This comes from the journal Sh’ma so you know it is kosher:
Berrin: So what would you say to a couple experiencing a loss of desire?
Perel: Desire is connected to our sense of self-worth. Couples have a way of being together that stops the flow of their erotic interest. A lack of desire can be a result of too much distance and lack of connection or it can be the consequence of excess closeness. Fire needs air and many couples don’t leave each other enough air. Desire needs a synapse to cross. Desire ceases when there is nothing to desire — that is, an individual has no desire for the sex he or she can have. The loss of desire is often far more the result of fear than the passage of time. Fear of bringing our deepest wishes, needs, and vulnerabilities to the one we love. Sex in a long-term relationship is always risky because erotic sex with the one we love is perhaps the last taboo.
What really helps people is to connect with their own erotic selves, what is blocking their capacity for pleasure, their sensuality, their own sensuousness. We’re all born sensuous but we become erotic. We must develop an awareness of our body, a connection with our own skin, and a desire to want to please it, touch it, dress it, wash it, let it breathe the air.
Berrin: Does Judaism put up blocks and obstacles to that experience of pleasure?
Perel: Not Judaism but Jewish people. Judaism is not anti-carnal, but it has developed a sexuality that is not purely pleasure bound; pleasure is connected with reproduction. It has a purpose. Eroticism cultivates pleasure for its own sake. If poetry is the eroticism of language, then eroticism is the poetry of the body. That’s the difference between sexuality and eroticism. In Judaism, the prohibition against masturbation, for men, that is spilling seed, fosters a total dependency on their partner.
Berrin: Kedusha is often translated as holiness, but it means separateness. How does the concept apply to the erotic, that is, wanting what you can’t have, what’s set aside?
Perel: While the laws of nida were built around increasing the possibilities for fertility, they also, implicitly and explicitly for that matter, increase the desire and the interest and the wanting when you are once again allowed to return to your spouse. The notion of creating a boundary, a time when you are not supposed to be intimate, also energizes the time when you may be sexual. An underlying assumption in the system is that separateness increases desire. But I’m not sure it always works like that for people practicing nida.
The very existence of rabbinic discussion of the erotic in Jewish text shows that there was an awareness of erotic yearnings for the forbidden; sex is described as something important, a major element of matrimony. That conveys a positive value. There is no sin attached to sex, no sense of the debasement of the flesh, or it being inferior. Reading Jewish text, you discover lots of rules, but you don’t get a sense of shame and vilification of the flesh, which is quite a feat for a religion whose closest neighbor for so many centuries was dominant Christianity that espoused celibacy and the inferiority of the body.
But the lack of exposure and ignorance about sex can create problems. There is text and then there is life. Historically, with the glorification of study and mental capacity and the elevation of education and the intellect, the body was basically neglected. So, while we are supposed to have great sex, our bodies are often treated like shmatas. That’s the essence of Woody Allen with his nerdy body who is so preoccupied with sex — repression always fuels interest. And repression has a way of fueling passion. That’s part of the forbidden. Can you want what you already have or is desire rooted in absence and in longing? One has to be happy with a lease with an option to renew. Marriage for me is that you have a lease with somebody with an option to constantly renew.
