Longing to be together, or scratching a seven year itch?
On Mating in Captivity and Love Across Borders
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Earlier this week, I spoke at the Rebel Book Club—an incredible non-fiction book club, based out of London (but they do online events), that managed to turn out a crowd of 100+ people to talk all about books on a Tuesday evening. Beautiful, if you ask me.
This month, the theme was “love”—and while the club chose to read Esther Perel’s “Mating in Captivity”—apparently our dear Love Across Borders came in a close second (!)
I am not surprised that Esther Perel won by popular demand—she is beautiful, poised and has a breath-taking Belgian accent. Meanwhile, I’m a fast-talking raccoon cleverly disguised as a woman, and yet we have both have written books about our observations on modern love. For those who are unfamiliar, Mating in Captivity is a collection of stories from couples that Esther Perel works with as a relationship therapist, exploring the challenges of modern day romance and partnership. A few themes are the disappointment of losing the “spark”—and how to get it back—as well as the need for community, and to resist the urge to place all of your emotional burdens and needs on one person, as we are wont to do with our societal fetishization of finding “the one” and conforming ourselves to the confines of modern day monogamy.
Meanwhile, Love Across Borders is a collection of modern day love stories that have been shaped and circumscribed by border regimes and immigration policies. It is devastatingly familiar to anyone who has ever witnessed—or experienced—the way that passports and papers can come in the way of their relationships. Sometimes, this is through physical borders that literally separate people.
Sometimes it is emotional. What happens when the trauma of war and separation—and the heartbreak of separation, of losing a country that we once that was ours—catches up to us? What happens when the physical threat of war in one’s homeland is exchanged for the relative safety of a stable country, but always being treated as less-than, inferior? I wondered what it did to the most emotional aspects of our lives. What does it do to our love stories?
So, this week I spent some time thinking about the two books—two stories of modern love and relationships, yet wildly different at the same time. While Perel frames the pressures of monogamous marriage as captivity, I found myself almost fetishizing these seemingly “ordinary” problems, especially when I was in the throes of navigating my own journey of love across borders. How nice would it be to be worried about losing the “spark” with my partner because we spent too much time around each other, instead of wondering if I would always be living in an existential crisis of wondering where in the world we could live, and actually be a normal couple? Being a normal couple felt more novel—almost like role-play, or make believe—than covering wars and waiting on passports and papers, fantasizing about stability and boredom.
Of course, many of the points that Perel raises are valid—you don’t need to be polyamorous to see that relying on just one person to fulfill all of our emotional needs is a terrible idea, or to benefit from a robust community. Nevertheless, borders have a way of separating and isolating people, both from their families and their communities—and I constantly wonder how this lack of freedom, this “captivity” if you will affects peoples’ romantic lives. How does it make people into smaller versions of themselves than they would be otherwise?
Perel also frequently brings up the fact that her own parents survived the Holocaust, and that this kind of both lived and generational trauma has a way of working itself into our most intimate moments in unexpected ways. Again, Love Across Borders is an extension of this idea, using stories from Syria, Yemen, Mexico, Palestine and many other places to show the ways in which our modern, present-day conflicts—those making up the headlines that too many people turn away from, that drive the fear and xenophobia that closes our borders affects ordinary people and their ability to be together. While understanding the Holocaust—and listening to the testimonies of survivors—is essential to understanding the present-day realities of borders and immigration controls, especially the way that the far right rises to power—it is just one of many global tragedies that has embedded itself into people’s lives, affecting the way that people move through the world and relate to one another.
It also got me thinking about the (proverbial) next chapters of Love Across Borders, after the happily ever after—after the moment that we all dreamed of, where we ride into the sunset free from the struggles of the passports and papers that have constricted our relationships, able to finally take the romantic vacations that we fantasized about, or think about having children without worrying what passports they’ll have access to or whether or not they’ll be stateless? I wonder about the ways that our stories of passports and papers work their ways into our lives even once we are documented—sometimes, hyper documented (because one can never have enough documents), if they will slowly disappear or if they will always haunt us.
Do we see those years as lost?
As natural as the kinds of marital problems that come up in “Mating in Captivity” might be for so many—including many “Love Across Borders” type couples who have now realized that long held dream of stability and “marital bliss”—I think that many would do well to reflect on the kinds of barriers that so many couples are facing just to be together, and reflect on what they would do if they were in their shoes. How would you navigate years of separation, or the knowledge that your partner could be in physical danger?
Which book do you relate to more—or, do you relate to both? Let me know in the comments, and see you next time…
Anna