Esther Perel famous quotes

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.
-- Esther Perel

#Knowing #Desire #Needs

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.
-- Esther Perel

#Fall #Doe #Assuming

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

#Loyalty #Expression #Trouble

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

#Abandoned #Autonomy #Feels

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.
-- Esther Perel

#Self #Want #Elsewhere

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

#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
-- Esther Perel

#Sex #Men #Connections

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.
-- Esther Perel

#Relationship #Adventure #Commitment

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.
-- Esther Perel

#Children #Kids #Responsibility

Today, monogamy is one person at a time.
-- Esther Perel

#Today #Monogamy #Persons

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

#Imagination #Responsible #Persons

When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.
-- Esther Perel

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.
-- Esther Perel

#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.
-- Esther Perel

#Religious #Art #Sex

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

#Motivation #Lying #Inspiration

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

#Religious #Anxiety #Guilt

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

#Two #Needs #Pillars

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.
-- Esther Perel

#Partners #Persons

Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.
-- Esther Perel

#Self #Space #Thrive

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

#Eye #Mystery

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.
-- Esther Perel

#Sometimes #Longing #Existential

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

#Want #Persons

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?
-- Esther Perel

#Weight #Village #Today

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

#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.
-- Esther Perel

#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.
-- Esther Perel

#Motivation #Powerful #Inspiration

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.
-- Esther Perel

#Good Life #Peers #Partners

Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.
-- Esther Perel

#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.
-- Esther Perel

#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.
-- Esther Perel

#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.
-- Esther Perel

#Motivation #Inspiration #Responsibility