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.".

Esther Perel

Categorized in : Desire Perfect Obstacles

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

elsewhere self want

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.

Esther Perel

passion couple children

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

Esther Perel

new-eyes mystery eye

If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.

Esther Perel

one-day lost order

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.

Esther Perel

emotional cheating years

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.

Esther Perel

knowing-everything desire needs

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

Esther Perel

finding-happiness make-you-happy giving

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

Esther Perel

pillars two needs

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

Esther Perel

loyalty trouble expression

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.

Esther Perel

feelings giving people

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

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

Esther Perel

responsible persons imagination

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

adventure relationship commitment

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.

Esther Perel

dancing feelings people

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

Esther Perel

autonomy abandoned feels

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

village weight 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

connections men sex

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.

Esther Perel

erotic imagination play

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

Esther Perel

take-me can-do sex

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