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

Esther Perel

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Esther Perel
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Author
Psychotherapist
Antwerpen
Rests
Surrender
Exists
Two
Separateness
Need
Togetherness
Needs
Alongside
Love
Pillars
Autonomy

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The secret to desire in a long-term relationship
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We used to moralize today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.
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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.
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In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays.
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There is no neediness in desire ... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.
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You never know your partner as well as you think.
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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.
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It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.
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Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.
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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.
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Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.
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Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy
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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.
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To look at infidelity from the point of view of sex is a complete narrowing of the phenomenon. There's a reason that the commandment is repeated twice in the Bible - once for doing it and once for thinking about it. We have always created structures and broken structures. It is essential to the human spirit.
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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.
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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..
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Most affairs do die a natural death. Today, you look at your partner's phone to find out the weather, and you find out about a lover. It has never been as easy to cheat as it is today, and it has never been harder to keep a secret.
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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.
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I want to engage people in an honest, enlightened, and provocative conversation about the nature of erotic desire and the intricacies of intimacy and sexuality. The object of my game is to bring nonjudgmental, multicultural understanding to the challenges and choices of modern relationships.
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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.
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