Reignite Your Relationship: Esther Perel On Desire, Intimacy, Sex, & Long-Term Love

30:05That is confirmation bias, exactly. But you know, the interesting thing is that at the same time as people do that, They yearn for it to be different, but they don't know how they themselves are contributing sometimes to making it not change. Not change.

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35:43I'm a long time in recovery. And as you know, one of the key tools in 12-step is performing the inventory, right? Which is basically like looking at your part in every equation and getting out of blame. And that is a very powerful tool in many contexts, not the least of which is this, like being able to step back and in a place of equanimity, like really get honest with yourself about the ways in which you're contributing to the unhealthy dynamic to kind of disabuse yourself of that cognitive bias. But you know why it's so important? Because one piece is I take responsibility. I'm accountable.

36:26Okay. So I've checked myself and here are the ways in which I think I've done things that are not necessarily helpful to us. And here are things that I think actually I want to do or I am doing that I think are for the good of us. But beyond that, I think what's so powerful about the inventory or accountability as a whole is that it really is the foundation for self-esteem and self-confidence. Because it says, this is what my friend Terry Reals always says, I am flawed, but I can still hold myself in high regard. In order to take responsibility, you cannot sink into shame. I'm a piece of shit.

37:11I'm such a lousy person. You have to still respect yourself and have dignity. But at the same time, you know that you're capable of nasty, harmful, destructive, cruel stuff. That that side... The whole spectrum of it. Yes. And that's what happens when you do the inventories. You say, you know, because if you just say, I'm such a piece of shit, then I feel so bad about myself that you no longer have any reason to be angry with me. Right, but there's a sort of indulgent narcissism with that as well. You know, like you can sort of like go around saying that to people. And there's a performance aspect to that that's a little bit dishonest.

37:54Like you're saying that is much about reaffirming whatever your view of yourself is as a way of like keeping people at a distance or, you know, kind of playing the victim. Basically, you're not really seeing the other. You're still at the center of the universe. Right. You're making it about yourself. It's about you. It's about you. And that's why when you actually really make it about the other and you really own it, then ownership is freedom. that's what I mean by I'm flawed but I can I'm standing tall and I own it and by owning it I'm free it's a very important concept people think that by owning it I'm the blame and I'm the bad person and I know the way into that for me is to do my best to not get defensive particularly in the heat of the moment like if I can just hear it out and take a beat and then reflect on it and say, oh, that's interesting.

38:58Yeah, I should look at that or let me look at that or tell me more about why you feel that way. Like from, you know, a 10 ,000 foot view, like if you can really extract yourself out of the emotionality, like the heightened emotionality, that seems to have served me well in those circumstances. Absolutely. Because our instinct is to just defend ourselves and get defensive and lash out and be aggressive. And of course, that just creates a downward spiral. But sometimes we come with a predisposition, a propensity for defensiveness, but sometimes we are defensive because someone is attacking us. And instead of them saying, you know, this example, I wish you did more of this or less of that or acknowledged here or saw me there, we basically say, you never do, you never see, you never say.

39:46Nobody wants to be defined by someone else. It's a kind of a thing we want to have proprietary rights about is me. You don't tell me who I am. Stay out of that zone. And that's what triggers an instant defensiveness as well. So it's sometimes internal. I'm defensive because I instantly can feel bruised and criticized and et cetera, et cetera, and vilified and victim. And sometimes the defensiveness is relational. Isn't everything relational though? Isn't this one of your big things? We are relationship animals. And although we reflect on ourselves and our own kind of like trajectory through life, we are who we are because of our relationship with other people.

40:36I do tend to think like that, yes. I think we are who we are because our relationship with other people also influence how we see ourselves. I mean, I do think that in the presence of the other, we discover ourselves. I think in dialectic terms. I don't think you can know happiness without having known suffering. I don't think you can know beauty without knowing or good without evil. I mean, these things are inter-dynamically connected. And the same thing is true relationally. I can't know others if I don't really know myself, and I can't know myself if I'm just standing in front of my own mirror.

41:17Right. So the monk who's been meditating alone in a cave for many years is one thing, but the true test of that person's, you know, sort of spiritual metal is when they go out into the world, right? Or in the AA context, it's like, if you really want to get confronted with your character defects, get into a relationship, right? Because that's the engine for growth in many ways. Like you can only do so much by yourself. It's only in your connections with other human beings that you learn what needs to change and how to grow. Correct. But some people choose to live more in relationship to nature.

41:56Some people choose to live more in relationship to the divine. I mean, so the monk may be less preoccupied with their relationship to other humans if they're living in a more insular way. I study people who are in relationships with parents and children, with friends. I'm very interested in friendship these days. Colleagues, co-founders, creative pairs, all kinds of dyads. and that's my, that's the field of study for me. So yes, we are relational, but we may choose to actually live in a different relationship, which is to beyond humans. What is the biggest relationship issue that you find yourself contending with the most with your patients and the people that you see?

42:49I think that there are various different things and they also are generational and their cultural and everything, there's just one thing. I mean, yes, people often, if they are in relationships, come to say, we don't communicate. But that is a line that opens up an entire portal, you know, to a host of issues. So these days, people are way too much living in a contactless world in which they don't really need to leave their house for a lot of things to get food, to work, to exercise, to meet people. I mean, and they are more and more isolated and they become more and more disembodied and they lose a sense of attunement and physical attunement to others.

43:36And they lose the capacity for nuance and negotiation because they also are influenced by algorithmic perfections, which give them very polished answers so that you can bifurcate all the inconveniences of life and all the frictions. And then they find themselves rather stumped when they have to deal with conflict or friction or differences. So they polarize and they cut off. That's one narrative. Is that part of why you're so interested in friendships right now? Yes. Yeah. Because, I mean, also, you know, you get questions. And then the questions sent to me begin to tell me of a concern that is growing in the society, friendship breakup.

44:20I don't remember 20 years ago having this question at my door as frequently. That doesn't mean that there were not breakups among friends and certainly among brothers and relatives. But this is a very important piece because this is how tensions in the culture and the political systems at large are literally fracturing relationships between people who once cared about each other deeply. I think this description that I just gave you is quite generational, but of a great concern to me. more and more interested. I see more and more people in my office who carry over the expectations for perfections that the algorithmic perfections are giving them, and those become their expectations for relationship.

45:09It shouldn't be hard. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be this. It shouldn't be that. So that's why I create courses on conflict and on sexuality, because it is. Maybe it shouldn't, but it is. It's part of relationships. It's intrinsic to relationships. I think that contempt is a major issue. You know, the Gottmans have what they call the four horses of apocalypse. I agree. I think indifference, criticism, defensiveness, and contempt are major breakdowns of relationship. So they don't call it that. They call it we don't communicate. But underneath the we don't communicate are these four. And once you reach that stage of contempt, it becomes very difficult to walk it back.

45:54Contempt is often seen as the hardest of them all. Well, we're in a very deranging time. Loneliness is another big issue. Inside relationships. This is another piece. Say more about that. I mean, it's not like people haven't been lonely in their marriages, okay? But they had... Communities, they went to neighborhood associations, churches, synagogues, temples, you know, workplaces where they spend a lot of time so that they support groups of all sorts that were not designated as support groups. But that's what they offered. So you could spend a lot of time in relationships with other people rather than just have to confront your partner all the time.

46:42But now, it's a thing that I've come to call ambiguous loss. Have you ever heard that term? Ambiguous loss is actually a term that was coined by a psychologist, Pauline Boss. And she originally created it to describe situations of unresolved mourning, when you don't know if the person is still there or not there. So you can have somebody who is physically sitting right next to you, but they are emotionally or psychologically completely gone, like Alzheimer or dementia. They don't remember your name, they don't know they exist. But you can also have situations where the person is physically gone, but they are emotionally or psychologically completely vivid.

47:28Deployment, disappearance, hostage-taking. And in both situations, you don't know if the person is there or not there. And these days, you find two people sitting at home on their sofas, watching television, scrolling on their phones, trying to say something to each other, where the other person basically says, uh-huh, uh-huh. And you know that they're not really listening and that personal thing you just shared kind of evaporated in midair. And you experience that incoherent sense of aloneness next to somebody. That ambiguous loss is, I think, one of the very interesting things. I look at these people, I say, and you came to talk to me about not having sex?

48:15I mean, should we talk about sex or should we talk about this situation first? Being alone in a relationship. Yeah, and doing things that are by their very nature, keeping people not just separate, but immersed in other worlds while they're sitting on their couch together. Now, you could say then what's different if two people are sitting and reading a novel? Certain things are not that different. They are in a fantasy world, they're elsewhere, etc. But this thing on an everyday basis where people sit at their dinner tables and their faces are in their screens and their communication is on WhatsApp, there is something that is fraying at the edges.

49:04Sure. Yeah, we're running this gigantic social experiment that I think at this point we know is not in our best interest that is uniquely derranging for a whole variety of reasons. one of which is these devices that we're all holding are all bespoke to us and us alone. Like what we're seeing is completely unique and we could be in partnership with someone else and they're looking at their phone, but what they're looking at is, you know, like you're moving apart from each other because you're immersing yourselves in worlds that might not overlap entirely until one day you wake up and you don't know who that person is.

49:39Meanwhile, all our interactions socially are through the device. and it gives us this illusion of being connected when in fact it's creating more and more loneliness. And layer on top of that, the increased suburbanization of the world and work from home and all of these things where the opportunities and the occasions for being with other people in real life are fewer and far between. And of course, there's gonna be a decline or a denigration in our skill, our emotional intelligence, our ability to navigate conflict, to be in social situations. And the less we do it, the more intimidating it becomes, the more fearful it is.

50:19And I see this with young people and my younger children, and they just, they don't want to text. They don't want to get on the phone. They don't want to talk, like they don't know how to talk to somebody. And it's like, you have to learn these things, right? It's almost like I have to push them into the world in order to make sure that they're developing those skills. But all their friends are doing it. And it's like, what is this going to reap for this generation? It's called the rise of artificial intimacy. Yeah. Everybody talks about artificial intelligence. And it's like, yeah, it's not headed in a good direction.

50:52I mean, it's headed somewhere that I cannot imagine and predict. But what I do know is this thing about artificial intimacy, it's changing our expectations. and I hear very often people who are very, very moved that someone sends them birthday wishes on a text rather than a DM and that that means that they were really paying attention to them and I'm thinking they couldn't pick up the phone and sing a song and I mean, you really don't ask for much, isn't it? You can have a thousand virtual friends and no one to feed your cat. I mean, modern loneliness masks as hyperconnectivity. And then nobody to pick up a prescription at a pharmacy.

51:38And then we confuse friends with friendship. That's part of why I'm also interested in friendship these days. It's like, what is friendship and how do people cultivate that? Do people know how to cultivate friends, supposedly? But it's two different things. Talk a little bit more about that. This is such a rich topic. One day I'll just talk about friendship alone. But friends accompany you through phases of life or through your entire life. Good friends hold you accountable. They reckon with you. They hold you when you're about to collapse. It's like they have their hands underneath you so that before you hit the ground, you're in their hands and they won't let you fall.

52:28Friends believe in you when you're, you know, fretting. Friends are there also to tell you when you should get out of a relationship that seems to really not be very good for you. Friends basically sometimes say, stop acting like a jerk. Friends play with you. Friends discover the world with you, explore, travel, are curious. I mean, friends are erotic experiences and they are the only mutually chosen. I mean, you cannot be friends with someone who is not friends with you. You can love someone who doesn't love you back. But that level of mutuality, of friendship and reciprocity is absolutely unique.

53:09Friends is the first relationship that you choose as a child that is a free choice. Yeah, I've never thought of it that way. But certainly, it's a dynamic that requires effort and work, right? There's a difference between somebody you call your friend because you text each other on the internet occasionally versus the person who's going to show up in your moments of need. Arthur Brooks calls it the difference between deal friends and real friends. We're chatting via text with a bunch of people, but that's very different qualitatively from a real friend. Look, I think it's a piece of it that is also very cultural.

53:48I mean, English does not have many middle words. It has acquaintance, friends, good friend, best friend. French has a few words in between. Yeah. You know, but I do remember that, you know, when I arrived to the United States, I had to learn that people often say, I have a friend, but that would be someone they hadn't seen in 10 years. And I just thought, that's such, that doesn't exist. What is the French word for that? I know someone. Yeah. I met someone, I know someone, you know, I used to have a friend. And this is because of mobility. This is because people move here a lot. You know, I'll tell you one thing that is very interesting about friends.

54:35And I don't know how it is today, but it was a thing I experienced as a mother. When my child, my youngest child was in kindergarten, he had a very close friend. And we thought it was a beautiful relationship, these two boys. And it was obvious that they should be together in the same classroom in first grade. And the school basically told us, no, what's important is that they learn to make new friends, that they be agile, adept at new relationships, because they're about to move around anyway for the rest of their life here. They better know how to create new friends each time. This was the opposite culturally of the way that we had learned about it in Belgium.

55:20When you had a good friend, you made sure to have the kids stay with their best friend because it meant that they were entering into this new phase of life, first grade, with building support. And that you looked at friendship as how do you reinforce continuity rather than how you reinforce replicability. Yeah, that seems like a violent act to like engineer a friendship breakup. under the idea of like instilling resilience or something. Yes, but it was that idea. Yeah. Back to the AI thing. I'm imagining a not too distant future in which there is like a HER device and people can engage with an artificial intelligence that sounds and feels very human and says all the things that you want them to say and you feel seen and heard and understood.

56:10but that artificial intelligence is just that. It lacks a soul, it lacks a consciousness and it's a dynamic that's one-sided because it's engineered specifically to meet your needs. And so what it's teaching you is that you don't have to worry about your partner's needs because this is a computer, right? And so when that person goes out into the world, they're being programmed into this mentality that they don't need to worry about meeting another person's needs. And any successful relationship is a balancing of meeting each other's needs. Correct. And then we're going to get artificially engineered partners.

56:57Yeah. Who will provide exactly that kind of... And you're going to have to open up a new part of your practice to deal with these people and all the dilemmas that they're going to experience. I think that it is a central question. I mean, Sherry Turkle's work on artificial intimacy is really studying that thing. It's like relationships are I and thou. Relationships are not just about how the individual gets their needs met in a rather narcissistic way, which means all with the arrow turned toward me. Relationship involves reciprocity, mutuality, attunement, empathy, Those are all experiences that have the arrow pointed towards the other.

57:40And in the machine, you get an other that doesn't have a subjectivity. That other doesn't have a reaction to what you do, even though that will become programmed at some level. And this is a big, big debate, is what kind of lessons for relationship is this development producing? You talk with people in AI or people who are very techno-optimistic and they always, not always, but they often answer you, not yet, it will happen, you know. And if you question that, you know, you're often seen as not necessarily going with progress, so to speak. I think, look, I'll give you another, an example of the opposite of this AI thing, right?

58:25I ask a question in the tour, just really one of these simple questions, but it tells me so much. How many of you grew up playing freely on the street? Did you? Sure. Any of your kids? Do they play freely on the street? Did they? No, because we live on a busy sort of road where it's not safe to just go out and run down the street, which is something I've thought a lot about. So last night, you asked me about the show here in L.A. I asked these thousands of people and the hands were high up when I said, did you grow up? And when I said, how many of you have children or no children that are playing freely on the street?

59:10It was a trickle. What does that mean? It means that play, which is such an important ground for experimentation and learning and development. And free play used to be this ground for social negotiation where kids learned to make friends, to make peace, to have enemies, to make wars, to broker agreements, to make rules, to break rules. And this whole ground for unprompted, unmonitored, unscripted negotiation is gone. And that to me is an essential piece of what we are talking about here. When you're talking about the AI that only has one direction. You are programmed to say what I want to hear.

1:00:01It's not a relationship. It's a pacifier. It's inevitable also. I mean, I live with the developments, you know, but at this moment, I do meet people who enjoy, you know, even I sometimes think my robots are far more reliable than my husband. You know? I mean, but I also— These are all problems born of, I guess at some point, good intentions. Like, you know, the idea that kids don't go out and play. No, no, I was going to say I'm not going to be— AI is extremely important. It's doing a ton of great things. But in the realm of relationships. Oh, it's terrible. We can just say it. That's the place in which I am looking.

1:00:47I'm in total agreement with you. I was thinking back to kids and play, like the idea that we need to protect our kids came about at some point where we were all meant to be very afraid of the world. And we're putting helmets on kids for everything and knee pads and are kind of projecting a fear onto them that the world is a very dangerous place that has put a damper on, you know, this kind of free range idea of kids being out in the world. And as a result, we've sacrificed not only what you mentioned, but kind of the awe and wonder of going on adventures and, you know, sort of stretching your own independence, which are, of course, also important skills that you need in the world.

1:01:27And, you know, how does that translate into what kind of adults these people become when they internalize that fear and approach the world from that place of thinking that we should all hermetically seal ourselves from it rather than embrace it and welcome it and skin our knees and have those experiences, which create that resilience and that ability to navigate conflict and difficulty and deal with obstacles as they come. Agree. Yeah. I've been with my wife for a long time, 25 years or something like that. So I would be remiss in not exploring what you might be able to share with me that might be helpful in my own marriage.

1:02:12And I would say that I have a very successful marriage and I still, we love each other very much. And I think we're really good at communication and navigating conflict. we have four kids and they're on the older side now. But I think like a lot of couples who've been together for a long time, relationships are a constantly evolving thing and we go through phases with it. And now with the kids older, it's sort of like, okay, who are you now? And like, where are we with this whole thing? And how can we get back to some more of the intimacy that was so integral to our relationship in the earlier years and do it from a perspective of playfulness, right?

1:02:58And so we're in this process of finding our way back to that place, like it's an exploratory phase. And it's fucking hard, man. You know, like this is not an easy thing. And it brings up like so much stuff. And, you know, it's hard to talk about this stuff when you've been with somebody for so long. Stuff means what? Yeah, good question. Stuff, what does stuff mean? having to confront the ways in which... where old patterns continue to resurface and lead to conflict. Ways in which old traumas continue to rear their heads and create conflict, I suppose. And also everything's good, right? Like we can just continue on our way and we're both kind of fulfilled and happy in what we do.

1:03:49And it's easy to kind of perpetuate that and not acknowledge like, hey, we could be more together than we are currently and how do we find our way back there? So stuff, what is the stuff? I guess there's a lot of stuff, but one would be just allowing things to continue as they always have. Complacency. Yeah, complacency. That was the word I was looking for. I can easily fall into the illusion that it's a static thing when, of course, it's not. It's an always evolving dynamic. Are all the children out of the house or you still have some living with you? Yeah, so we have a 17-year-old daughter and a 20-year-old daughter, and they're both out of the house.

1:04:29One is in boarding school and one is in college. And then we have a 29 and a 28 year old and they moved out before the pandemic and they were living on the other side of town doing their thing. And then when COVID happened, they moved back and they're still at home, but they're like, they have their own lives. Like they live at home, but like, you know, it's not like I have to worry about picking them up or where they are on a day-to-day basis. So it's not quite an empty nest situation in that traditional sense, but it is a moment in which we're attempting to kind of reconnect with each other in a more meaningful way.

1:05:05I mean, it's a lot to say about this, but I tend to think, I like this is a framework that I have often found helpful, is that most of us today in the West will have two or three adult relationships or marriages in our lifetime. Some of us are going to do it with the same person. So this is your transition. Are you going to have another relationship with each other? And that often involves a lot of ritual. I find ritual is an extremely important and undervalued experience in relationships. And the ritual sometimes is about saying goodbye to your first marriage and having the opportunity to create a second marriage.

1:05:54It may involve writing new vows. It may involve having a ceremony with friends. It may involve having a ceremony alone. But it involves a ritual, something that is symbolic, that declares the intention, that puts in the investment, that articulates it, that throws things in the ocean, in the water, burns it on the mountain, whatever it is. But the beauty of Elevate, you had this ritual. It's a routine that is infused with creativity and intention. And what you're talking about is how do you break the routine? Well, by turning it into a ritual. So that's first thing. My wife is all about ritual.

1:06:36Like this is the conversation that we've had. And she's somebody just for context, like very much lives in that kind of heart-centered space where I get lost in my mind. and sometimes we miscommunicate because we're speaking different languages and that's a result of many things. So just invite her to take here. She's all about that. Just tell her, take me. I mean, because the take me is I'm curious, I'm open, I'm receptive to something new. I know my ways. I know I can be complacent, I can be lazy. You know, I can mire myself in routine. Number two is this. This is the research of Eli Finkel that is very useful.

1:07:22If you keep doing the things you are comfortable with and you enjoy and they are cozy and they are familiar, you strengthen the friendship dimension of a relationship, which is huge. But if you say, I don't just want to survive. I want to feel alive in my relationship. I want to infuse that erotic energy, erotic as in aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, curiosity, playfulness, that. Then you need to do something different than just the familiar and the cozy. And that means new experiences. It's like generate new cells, new experiences that involve risk, an active engagement with the unknown and the novel, curiosity, playfulness, all of that.

1:08:12For some people, that's travel. For some people, that's getting into a thing together that they never did. For some people, it's what is the thing that you've always wanted to do and never got to. For some people, it's journeys together. I mean, it's different things, but they involve a meeting with yourself and with the other in a new context that reveals new things about yourselves and about each other. And that means risk. Playfulness is when risk and uncertainty are fun. What long-term relationships need to be willing to let go of is the illusion of safety and certainty as if it can continue forever.

1:08:57Because there is a difference, this is so important, between surviving and thriving. And some people don't need to do the thriving. It's not for everyone. But for those who say, I want to feel that energy, that connection, that vitality, that, again, it doesn't happen on its own. A culture that becomes invisible dies. A relationship that doesn't do the things that maintain its aliveness and freshness becomes cozy and familiar and familiar. and that is beautiful, but that is not going to give you the prickle that you say you would like to feel on occasion. Yeah. And the risk and... There's no risk.

1:09:45The uncertainty. I mean, there's no risk to the relationship. Sure, sure, sure. But that's premised on a foundation of trust. Like you have to have trust in order to take the risk. So that is a major debate in the trust research field. Tell me more. Do you need to trust in order to take risks? Or is risk-taking what builds trust? Oh, interesting. This is the big debate in the trust research field. And trust is when, I mean, Rachel Botsman says it beautifully, trust is an active engagement with the unknown. It's a leap of faith, trust. If you need assurance up front, then you're not trusting. Then it's not trust.

1:10:35Right, right. That's a bit of a mindfuck. No, it's just a different way of looking at it. No, when I say risk, it means that that risk-taking will in and of itself, I mean, is meant to strengthen the trust and develop a different kind of intimacy. It's an intimacy of adults. It's an intimacy that doesn't go straight through the role of parents. It's a different level of engagement where two people get to rediscover each other and themselves at a different stage of their relationship. Sometimes it's new friends. Sometimes it's new horizons. Sometimes it's a new house. Sometimes it's a new job. the word new stands in front of everything.

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1:13:08I think what my wife is looking for most is intimacy and feeling like she's truly being seen. And I think my predisposition or my preset is to lose myself in my own mind and go out into the world and, you know, pursue achievements as a proxy for love. Like I think part of my wounding or my wiring is around love being a transactional thing and my worthiness or my deservedness for love being a function of kind of how I show up in the world and do things like under this idea of like specialness. And so I'm doing those things thinking that that's the path to love. How many years have you been saying this?

1:14:05Well, many years. This is the story. So that's the story. And this gets to like, you know, the stories that we tell ourselves about our childhood trauma or whatever it is and what aspects of that are informative in terms of like self-awareness so that you can heal them and move forward. And where do we get stuck in them as a story and just get into like a whole drama around it? Yes. It's like how helpful is this story? Yeah. I mean, it's good for self-awareness. And then when I do something, I'm like, oh, maybe I can make sense of why I'm doing this. but it doesn't help me in terms of like resolving it.

1:14:39No, the minute you start telling it to me, I'm thinking, man, this is his canned story. He's so used to that story. It's so like he just pulls it out of his... And that doesn't mean it's not true. That doesn't mean it doesn't have tremendous validity, but it is utterly stale. And it doesn't justify anything at this moment in your life. At this moment in your life, keep your story, But if you say, I want to make sure that my relationship gets a new trust of energy, of breath, of expansion, then go do the things that you know will make a difference. To just say, she wants this and I'm more than that.

1:15:26It's self-serving and it's a little stale, if you allow me. Yeah, yeah. No, it's good. So, you know, she wants to be seen, but I'm sure by now, after 25 years, you have a certain idea of which way she likes that. Of course. And decide, I'm going to put her in the center of my, go for, think of five days, three days. But I'm going to once fully, fully, fully satiate this wish of hers. I'm going to be there complete. Don't even take my phone with me. Nothing. I want her one time to be radiating in the center of my universe. What else should I do? Okay. I'll start with that. That's good. Then the second thing you do is, I mean, that's not in order, but when you were talking, I thought, I couldn't see you write a letter.

1:16:23I'm very big on letter writing because I think that writing gives you a chance of being with yourself while you talk to the other and reading a letter is being with the other while being with yourself. And I think you should write her a letter and just say, you know, I was talking to this woman on the podcast and I found myself saying, this is what you would like. And I just answered in the same usual defensive, tried out story of why I won't do something that would just probably be a risk for me and something unfamiliar and something that is not my comfort zone. And I realized how often I must have told you that story and how much that story is kind of holding me back.

1:17:11And here we are after 25 years, and I'm thinking, man, at whatever age I am, I'm still telling the same thing. How true is this now? and how much does it serve me to actually not make changes? And I just thought that you should know that I know. I'm not impervious to this. And I know that that story has probably kept me away from you many times and it also makes me lazy and it also, et cetera, et cetera, and just own that. That's where we started our conversation with responsibility. I think when people get that letter, there's suddenly a real sense of shared reality. What I've been trying to tell him is not delusional.

1:18:01I get it. I see it. I know it. I feel it. And when he confirms it, we're in a shared reality. This may be true in other directions for other things, you know. And from there, you make a commitment to something. A commitment to the fact that, you know, every system straddles stability and change, continuity and innovation, security and freedom, every living organism, every relationship as well. So when you raise kids and you stay together, you emphasize the stability, the predictability, the reliability, the security, the anchoring dimensions of life. But at the stage that you're entering or have entered, if you want that relationship to not just be a scaffolding, but really a relationship, then you want to bring back the playfulness, the vitality, the risk taking, the novelty, the engagement with the unknown, curiosity.

1:19:08Replace comfortable with curious. To feel seen, she needs to feel your curiosity. Mm-hmm. Yeah. She said as much. Okay. Tell her that I never met her, but we have somehow. Can I report back to you? You absolutely can. I love that. I mean, it's so doable. That's the thing. Like, I can do that. You know, I can do that. Like, what has held me back from that? I mean, the good news is I'm in. Like, I'm not like, I want to have that richness of experience. Like, you know, I don't want to have just a normal thing and I don't want out of the marriage. I want it to be the best that it can be. And I am willing to do what that takes.

1:19:52That means being in is nice, but you don't want to be in with minimum effort. You don't tell your children to do minimum effort. You probably tell them a lot of things about how to go for things. And the same thing is true. So there's something about that coasting. Yeah. And that, you know, the thing holds on its own. without nurturing. You know, when you talk about performance and work and this and that, it's like, I see a lot of people who bring the best of themselves to work and the leftovers home. Yeah. The attention you're paying me in this conversation here, where you focused on everything I say, do you have that focus when she talks?

1:20:34Right, right, right, right. Or do you come home and you say, I'm done working and I can kind of put my attention on the coat rack? It's interesting. And also just the human mind's capacity to delude ourselves around the static nature of things, like whether it's a relationship or anything else. Like in AA, it's sort of like everything you do is moving you towards a drink or away from a drink. There is no coasting in sobriety. There's no coasting in relationships. And yet we tell ourselves like this is a static, locked in thing. Maybe we do that because it feeds our need to feel like we have control over our lives and in a world in which we actually have no control.

1:21:16Like, I don't know why we do that, but I'm constantly having to remind myself that things are not static. It's a contrived illusion of safety. Because if we're not in control, then we're not safe. For some of us, yes. For most of us. Talk a little bit more about your definition of... You do know that when you just said this, you swallowed. What does that mean? Come on. It means that it's a sentence that means a lot to you. And what it means is not for here. Yeah. All right, I'm going to reflect on that. I want to talk about sexuality a little bit. you mentioned the word erotic and you have a very specific definition of that that's different from sex.

1:22:12So can you elaborate a little bit more on what you were talking about earlier? Sexuality is the instinct, it's nature, it's the base. But eroticism is sexuality that is transformed by the human imagination. It's what gives sex meaning. And we are creatures of meaning. Modernity has brought these two together as if erotic means sexual, turn on, arousal, this, that. But eroticism exists in every spiritual tradition. And it is really about a quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of vitality, and engagement with serendipity and the unknown, curiosity, imagination, creativity. Those are the essential ingredients of the erotic.

1:23:00You can have a lot of sex and feel absolutely nothing. Women have done that for centuries, by the way. But in the erotic, you can do very, very little and feel a tremendous amount because the central agent of the erotic mind is the imagination. And I think it's a very important distinction because when people come to me and they say they often want more sex, but they always want better sex. And this better is in the quality of engagement, in the attention, in the intimacy, in the freedom, in the surrender, in what is being communicated by these bodies. So I'm very interested in the erotic because I'm interested in not just having relationships survive and not die.

1:23:54I'm interested in relationships feeling alive. And that's the opposite of what you call the status quo. It can be really hard to talk about this for cultural reasons or just the way that we were raised where these are verboten subjects. And then as adults, we don't have the vocabulary or we're so captured by guilt and shame around our own innate sexuality that it creates challenges in terms of communication between partners around this terrain. You know, I wrote Mating in Captivity almost 20 years ago. And I have had conversations with thousands of people all over the world about the very thing that they had never spoken about.

1:24:46And I began to think beyond just coming to my office, how do I provide people with exercises, language, vocabulary, perspectives, tools to actually have these conversations? It's one of the things that I'm most interested in is helping people have difficult conversations. Conflict is a difficult conversation. Sexuality is a difficult conversation. And I just am creating, it's releasing next week, but it's a course bundle. It's called the Esther Perel Desire Bundle. And it's two courses on sexuality. One for people who are really stuck and just want to even talk about it and not derail each time.

1:25:32And one for people who really want the flicker to just ignite a little bit more into a flame. And it's called Playing With Desire, the second one. And it's all that. It's very concrete tools to help you have, A, understand your own sexuality and understand how I think about sexuality, which I'll say in a moment. And then how to play, how to have conversations. And my card game does the same. It's a, I've looked for multiple ways to give people ease, comfort, fluidity, playfulness to talk about these things without going all, you know, all icky and tense. Right, because like in a card game, it's all fun.

1:26:18Like the stakes are lowered, right? But you can reveal a lot, you know, play is when risk is fun. So you can reveal a lot of things because you're in the midst of play. A lot of conversations about sexuality, especially in the United States, is either smut or sanctimony. It's rarely just a natural conversation, an amazing window into the self. Sexuality is a window into a person and into a relationship. The traditional, the common way people think of sex is that it's something you do. You have sex. Rather than it's an experience. Where do you go in sex? What kind of place do you enter? Is it a space for deep connection, for naughtiness, for playfulness, for mischief, for spiritual union, to surrender, to be taken care of, to be safely powerful, to be vulnerable, to finally abdicate all responsibility of good citizenship?

1:27:14I mean, what's the space you enter? What parts of yourselves are you connecting with? Which sense is most alive in the erotic experience for you? So if you really understand sexuality, you know that it's a coded language for our deepest emotional needs, not for what turns you on. What turns you on and what you experience there is actually, you know, what are the deep needs, wishes, wounds, fears that you bring, you know, from your emotional life into your sexual life. And your fantasy life is the ultimate secret code. You know, your prevalent fantasies reveal your deepest needs because a fantasy, a good fantasy states the problem and offers the solution.

1:28:02You understand? That's a Michael Bader line. You know, it's a good fantasy is to subvert the fears and the inhibitions that roil inside of you and turn them into, you know, play. And so once you enter sexuality from that point of view, once you understand that people have erotic blueprints and that they're, how they were loved, how they connected, how they learned to experience pleasure, how they learned to receive, you know, that all these emotional experiences translate in the physicality of sex. Tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make love. That's the blueprint. And so you give people a set of questions and they begin to answer them.

1:28:50And I know, I mean, I know because I've done it a thousand times and now we're doing it through the course. And I hear people just saying, we never talked about any of this. It's like I'm discovering this person or I never thought about that for myself. And this opening up, this unlocking of that conversation, because people often can do sex but can't talk about it. and certainly not with the person they're having sex with. They'll talk with anybody. And why is that? What's at the crux of that? A lot of different things. I mean, one is this is a subject that we learn to be silent and secretive about.

1:29:28In the past, you had to feel ashamed if you had sex. Now you have to feel ashamed if you don't have sex. Men typically lie by exaggerating. Women have typically learned to lie by underrepresenting. When I say men, women, I mean, it's also men identified and women identified. But the structures that are in place is that male sexuality is rather fixed. Men are always interested. They always want it. They're, you know, in perpetual motion in search of an outlet. It's spontaneous, unprompted. They don't need any help. It just, you know, they come ready. And women's sexuality is more diffuse, more subjective, more rising on the lattice of emotion, more contextual.

1:30:08and there's a tremendous amount of myth and wrong ideas that are just filling people's heads. And the beginning of the course is really to demystify a whole bunch of things that are utterly not the case. I mean, it is clear that male sexuality is no less influenced by the internal life. A guy who's depressed or who is anxious or insecure, if you think that doesn't influence their sexuality in one way or another, but it does. It's not true that men just exist in their groins. And that women actually, it may be all about the supposed idea that they have less interest sexually. But in fact, maybe women are getting bored with monogamy much sooner than men.

1:30:52And what keeps them interested is a lot more risque activity, creativity, interest being seen and all of that. And that's why they're not interested. It's not that they're not interested in sex. It's that they're not interested in the sex they can have. Mm-hmm. at least with many men. Right. So for somebody who's listening to this or watching this, who has struggled with initiating this type of conversation, I mean, they can take your course and we'll put links to all of that in the show notes and there's the board game, et cetera. What would be like a tool to kind of confront that fear and take on that risk and take that leap and ask that first question or create an environment where that conversation can take place, maybe for the first time.

1:31:40It's either you just go straight up and you just say, I listened to this conversation or shall we? I mean, what is a podcast doing? What does my podcast do? You listen to couples having those sessions where they do exactly what you just asked me. And as you listen to it together, you just turn to your partner in the car and you say, have you ever thought of that? Is that ever been a question that you ask? Is that something you've ever wanted? That's basically how a podcast becomes a transitional object. And we're talking about the podcast, but in fact we're talking about ourselves. So much of where should we begin has been about that.

1:32:24People listen to another couple. The more intensely they listen to these other relationships, the more they see themselves and the more it gives them the words and the courage to have the conversations that they want to have. So I have done it through my podcast. I have done it through my card game and I am doing it through the courses because those are three entry doors that I think one of them you will find accessible. If I say to you, go talk to your wife like that, not really. But if I say, you know, there's an episode, I think that it would really be interesting. It's also a couple that's been together, The kids are leaving.

1:33:00They want to reconnect with it. Then you listen to the story. It's like watching a movie, reading a book. You're soft-pedaling your way into it. Okay. If I say a group of friends come, you don't necessarily start playing with your partner alone. And you say, I got this card game, you know, and I actually saw this woman or this people play. It's a Trojan horse of a card game. But you don't start with the most difficult questions. You put two cards underneath everybody's plate and you don't do the whole game. and you just say, thought we should have enforced, you know. I have yet to ever see people have the courage, the guts to just simply say, I want to do something else tonight.

1:33:38I saw this card game and I want to try it out on ourselves and I think we know each other enough to do so. And then they realized that, man, this is so much more interesting than most of the chit chat they ever always have. I mean, I have literally yet to see someone who says this was a complete flop. You know, sometimes it takes a bit of time till it gets going But when the stories become interesting, you're like, I thought I knew you, dude. When did that happen? It's interesting. I just did it with 5 ,000 people. So I can tell you, I take a few of the questions that are gentle. Don't start with sex questions per se.

1:34:15Begin with questions, a risk I took that changed my life, a message I fantasize receiving. If I could whisper something in the ears of my younger self, a guilty pleasure I savor is. Stuff like that. Right. And then you sort of slowly tiptoe into... No, then you go afterwards, they leave your friends, and then you go with your partner, and then you say, I have a few other questions I thought we could try. And then you say, you know, we never talk about this stuff, and it's weird. It's like, why not? I mean, what are we talking about? You know? Death, sex, and money. It's three subjects we never talk about, and yet they're present in everyone's life.

1:34:54The podcast is so great, because you're truly a fly on the wall getting to eavesdrop into the way you work with couples who are going through problems that we can all relate to. And I think its power is in, you know, kind of modeling what those conversations look like and what they can be, especially for somebody who has no previous experience in a therapeutic modality. It's really empowering. And they're almost like they have three-act structures to them. Like there's a beginning, middle, and an end. Like you're on a journey with these people as you hear their innermost thoughts and working through these problems.

1:35:33It's couples and individuals. And there is a whole series on work. The idea in my head was, as you listen, you will find the tools and the language needed for the conversations that you need to have. That is the idea. Because these days, your best friend can come and tell you that they're breaking up and you never saw it coming. People don't really know the truth of other people. It's happening in a therapist's office, you know, confidentially. And that leaves a lot of people wondering, is this only happening to me? Am I the only one who can't talk about this with my partner? Everything I do is about cultivating relational intelligence, helping people have difficult conversations, finding the vocabulary, understanding what certain things mean to them first, creating exercises and structures that give them a way to start.

1:36:28How do I think about this? Before I even know how I talk about it, how do I think about it? What does it mean to think about sexuality? And what's different? You can ask a couple, do you still have sex? That's not the same as what is the role of sex in your life? What do you like to experience in sex? How do you connect? You know, what's the sense with which you experience sensuality the most? And how so? I have 150 of those questions. It's not like it's only five or six, but it's like, wow, this is what you talk about. You know, in our pornographic world, those things have kind of vanished, you know?

1:37:12And so to make this actually a very rich, intriguing, you suddenly see people being like, you know, you think you know the person next to you and you don't. And because you don't, they actually remain interesting. That is a part of what keeps a relationship alive. Right, the mystery. You know, the presumption that you know the other person right next to you and that there's nothing left to discover is really boring and precludes, in my opinion, a certain kind of hopefulness. If you can never be surprised anymore and you think the other person is like the inside of your pocket, that's the contrived illusion of safety.

1:37:52Don't give me novelty in a place where I want to think that I already, no surprises can happen to me. And then you complain of boredom. Well, you can't have it both ways. It's so true how this subject is divided in this binary way between the salacious and the Puritan. And when I think of my own education, my own sex education, there was basically nothing. And you're just sort of trying to figure it out as a teenager yourself. and then the younger generation with just the level of access to porn everywhere and the lack of sex education and the lack of anybody like yourself who is helping young people develop a vocabulary and a confidence to have these kinds of conversations.

1:38:41This is not a healthy dynamic for, you know, how to kind of emerge into the world and be able to have, you know, healthy sexual relations. No. We need to, like, change the whole system around this. There's a lot of ignorance. There's a lot of myth. There's a lot of misunderstandings. And perfectionist ideals because of the algorithms and the social media. Yes, or even romantic ideals that have been propagated through movies in which everybody is always just instantly ready, exploding, you know, throwing themselves at another person. Nobody sees maintenance sex in a movie. You only see passionate sex.

1:39:26While maintenance sex is extremely important in erotic couples. Not everything is always a big production. Not every meal is a four-course meal. Some meals are just very simple home-cooked food, but they're no less pleasurable. And so what we see is just creating a set of rather unrealistic expectations. expectations. Not everybody starts sex after 18 years together just from being desirous and aroused and turned on. Sometimes you start from being willing and just open and we'll see what happens. You're not always eating because you're hungry. Not everybody runs to the gym because they can't wait.

1:40:06But I've never seen somebody come back from the gym and regret. And sex is no different. And sex is no different. And we have a kind of an exceptionalism around sex, as Marty Klein says, that is really problematic. And exceptionalism because of just the imagery that we're exposed to? No, because it was so forbidden for so long. Sexuality was primarily for procreation. Sexuality was a woman's marital duty. You needed to have 10 children, for which you needed to have 12 because two were not going to survive. So you had a kind of an intrinsic motivation. Children had a very different meaning in the family than they have today.

1:40:52And we switched gradually from the sexuality that had a goal and that was sanctioned religiously around that goal to a sexuality that went from duty to desire. We took sexuality out of the realm of nature and we socialized it. Sexuality became an element of our identity, not just an element of our condition. It's not just what we do, it's who we are. And we completely gave a new definition to sexuality, to its meaning, culturally, relationally, socially. And we freed it. And once we freed it, we said, it's natural. And once we said it's natural, we began to think that it just would pop up at 11.30 at night after you finished cleaning up the whole house out of nowhere.

1:41:45and that is kind of one of the evolutions. It's like it may be more natural than what we thought, but that doesn't mean it is just there ready to burst, you know, spontaneously. In a long-term relationship, everything that is spontaneous already happened. If you want it to happen, committed sex is premeditated, willful, conscious, creative sex. And then people say, oh, but that means you have to schedule it and plan it. I said, you don't schedule birthdays. You don't schedule your tennis game. You don't schedule. Of course, do you think that it takes something away from your tennis game because you scheduled it?

1:42:25No, nobody thinks that. But somehow this sex, God forbid, should have to be thought about. And that myth of spontaneity is actually revealing how uncomfortable people are with sex. They want it to just happen. So they don't have to actually claim it, own it. That's a revelatory point because there is this stigma that if you're scheduling it, that it isn't actually real sex because it didn't spontaneously emerge. Yeah, that is such a minefield. Seriously, the spontaneous myth is a subterfuge for people's challenges to actually openly, willfully acknowledge that this is important to them and they are going to make sure it happens, that they give value to it.

1:43:19Right, and to show up for that appointment as scheduled, whether you're in the mood or not, is confronting, right? Because if you have to then channel yourself or get yourself into a state of receptivity and giving when you're not just spontaneously feeling it, that's part of what it means to tend to this important thing between two people. Do you ever book a nice restaurant to go for dinner? Sure. Okay. Do you ever that whole day not think about the restaurant because you have a whole bunch of things to do? then you come home and you start to gradually think about the fact that you have this reservation.

1:44:01Then you take a shower, you change, you dress up, maybe because you think it's kind of nice to be dressed up to go to this place. Then you're still somewhat in a rush thinking about all the things that you need to finish. But you don't cancel your reservation because you're actually on some level looking forward to finally sit down. And does all that preparation make you feel like you shouldn't go to the restaurant? No, au contraire. Or that the experience that you just had was less worthy because you put it on the calendar. That's right. When you think about what you're saying about how sex is supposed to happen, we're not surprised that it doesn't happen nearly as often and as well as people would like.

1:44:43This being in the mood, the mood comes. The mood is something you cultivate. The mood comes with the attention, with the focus, with the presence, with being available. The mood is not, you know, don't always eat because you're hungry. But suddenly it smelled good. And then you said, oh, wow, what is that? Then you tasted. Then you took a little plate. Then you even ate more than you cared for. Then you really enjoyed it. And then you said, but I wasn't hungry. Surprising. You know, that's what happens with sex too. This being in the mood, this notion that desire precedes everything. and comes out of nowhere is a complete misunderstanding of how we connect sexually, for sure in long-term relationships.

1:45:34Let me put it this way. Sex is never spontaneous. It's just that when you are in the beginning or when you're single, you prepare yourself alone first in your mind. Where are we going to go? Where are we going to eat? What music?

1:45:53What moment that this is work that you shouldn't have to do. When a painter starts to paint and they prepare their materials, they're not busy thinking, oh, boring. No, they're thinking as they're preparing the colors or they're not thinking. They're actually trying to not think, whichever process they're engaged in. But everyone understands ritual to prepare a site or to go and put your skis or your, whatever, your golf clubs or your tennis racket or your baseball mitt. I mean, there is, you dress a certain way, you put your accoutrements, you bring your tools, your accessories, and nobody thinks this takes away from the experience.

1:46:35Everybody understands that that's what, that is the ritual of going to this activity. That's beautifully put. From hikers to bikers, everybody has a set of rituals, tools. Nobody says, oh, bike toys. Right. I think we... But sex toys. Yeah. We have this, when you say ritualize or ritual, like we have a reductive notion of what that is. It's candles and fireplaces and things like that. But it can be, it doesn't necessarily have to be that. but it is a way of marking it and readying yourself and like honoring it. It's mindfulness. And in fact, I'm putting my mind, my attention onto this thing because I am creating anticipation.

1:47:25And anticipation is the mortar of desire. Anticipation is the mortar of desire. If I'm about to travel to Paris, I'm anticipating this trip. I bought a ticket. I have a suitcase ready. I prepared certain clothes that I can imagine wearing there. I'm looking up for places I want to visit. I'm anticipating. It's an imaginary experience with which I'm projecting myself in Paris. And sex is no different. And sex is exactly the same. If sex is a foregone conclusion and you know in advance what you're going to get, why would you be interested all the time? Some of us are, but many of us are not. It's the curiosity.

1:48:10It's the whatever's going to happen. And then if I go to Paris, it's not a foregone conclusion, even if I've been 10 times. Yeah, yeah. Or you could go and be disappointed. You can do that too. But people don't come to get my help for disappointment. Can we talk about dating a little bit? But my lens on dating as somebody who's been married for a long time is through the adventures and misadventures of my boys. It's through my friends and peers who are divorced and now on the apps. And it's through like friends of my wife. And the narratives go something like this, at least with respect to young men.

1:48:57It's this is a game that's stacked against us. unless you're rich and powerful or unbelievably handsome. There's no incentive for any of these women to take a chance or commit to me. Like that's one story. For the divorced men, it's a similar story. For the women, it's like, where are all the good guys? Like I've been on these apps, I've been on a million terrible dates and I just can't find like just a decent person that I feel like investing my time and energy with. Yep. Those are stories you must hear quite a bit. Yes, I echo your stories. I have two sons too. I have a long-term relationship.

1:49:40I hear the same things. I think I don't know that I have really original things to say about it in the sense that we're in the midst of this. We're watching this. At first, updating allowed people to meet who would otherwise never meet. App dating is really very, very helpful to affinity groups. But something began to happen around the apps that became a complete commodification of people. You know, the kind of a ubiquitous ghosting that can take place. And people stopped being caring and careful of the feelings, the hearts, the brittle responses of other people. it's rough it's rough out there if I don't have to look at you in the eyes when I say I don't think we're going to continue or I'm not sure I'm interested or I met somebody else or I really wish you well but I would rather be friends or you know it's easy to just disappear or when the courage to be vulnerable with someone is met with the wrong reaction or disappointment So I have a lot of questions about how many times, you know, how much time I always find out.

1:51:02How long have you been writing before you meet? Did you call or did you see each other before you met? What did you do on your first date? A lot of first dates are often kind of akin to job interviews. It's pretty this way. I suggest to people to do something very different than to go and sit in a noisy place or and ask each other questions. I think that is not the way you meet. And then while you ask questions, you wait to see if you're experiencing any butterflies. You know, I think what often happens is that people go on the dates, if they go on the dates, and they live their life. I can't see you tonight, they say to their friends, because I have a date.

1:51:49I have a date Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week. I have dates. and they live their life to go on those dates and those dates don't materialize into anything and then they have to go back to their friends to say nothing happened and they feel this kind of emptiness in their stomach. The thing is set up that I date, I meet you, maybe we continue and after a few months when I know we are steady, then I introduce you to my community. Something about this feels off to me. You have a date, you have plans with your friend, bring your dates to the friends. Let's figure it out in some hermetically sealed vacuum.

1:52:26Yes. And meanwhile, when you're outside of your life and you're in that artificial world, you're both projecting idealized versions of yourself onto each other. And you're running a checklist in your mind on that list that you kind of opened with. Like, is this person going to satisfy all of these requirements that I have? And then you compare that to this perfectionism ideal that you see on social media. and it's a setup for disaster predominantly, is it not? Like how can anyone survive that? I mean basically people get into it, they do it for a few months, they either meet someone and then that goes into one direction or they don't meet, they get exhausted, they feel degraded, they feel flattened out and then they stop, they get off the app and then they go for a few months in their life and then they kind of get the courage to go back on the app and it's this revolt and then they see the same people sometimes that they had seen months back.

1:53:27I think that don't leave your life to go date. That's my first advice to a lot of people. Bring the dates to your life. But I don't want to have to tell that it didn't work. Let's just say I just met somebody. It's the first time I'm seeing them. I'm bringing someone along. They're your friends. They will have a lot to say and you will have a ton of data points from seeing this person interact with your people in your life, you know, integrate it so that you don't cut off from your life to go, you know, put yourself in the Petri dish. So that's one thing. The second thing is don't sit and interview and ask questions.

1:54:02Go do something you enjoy doing and bring that person along so that you, it's in multiple ways I'm thinking, how do we integrate this thing? Something is off in the complete cutoff. It's like isolation tanks in which these dates take place. And asking questions isn't going to tell you much. So there's a whole new generation now of people who are off the apps and they're going speed dating. How do you feel about that? Is that a good thing? I think we need to try a lot of different things. People are often starved. They want to connect. They don't meet enough people. the workplace is somehow no longer a place where you, they don't go to work many times.

1:54:46They spend the whole day at home. So, you know, this is this contactless life. So, any situation where you are in person with people and not just you sit in lines, you know, facing people two minutes, two minutes, you create activities. Some people use my card game, they do questions, there's an engagement, there's an experience that is created. and you will live with someone with whom you're talking and you will maybe even see that person again and that person may become a friend or may become a date or may introduce you to someone else. There is something dynamic about it and 3D and embodied, embodied.

1:55:28I think that that's the real thing here. I have yet to hear people who've gone to the speed dating and say it's a horrible experience. It's interesting because it sounds like a nightmare to me. Because you're thinking of it as being in a supermarket and having to look at a shelf and decide which box you want to take off the shelf. It sounds like the ultimate sort of job interview type dynamic. But it's not done like that. People come into little groups. They have a question. They're playing a game. I'm talking about the ones I've heard that are done tastefully, but they're springing up all over the place.

1:56:00Oh, that's interesting. It's almost like it's an antidote to the apps on some level to create collisions. create a dynamic in which people have to like interact with each other. That's so interesting. And all the ones who are there say the same thing. I wanted to meet in person, but I wanted to have a context for it, a framework. I don't want to be alone. There's also a thing about a lot, there's a lot of people they move. Right, right, right. Which kind of lowers the stakes a little bit, I guess. One of the things that I see in older people who have had many relationships, maybe multiple marriages, et cetera.

1:56:36The older you get, you know yourself better. You also know what you like and you don't like. And it's very easy. You're inflexible. You're like, this is the way I like my life. And I want to have a relationship, but I'm really not interested in anybody who's going to challenge that way of living that I like and that I'm so accustomed to. And so, you're sort of dead out of the gate, right? Especially if you're going to be dating somebody who's in your age bracket because they're probably coming to it similarly, right? And so, So somehow these people need to, you know, kind of embrace a little more flexibility around that kind of thing if a relationship is going to have a shot.

1:57:13Yes. I mean, basically, sometimes people will say, I would like to be in a relationship, but I prefer the one I have with myself. Okay. Then stay with yourself. It's okay. I mean, you don't go to be with somebody else to stay unchanged. Part of what you experience by being with someone else, not just in a romantic relationship, is to actually discover yourself anew, differently, things that you didn't know you may like. So if it's to stay static and you kind of say it up front, don't move me, don't budge me, don't shake me, don't intrude on me, then you kind of want to ask what happened? What made that become such a prerogative for you?

1:58:07Did you feel like you lost yourself too much in the previous relationship? Is this a way of holding on to the previous relationship? What is the meaning of this static quality that you seem to claim? You know? What is it that you may be afraid of? What is it that you're defending against even before the whole thing even started? and who tells you that someone is going to, you know, that that's what people come to do, you know, the renovation project. They've already done their homes. So what are we talking about? And that's my conversation when I hear that dialogue. But I think the first question often is, how have you been in your previous relationships?

1:58:53I think that we don't pay enough attention to how relationships end. And I think that when they end, we tend to think that they failed, when in fact longevity is not the only marker of success. And I think that some relationships were very good for what they were meant to be. And if people could understand that the ending doesn't mean they failed, then they could take with them a very different story about what they bring to the next relationship. Because we come with our accumulated memories and lessons of the relationships we've been in. Yes, some relationships run their course and were successful for what they were, but are no longer viable.

1:59:40And that's not a failure. That's a success, right, for a certain stage of life. You grew up together. You build homes together. You took care of your aging parents. You have been there to help each other begin your professional lives. Or you've raised kids together. You've done a lot of things. These are not small things. These are not failed relationships. Maybe at this moment, developmentally, you need, there is something else. This is why I say we will have two or three relationships. And some of us will do it with the same person. And some of us will need another person to create something new.

2:00:18Some people can reinvent on location and reimagine themselves. And some of us will leave. We live twice as long, and that means that longevity means something very different. And at different stages, you know, you will see these developmental tasks of family life for many is no longer at the center. So what do you have together? And some relationships will stay because there's a real deep connection between the two people, and the quality of the relationship is what really holds them. And for some people, they will stay together because it's a very powerful scaffolding. It gives them access to all kinds of things in the world.

2:01:03That is what the relationship provides them. And it's a lifestyle and resources and people, and that is the meaning of the relationship. Nothing wrong with that. And it's up to the people in the relationship to make up those rules and what that contract looks like. It doesn't have to adhere to our conventional understanding of what a relationship needs to look like. I also think that it's okay to want other relationships. Romantic relationship is not the only one for us to stay connected. There are people who are wonderful siblings, friends, bosses, mentors, and they do not shine in the romantic sphere.

2:01:46but they are the friends you dearly want to have. And we have so attached the word love and intimacy to the romantic relationship when in fact there is deep love and intimacy in friendships, for example. And there's a tremendous pressure about that romantic relationship. But maybe for some people, that same person that says, I like my habits and I be my guest, you know maybe have some sexual partners maybe have close friends maybe you have people with whom you like to travel maybe you have people with whom you enjoy being together but you don't want to merge homes and you want to be a lot or living apart together we either accept that there's a multiplicity of models and there isn't a one size fits all but that being connected and having intimacy and meaningful relationship is essential to our survival and to our well-being and not to put all of it into one type of relationship.

2:02:49I think that that's the more important piece is we need connection. We're socially wired. Relational health is essential to physical health, to our overall sense of well-being, but it doesn't just have to take place in the romantic relationship. I could talk to you for hours and hours more, but we have to bring this to a conclusion. Thank you for coming here today. I really appreciate it. I think your work is vital and I applaud and salute you for the way that you show up in the world and how helpful you have been to millions of people because relationships is a universal thing. We all have our struggles and challenges with it.

2:03:30And you have been just a wealth of information and inspiration and education in that regard. So thank you. Thank you. Yeah. You have a couple courses that are going live soon, Playing With Desire and Bringing Desire Back, which I believe are dropping on September 17th. Correct. Which is very exciting. And as a gift to our audience, you are offering a reduced price on that. If you use the code RICH15 at checkout, you get 15 % off. And for people who want to learn more about those courses, where should they go? EstherPerel.com. It's that simple. All right. Thank you. Thank you. I hope you'll come back and explore more.

2:04:14I had tons more I wanted to talk to you about, but this was a real treat. So thank you. I'm honored. Yes. Peace. Thanks.

2:04:28Thank you.

2:04:34That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:06:26Thank you.