Esther Perel
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.Collection: Self
Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.Collection: Eye
If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.Collection: Order
Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.Collection: Two
Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Children
Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.Collection: Knowing Everything
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.Collection: Cheating
Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious.Collection: Play
Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.Collection: Relationship
Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacyCollection: Sex
It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.Collection: Imagination
Marriage isn't meant to make you happy - it's there because it gives you a life in which you can find happiness.Collection: Giving
Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?Collection: Weight
It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.Collection: Abandoned
Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.Collection: Self
Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.Collection: Loyalty
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.Collection: Dancing
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.Collection: Motivation
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.Collection: People
Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Hurt
When we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner we're turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become.Collection: Partners
There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.Collection: Knowing
In committed sex, in marriage, people don't feel the need to seduce or to build anticipation - - that's an effort they think they no longer need to do now that they have conquered their partner. If they're in the mood, their partner should be too.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Betrayal
Today, monogamy is one person at a time.Collection: Today
As a teenager growing up in Europe, I embraced the romantic ideal. For me, I had to give up the ideal that one person would be there for everything. Once you give up that ideal, then you begin to accept the person that you are with - the person who won't be able to give you everything and who won't be able to know exactly what you want and feel without you even needing to say it.Collection: Growing Up
Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.Collection: Garden
I have more than thirty thousand hours of family and relationship counseling experience under my belt. Over the years, I have seen changes in relationship trends walk through my therapy office doors. My richest gifts are translating the complexities of love and desire in modern relationships into something simple and accessible. I can offer informed advice that makes people feel comfortable, knowledgeable, and confident.Collection: Simple
We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.Collection: Religious
But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what's a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.Collection: Religious
The meaning of secrecy is very different when the model of love is one of transparency. So to understand the politics of secrecy and revelation, you need to understand the larger culture in which the couple lives and also the culture of the couple itself. What does intimacy mean to them? Where does the couple draw the line between togetherness and separateness? That's what informs you. You always ask, "What would happen if I tell? What would happen if I don't tell?" Sometimes, the partner doesn't want to know.Collection: Couple
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.Collection: Selfish
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.Collection: Secret
Acceptance doesn't mean predictability. Sex isn't always for 11 at night - - it's also 'meet at a hotel room at noon'. What you feel during dating can exist at home, if you don't suffocate it.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Want
Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.Collection: Love Is
The mom doesn't become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space.Collection: Mom
At the same time, eroticism in the home requires active engagement and willful intent. It is an ongoing resistance to the message that marriage is serious, more work than play; and that passion is for teenagers and the immature. We must unpack our ambivalence about pleasure, and challenge our pervasive discomfort with sexuality, particularly in the context of family. Complaining of sexual boredom is easy and conventional. Nurturing eroticism in the home is an act of open defience.Collection: Teenager
Affairs can be powerful detonators. They can invigorate a marriage that's flat, jolt people out of years of complacency. Fear of loss rekindles desire, makes people have conversations they haven't had in years, takes them out of their contrived illusion of safety.Collection: Powerful
We are afraid that our adult sexuality will somehow damage our kids, that it’s inappropriate or dangerous. But whom are we protecting? Children who see their primary caregivers at ease expressing their affection (discreetly, within appropriate boundaries) are more likely to embrace sexuality with the healthy combination of respect, responsibility, and curiosity it deserves. By censoring our sexuality, curbing our desires, or renouncing them altogether, we hand our inhibitions intact to the next generation.Collection: Children
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.".Collection: Perfect
Real sexual conversations are enormously intimate and beautiful because they reveal so much about who we are and what we want. What are the emotional needs we bring to our sexuality and how do we connect to ourselves and connect to a partner? There's such a rich tapestry that can be revealed, but the vast majority of couples have never had those talks.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Passion
The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.Collection: Motivation
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.Collection: Sometimes
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.Collection: Identity
There is not one person who can fulfill all your needs. You may choose a partner who is your intellectual equal, and he may not be your most compatible sexual partner. And then there's the duality between security and adventure. A relationship that gives you plenty of novelty, and adventure, may not provide the stability you long for. Time, continuity and familiarity with somebody gives you other things in life but won't necessarily give you the kind of intense lustful experiences that you may have when you first meet someone and are curious about penetrating the mystery of them.Collection: Adventure
You know what happens to sex in marriage? Instead of inviting desire, you monitor it. Especially men: You let her sleep late, you take the kids to the park, and all that time you're thinking, "Tonight I'll get some." That doesn't work.Collection: Sex