Esther Perel Quotes
-
Our partner's sexuality does not belong to us. It isn't just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction.
-
People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy. Cheating doesn't begin to describe the ways that people let each other down.
-
Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.
-
Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.
-
I believe that the vast majority of people that are unfaithful are monogamous in their beliefs. The ones who are not monogamous in their beliefs either live in poly relationships or consensual non-monogamous relationships, or they have divorced. If it's very bad, then people don't stay married these days in the West. They can be married and have their family, but they want something else - they want something that they don't have in their lives, or simply to be someone that isn't who they are in the context of their marriage.
-
I think love is often a bit selfish, even before we had consumerism. That's not new. A consumer society gives you the illusion of having massive amounts of choice and saddles you with the freedom of being able to dabble in that choice. And at the same time, you are left with the tyranny of self-doubt and uncertainty about whether you made the right choice.
-
A peer relationship is one where the partners experience an affectionate, companionate coupledom. They are friends. They are the product of the egalitarian model; they are good life partners, but are often less sexual.
-
What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
-
On some level we trade passion for security, that's trading one illusion for another. It's a matter of degree. We can't live in constant fear, but we can't live without any. The fear of loss is essential to love.
-
We know desire is rooted in absence and yearning. What you don't have is often ten times richer than what you actually experience. An affair is a perfect erotic plot because it fits the erotic equation of psychotherapist Jack Morin: "Attraction plus obstacle equals excitement.".
-
The one word I hear when people have affairs is that they feel alive. They don't talk about the fact they're having sex. They feel like they are engaged with their life. They describe an experience that beats back the deadness inside, which isn't the fault of the marriage or the partner. It's often the deadness that they have allowed to creep in for years on their own. But by definition, it's a transgressive act. And transgression is a breaking of the rules. And it gives you a sense of ownership and freedom. And ownership and freedom gives you a feeling of aliveness. It's a chain.
-
Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.
-
At this point, we are living one of the greatest experiments in humankind - to create something that has, throughout history, been considered a contradiction in terms - a passionate marriage. Passion has always existed, but it took place somewhere else. Everything that we wanted from a traditional marriage - companionship, family, children, economic support, a best friend, a passionate lover, a trusted confidante, an intellectual equal - we are asking from one person what an entire village once provided. And couples are crumbling under the weight of so much expectation.
-
I want to engage people in an honest, enlightened, and provocative conversation about the nature of erotic desire and the intricacies of intimacy and sexuality. The object of my game is to bring nonjudgmental, multicultural understanding to the challenges and choices of modern relationships.
-
In desire, there must be some small amount of tension. And that tension comes with the unknown, the unpredictable. You can close yourself off at home and say, "Whew, at last I'm in a place where I don't have to worry," or you can keep yourself open to the mystery and elusiveness of your partner.
-
I say no to a double standard that men can roam and women must stay put at home. I say no to the fact that men are allowed to claim their sexuality and women just have to pretend that it doesn't matter to them. It's resisting poor relational arrangements. An affair is a way of saying, "No. I'm not playing by the rules." And sometimes betrayal is part of that because you deceive somebody else but you feel like you are, for the first time, being honest with yourself. Sometimes when people have affairs, they feel like they have been lying to themselves for years.
-
For most couples who come to me - especially in the aftermath of the revelation of an affair, when they are in a state of crisis and fear the loss of a predictable future - they start to have conversations for the first time about love, sex, monogamy, and marriage. Most couples don't negotiate or don't even converse about any of these things until the crisis of the affair has actually forced them to. Why does it take infidelity to get us talking about the stuff that should be there from the start?
-
Modern infidelity is different than traditional infidelity and sits on top of the romantic ideal that you find "the one" and that if you have everything that you need at home, you have no reason to go looking elsewhere. And if you have an affair, it's a symptom of a flawed relationship. If you don't apply the deficiency model to the relationship, then you apply it to the person. The person who strays is selfish, immature, addicted suffers from insecure attachment. And the person who doesn't stray is the committed partner: mature, stable, and non-selfish.
-
The whole notion of one person being enough for everything gets instantly challenged when you start to talk with somebody about wanting more or of wanting something else. They take it personally, feel like a failure or feel that they lack something, so you don't talk about it because you don't want to hurt, offend, or scare the other person. You also don't want to be rejected or have them leave you, whatever the reason.
-
Sometimes it has to do with other longings that are much more existential. Sometimes you go elsewhere not because you are not liking the one you are with; you are not liking the person you have become.
-
Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.
-
Most affairs do die a natural death. Today, you look at your partner's phone to find out the weather, and you find out about a lover. It has never been as easy to cheat as it is today, and it has never been harder to keep a secret.
-
Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there's a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two.
-
The secret to desire in a long-term relationship