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The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

Esther Perel

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Esther Perel
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Author
Psychotherapist
Antwerpen
Relationship
Secret
Term
Desire
Long

More quotes by Esther Perel

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Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.
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Today, monogamy is one person at a time.
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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.
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Affairs can be powerful detonators. They can invigorate a marriage that's flat, jolt people out of years of complacency. Fear of loss rekindles desire, makes people have conversations they haven't had in years, takes them out of their contrived illusion of safety.
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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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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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It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.
Esther Perel
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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.
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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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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Success, to me, is helping one person or many people counter the isolation and pseudoconnectivity of our lives by boosting their ability to connect to themselves and to others.
Esther Perel
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Love enjoys knowing everything about you desire needs mystery.
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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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
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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?
Esther Perel
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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.
Esther Perel
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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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Our partner's sexuality does not belong to us. It isn't just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction.
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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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