Esther Perel Quotes:

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.

source: - Twitter post from Dec 30, 2014

Topics: Knowing, Desire, Needs, Knowing Everything

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.

Topics: Fall, Doe, Assuming, Jurisdiction

Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.

source: - Twitter post from Sep 22, 2014

Topics: Loyalty, Expression, Trouble, Free Expression

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.

Topics: Identity, Who We Are, Today

Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy

Topics: Sex, Men, Connections, Women Want

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.

source: - Twitter post from Jan 22, 2018

Topics: Relationship, Adventure, Commitment, Marriage Advice

Today, monogamy is one person at a time.

Topics: Today, Monogamy, Persons

It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.

source: - Twitter post from Feb 27, 2015

Topics: Imagination, Responsible, Persons

When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.

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.

Topics: Order, One Day, Lost

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.

Topics: Religious, Art, Sex, Formidable, Invoke

What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.

Topics: Motivation, Lying, Inspiration

We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.

Topics: Religious, Anxiety, Guilt

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.

source: - Esther Perel (2009). “Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence”, p.25, Harper Collins

Topics: Two, Needs, Pillars, Autonomy, Separateness

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.

source: - Twitter post from Jan 30, 2015

Topics: Partners, Persons

Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.

source: - "So, how's your sex life these days" by Polly Vernon, www.theguardian.com. October 7, 2006.

Topics: Self, Space, Thrive

Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.

Topics: Eye, Mystery, New Eyes

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.

Topics: Sometimes, Longing, Existential

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?

source: - "How Jupiter in Libra Might Mess Up Marriage for Good" by The Astrotwins, www.elle.com. September 27, 2016.

Topics: Weight, Village, Today, Committed Relationship

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.

source: - "The secret to desire in a long-term relationship". TED Talk, www.ted.com. February 2013.

Topics: Motivation, Inspiration, Night

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.

Topics: Teenager, Passion, Home

There is no neediness in desire ... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.

Topics: Motivation, Powerful, Inspiration, Caretaking, Neediness

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.

Topics: Good Life, Peers, Partners

Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.

Topics: Garden, Secret, Secret Garden

In my community there were two groups of people, There were the ones who did not die and the ones who came back to life.

Topics: Grieving, Two, 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.

source: - Esther Perel (2009). “Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence”, p.3, Harper Collins

Topics: Passion, People, Realist

The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.

Topics: Motivation, Inspiration, Responsibility, Reciprocity

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.

source: - "Why We Cheat". Interview with Hanna Rosin, www.slate.com. March 27, 2014.

Topics: Self, Want, Elsewhere

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.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Children, Couple, Passion

Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.

source: - Twitter post from Aug 17, 2014

Topics: Sex, Take Me, Can Do

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.

Topics: Play, Imagination, Erotic

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.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Cheating, Emotional, Years, Lack Of Respect

Marriage isn't meant to make you happy - it's there because it gives you a life in which you can find happiness.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Giving, Finding Happiness, Make You Happy

It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.

Topics: Abandoned, Autonomy, Feels, Attracted To Someone

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.

source: - Source: www.psychologytoday.com

Topics: People, Giving, Feelings

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.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Dancing, People, Feelings

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.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Beautiful, Couple, Real

There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Knowing, Accepting, Partners

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.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Powerful, Loss, Years

The kiss that you have never given is just as powerful as hours of actual lovemaking. The erotic isn't just what is happening between people's legs. It is also what's happening in their erotic mind.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Powerful, Kissing, Mind

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.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Mom, Sexy, Mother

The attraction of dating is that you don't take yes for granted - - you're fully engaged, there's seductiveness, tension.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Dating, Granted, Tension

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.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Mean, Imagination, Special, Misconception

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.".

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Perfect, Desire, Obstacles

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.

source: - FaceBook post by Esther Perel from Aug 07, 2014

Topics: Passion, Loss, Essentials

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.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Sex, Home, Mean, Predictability

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.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Hurt, Scare, Reason

Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.

source: - Esther Perel (2009). “Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence”, p.20, Harper Collins

Topics: Love Is, Who We Are, Affirmation

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.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Sex, Thinking, People

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.

Topics: Children, Kids, Responsibility, Protecting Children, Inhibitions

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.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Sex, Sleep, Kids, Sleep Late

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.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Adventure, Long, Giving

For some people, a one-night stand doesn't make any difference in a seven-year love affair. I don't believe the degree of betrayal is always commensurate with the egregiousness of the behavior. They are two separate things.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Betrayal, Believe, People

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.

Topics: People, Helping, Isolation

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?

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Couple, Loss, Infidelity

People grow up learning to be silent about their sexuality, so where are they going to learn to talk about it when they are in a relationship? Shame, guilt, ignorance, reservation, prudishness, all kinds of different cultural systems and social stereotypes shroud sexuality in secrecy and in silence. And there's the romantic notion. "If I say in the beginning, that I am missing something, you are instantly going to think that means you are not enough."

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Growing Up, Ignorance, Mean

In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Dating, Goes On, Next

The vast majority of unfaithful people are experiencing a conflict between their values and their behavior, and that is the mess of infidelity. It's not an either-or. The idea that you would ask, "How can you say you love your husband and you want to stay married, and you also are having an affair?" Because we are not the same woman, or the same man. Because sexual revolutions don't take place at home. Because for most of us, freedom wasn't something that we experienced in our family, but usually outside of our family.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Husband, Love You, Home

You never know your partner as well as you think.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Thinking, Partners, Wells

There is no sex without a cue. People who date have their cues at home, before they meet. You think about where to go, what to eat, what to do and say. Sometimes the cue is short - - just before we reach the bar - - but sex is never just spontaneous. Spontaneity is a myth.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Sex, Home, Thinking

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.

Topics: Divorce, Love Is, Two, Modern Love, Divorce Rates

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.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Believe, People, Belief

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.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Home, Worry, Desire, Elusiveness

Are you asking a question because you want to know the answer or are you asking the question because you want your partner to know that you are having this question?

source: - FaceBook post by Esther Perel from Apr 24, 2013

Topics: Asking, Answers, Want

For me, the constitutive element of an affair is the secrecy. It is the secrecy that leads to the lying, to the deception, to the duplicity. It is the structure of an affair - not the sexual or emotional behavior or what people actually are doing.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Lying, Emotional, People

The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

source: - Twitter post from Apr 20, 2015

Topics: Long, Secret, Desire, Long Term Relationship

Women - - and men - - need to understand that a woman's transition is often much longer. The caretaker must leave the place of orientation to the needs of others to the place where she focuses on herself.

source: - Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Topics: Men, Transition, Needs, Needs Of Others, Caretakers

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.

Topics: Games, People, Choices, Intricacy

For some people, the experience of sexuality is that they are entirely inside their body, but others feel they have totally transcended the physical boundaries of their body. Transcendence is the ability to no longer feel you are contained within the physical world. For many people, the definition of spiritual is a sense of complete abdication of the self. For some people, it's union with another that transcends the borders between where one stops and where the other person starts and creates a sense of infiniteness and timelessness.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Spiritual, People, World

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.

source: - "Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic". Interview with Courtney E. Martin, www.alternet.org. November 27, 2007.

Topics: Good Life, Peers, Partners, Life Partner

Many couples have never had a conversation about sexuality and sexual boundaries. The presence or lack of sex, the quality of it, the satisfaction and dissatisfaction, the unmet needs. An affair upsets the status quo by not only bringing the subject of sexuality to the forefront but every other aspect of their relationship as well. An affair yields conversation that should have happened in the beginning, but that people were afraid to have because, well, what would that mean about their relationship?

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Couple, Mean, People

To look at infidelity from the point of view of sex is a complete narrowing of the phenomenon. There's a reason that the commandment is repeated twice in the Bible - once for doing it and once for thinking about it. We have always created structures and broken structures. It is essential to the human spirit.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Thinking, Broken, Infidelity

Secrecy fuels erotic intensity because it makes you feel like you're doing something that is entirely yours. It gives you the sense of autonomy, the sense of freedom, and the sense of sovereignty. And then you add to that the sexual energy. In many affairs, people will tell you they slept with the person three or four times, but the story went on for months. That's an important thing because many people who have affairs often have very good sexual relationships at home. It's not necessarily a compensation story. But affairs offer a different sexuality with a different context.

source: - Source: www.psychologytoday.com

Topics: Home, People, Giving

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.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Selfish, Love Is, Thinking

Even a good marriage leaves people with longings for certain things their marriage will never be. So, do they accept that, make compromises, and say, "You can't have everything in life," which is what we always did? Or do they say, "I deserve more. I want to experience that thing and, you know, I have fifty more years to live than I used to." It's not necessarily that we have more desires today, but we do feel more entitled to pursue them. We live in this "right to happiness" culture, and yes, we do live half a century longer than we used to.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: People, Desire, Culture

The power of transgression is the archetypal, foundational story of the Bible. We want to break our own codes - sometimes of morality, sometimes of ethics, sometimes of the power structure, sometimes of the institution of marriage - because there is freedom and power in transgression.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Morality, Ethics, Sometimes

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.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Religious, Unique, Most Amazing

Our consumer economy peddles the notions "romantic consumerism" of finding "the one," of being the one. It's the narcissistic enhancement of, "I'm the one you stopped your nomadic life for." It's one thing when you have sex for the first time when you marry, but it's another thing altogether when you stop having sex with others when you marry. So the marital commitment becomes, "I must be really special. With me, you no longer think you can find better next door." Romantic consumerism is thinking you can't find better, younger or newer.

source: - Source: www.psychologytoday.com

Topics: Commitment, Thinking, Special

I do consider even going to prostitutes, or seeing a hooker or an escort, as having an emotional component, even if it's not an emotion necessarily in the relationship. Even if you are paying in order to absolve yourself of any emotional involvement. That's the paradox.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Emotional, Emotion, Paradox

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.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Betrayal, Lying, Home

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.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Growing Up, Giving Up, Teenager

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.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Secret, Today, Lovers

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.

Topics: Simple, Years, Doors

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.

source: - Source: wbur.org

Topics: Couple, Mean, Love Is

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.

source: - "The Deeper Reasons Why People Have Affairs". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. October 20, 2017.

Topics: Selfish, Home, Insecure