Quote

Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.

Esther Perel

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Esther Perel
Age: 67
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Author
Psychotherapist
Antwerpen
Value
Realists
Security
Realist
Either
Happily
Passion
Stability
Values
Intensity
Often
Disappointed
Live
Extreme
People
Extremes
Romantics

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Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.
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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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Love enjoys knowing everything about you desire needs mystery.
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Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.
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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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Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.
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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.
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What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
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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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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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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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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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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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In committed sex, in marriage, people don't feel the need to seduce or to build anticipation - - that's an effort they think they no longer need to do now that they have conquered their partner. If they're in the mood, their partner should be too.
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It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.
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