Why HAPPY Couples CHEAT: The Surprising TRUTH About INFIDELITY & How to Reignite PASSION at Home | Esther Perel EP 616

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11What's the biggest lesson you've learned from researching and doing this work on this topic the last few years? One, I too, for a long time thought, affairs only happen in troubled relationships. If you have everything you want, there should be no reason to go looking elsewhere. Then I began to hear more and more people come into my office and say, I love my partner, I'm having an affair. You know, in the same way that when I wrote Mating in Captivity, people would say, I love my partner, we have no sex. And I was like, you know, I thought if you love, you desire. And now I thought if you love, you're faithful.

0:54So this idea that not all affairs are symptoms of relationships gone awry, that people in happy relationships also stray, and it isn't because of their partner or because of something in the relationship. That there's another theme here, that affairs, and this led me to the second thing, which is that you always have to look at infidelity from a dual perspective. At the heart of affairs is betrayal and hurt, but there is also longing. Longing for an emotional connection, longing for intensity, longing for a different sexuality, longing to reconnect with lost parts of ourselves. longing to suddenly feel alive because people have allowed themselves to feel dead on the inside.

1:39That, what it did to you and what it meant to me, that you have to be able to figure out both is a much more useful way to help people. Even if we love our partner, someone comes to you and is like, I love my partner, but I feel like I'm missing these other things. How do we not miss those things or create those in our relationships? Do you know how many times I say to people, tell me something, the person that is here in this other relationship, is that the one who comes home? I mean, the one that your partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, is dealing with is not nearly as charming and as attentive.

2:22You know, when you prepare your suitcase and you fly and you choose your carefully chosen clothes and you prepare yourself and, you know, you don't bring work with you when you go to, you know. But when you go home, you're on your phone the whole time. You bring the leftovers. You're not nearly that attentive. You're way less charming. Your humor is gone, you know. And then you tell me that your wife is boring or your husband is boring. And you? who are you here versus who are you there not who are they who are you so that's the first thing it's like what happened to you that you let this thing seep out of you and what makes it difficult for you to bring this back into your own relationship why is it why is that why is it that there you can be such a free woman and here is this boyfriend of yours who think you hate sex you have no interest, you are utterly frozen.

3:19And this one is like, it's the same woman. What happened? That's the bigger lie. The bigger lie is not only that you're having a lover. The bigger lie is that your husband, your boyfriend has no idea what's the truth about you. Why? And then different stories. Sometimes it's stories from childhood. I have no idea how to bring that part of me in the context of family because family was the place where sexuality was the most dangerous. So I have never known how to experience pleasure at home. Home was a place where I made sure to be safe. Pleasure I took somewhere else. Then you start to see the way that people have carved out and compartmentalized themselves and the reasons behind it.

4:03Now it's real therapy work. That's when you start to really try to understand why can't you integrate the different parts of you? Is it kind of like the idea of always dating in your relationship? It's like always trying to be your charming self and not forgetting it. How you got into the relationship, don't forget that? Is that kind of the concept? I don't know if it's always dating, but for sure, the couples that are erotic couples are couples who maintain a level of attention on each other. They don't take each other for granted. They flirt. They are physical. They continue to play with each other.

4:41They create the desire. They create desire. I mean, it doesn't just stay. I mean, it is an amazing thing to see how attentive people are to their creative projects, to their artwork, to their businesses, and how often rather neglectful, even a date night, it's nice, but what do you bring to the date night? Is it going through the motions or is it? Look, we know that if you do familiar activities with your partner, it's very nice and it creates a real sense of comfort to go back and to repeat things that you enjoy. But we know that if you want to bring excitement into a relationship, you need new experiences.

5:23You need to have this relationship be one in which you take yourself out of your comfort zone, in which you discover something, in which you explore traveling. traveling, but it doesn't have to be just traveling by going abroad. It's traveling. It's taking yourself to new places, to new experiences with each other, to new thresholds. All the research backs that up. It also breeds testosterone, for that matter. Novelty breeds testosterone. That's the work of Helen Fisher. And if you look at it metaphorically or biologically, it makes all sense in the world. Growth involves exploration, involves curiosity, involves discovery.

6:01we know it and it involves risk taking we know it in business and it is no different in the relationship in the business of intimacy if you want to call it like that

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7:12Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.