The last page of the booklet is called Erotic Storytelling, and if the name made you flinch, you’re in good company. The first time this page had a name, the person who named it flinched too.
Most of us hear erotic and file it under explicit — the word seems to arrive with a rating attached. That’s a modern narrowing of a very old word, and it’s worth getting the old one back, because the old one is the reason this page exists.
The psychotherapist Esther Perel uses erotic closer to its root — eros, the current of life itself. She is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, and she has said that the formative observation of her childhood was the difference between the survivors who didn’t die and the ones who came back to life. The erotic, as she uses it, is that second thing: the quality of aliveness. Vitality, with imagination running through it. It includes sex, but it is nowhere near limited to sex — you can feel it in how a person cooks, travels, argues, dresses, or tells a story. And by the same token, a person can be functional in every corner of life and still be, in her word, erotically flat.
Perel spent years asking people when they were most drawn to their partners. Nobody ever said “when we’re fused together on the couch.” They said: across the room. On stage. Absorbed in work they love. Seen at a slight distance, being fully themselves. Her conclusion is that desire needs a gap to jump across — we don’t long for what we already completely have and completely know. A little mystery isn’t the enemy of intimacy; it’s the fuel.
Now look at where this page sits. It’s the back cover. The booklet physically keeps it at a remove — a reader has to travel through your background, your beliefs, your everyday self before arriving here. The fold is doing what Perel says desire requires: holding something back, so there’s somewhere left to arrive. The cover says this is who I am. The back cover says this is what makes me feel alive. A whole person is bound between those two pages.
And no — nothing on this page needs to be explicit. “I want to learn to sail before I’m sixty, and I think about it every time I cross the bridge” is erotic storytelling. It’s desire, on the record, with the current still live.
Where in your life are you most alive — and what do you still want?
Write that. That’s the last page. It’s also, usually, the beginning of the better conversation.