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If a woman isn't feeling sexual with herself, she won't respond to advances from any partner, male or female. When this woman goes dancing, she's finding a connection with her own erotic self. It might be about being on a dance floor, feeling free, not having to feel at all responsible for anybody else's well-being. For other people, it might be about going on a hike for four days by herself and reconnecting with nature and strength and endurance and beauty.
Esther Perel
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Success, to me, is helping one person or many people counter the isolation and pseudoconnectivity of our lives by boosting their ability to connect to themselves and to others.
Esther Perel
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One of the big misconceptions is that affairs or trysts are flings about sex. And sometimes they are, but much more often they are about desire. And that is very different. The desire to feel special, to feel seen, to feel appreciated, to be laughed at or with. The desire to be desired. That does not manifest in a sexual act per se. Affairs make you feel alive. Alchemy means it's not about the actual sex, but the sexuality, the energy, the aura. It's the imagination and anticipation of it as much or instead of the actual experience of it.
Esther Perel
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Marriage isn't meant to make you happy - it's there because it gives you a life in which you can find happiness.
Esther Perel
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Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.
Esther Perel
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You never know your partner as well as you think.
Esther Perel
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Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.
Esther Perel
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It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.
Esther Perel
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Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day - the erotic mind is not very politically correct.
Esther Perel
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One of the most amazing abilities of sexuality is to momentarily transcend the borders of Self into something that is no longer defined by physical property and that is utterly unique. It's really what many call a religious experience.
Esther Perel
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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.
Esther Perel
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Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do.
Esther Perel
