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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.

Esther Perel

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Esther Perel
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Author
Psychotherapist
Antwerpen
Longing
Become
Persons
Person
Sometimes
Longings
Much
Liking
Existential
Elsewhere

More quotes by Esther Perel

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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.
Esther Perel
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Are you asking a question because you want to know the answer or are you asking the question because you want your partner to know that you are having this question?
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It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.
Esther Perel
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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.
Esther Perel
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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.
Esther Perel
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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
Esther Perel
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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
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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.
Esther Perel
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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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In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays.
Esther Perel
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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.
Esther Perel
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Love enjoys knowing everything about you desire needs mystery.
Esther Perel
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Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.
Esther Perel
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We used to moralize today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.
Esther Perel
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In desire, there must be some small amount of tension. And that tension comes with the unknown, the unpredictable. You can close yourself off at home and say, Whew, at last I'm in a place where I don't have to worry, or you can keep yourself open to the mystery and elusiveness of your partner.
Esther Perel
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Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.
Esther Perel
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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.
Esther Perel
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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.
Esther Perel
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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.
Esther Perel
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You know what happens to sex in marriage? Instead of inviting desire, you monitor it. Especially men: You let her sleep late, you take the kids to the park, and all that time you're thinking, Tonight I'll get some. That doesn't work.
Esther Perel