually have to do. There is no other book about this subject that does that with comparable rigour or compassion.
→ More psychology books that hold up: my reading list → Find The State of Affairs on AmazonWhere Should We Begin?: A Deck of 100 Questions for Couples
A physical card deck companion to Perel’s podcast of the same name. One hundred questions designed to start conversations between couples about desire, memory, fear, history, and what each person carries into the relationship from before it began. Not a book in the traditional sense — but one of the most useful things Perel has produced for people who want to put her ideas into practice at the kitchen table.
→ Find the card deck on AmazonPerel also hosts two long-running podcasts: Where Should We Begin?, in which she conducts single therapy sessions with real couples, and How’s Work?, which applies the same relational framework to workplace dynamics. Both are worth your time if either book resonates.
Frequently asked questions about Esther Perel
What books has Esther Perel written?
Esther Perel has written two books. The first is Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic (2006), which examines why desire fades in long-term relationships and argues that intimacy and erotic love are not naturally aligned. The second is The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (2017), which takes a rigorous and uncomfortable look at why affairs happen, what they mean, and what is possible afterwards. She also produced a card deck, Where Should We Begin? (2018), designed as a conversation tool for couples. Both books became international bestsellers and were translated into multiple languages.
What is Mating in Captivity about?
Mating in Captivity argues that the conditions that create emotional intimacy — safety, familiarity, domesticity, closeness — are often the same conditions that undermine sexual desire. Perel’s central insight is that desire requires distance, mystery, and a degree of uncertainty that long-term cohabitation tends to remove. The book does not offer a prescription for rekindling desire; it offers a framework for understanding why the problem exists in the first place. Perel draws on couples from dozens of different cultural backgrounds, and the cross-cultural perspective is one of the book’s most distinctive qualities: she is consistently sceptical of assumptions that get treated as universal when they are specific to a particular cultural context.
What is The State of Affairs about?
The State of Affairs is about infidelity: why it happens (including in otherwise happy relationships), what it reveals about the person who had the affair and about the relationship itself, and what it is possible to do with that knowledge afterwards. Perel resists the framework in which infidelity is simply a betrayal that must be atoned for or a relationship that must be ended. She is interested in what the affair was reaching for — the meaning or experience the person was seeking — and what that reveals. The book is deliberately uncomfortable for all parties, including readers who have never been involved in an affair, because Perel asks questions that most of the cultural conversation about infidelity is structured to avoid.
Which Esther Perel book should I read first?
Start with Mating in Captivity. It establishes Perel’s central framework — the tension between love and desire, between the domestic and the erotic — and it is slightly less confrontational than The State of Affairs. The two books are not formally a series, but The State of Affairs builds on the same intellectual foundation, and reading Mating in Captivity first gives the second book more resonance. If you have not been in a long-term relationship, start with Mating in Captivity. If you are currently inside the experience of infidelity — on either side of it — you may find The State of Affairs more urgent.
Is Esther Perel a therapist or an author?
Both. Perel is a practicing psychotherapist who runs a therapy practice in New York City and works as an organisational consultant for companies around the world. She is Belgian-born, trained in Europe, and fluent in nine languages — the cross-cultural dimension of her practice is central to her thinking and distinguishes her approach from most American relationship psychology. Her books, podcasts, and TED Talks are all extensions of decades of clinical work with couples across a very wide range of cultural backgrounds. Her most-watched TED Talk, “The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship,” has been viewed more than twenty million times.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.” — Esther Perel
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