Quote

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

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Esther Perel
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
Author
Psychotherapist
Antwerpen
Attraction
Equals
Perfect
Plus
Obstacle
Times
Excitement
Fits
Desire
Obstacles
Richer
Often
Affair
Jack
Experience
Absence
Yearning
Psychotherapist
Fit
Rooted
Equation
Plot
Erotic
Actually

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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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Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.
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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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Love enjoys knowing everything about you desire needs mystery.
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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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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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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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It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.
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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.
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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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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 used to moralize today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.
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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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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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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.
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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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Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.
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There is no sex without a cue. People who date have their cues at home, before they meet. You think about where to go, what to eat, what to do and say. Sometimes the cue is short - - just before we reach the bar - - but sex is never just spontaneous. Spontaneity is a myth.
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You never know your partner as well as you think.
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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.
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