Esther Perel Quotes Page 2

“To understand trust, you have to understand distrust. To understand fidelity, you have to understand infidelity.”

“Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.”

“Trust is the active engagement with the unknown. Trust is risky. It’s vulnerable. It’s a leap of faith.”

“We are most intensely excited when we are a little off-balance, uncertain.”

“We see what we want to see, what we can tolerate seeing, and our partner does the same. Neutralizing each other’s complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness.”

“When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.”

“When two become one — connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.”

“When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.”

“When you pick a partner, you pick a story. So what kind of story are you going to write?”

“Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.”

“You can look at the unknown as a place of fear and loss. You can look at the unknown as a realm of possibility and progress. The reality is, it’s both.”

“Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.”

“Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.”

“It’s hard to experience desire when you’re weighted down by concern.”

“It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.”

“Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition.”

“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. They know that they have years in which to deepen their connection, to experiment, to regress, and even to fail. They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli. It’s a story that they are writing together, one with many chapters, and neither partner knows how it will end. There’s always a place they haven’t gone yet, always something about the other still to be discovered.”

“Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.”

“Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.”

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

“The more we trust, the farther we are able to venture.”

“Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?”

“We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.”

“Humans have a tendency to look for things in the places where it is easiest to search for them rather than in the places where the truth is more likely to be found.”

“Monogamy used to mean one person for life. Now monogamy means one person at a time.”

“Our partners do not belong to us; they are only on loan, with an option to renew — or not. Knowing that we can lose them does not have to undermine commitment; rather, it mandates an active engagement that long-term couples often lose. The realization that our loved ones are forever elusive should jolt us out of complacency, in the most positive sense.”

“Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves.”

“The best ideas rarely arise in one isolated mind, but rather develop in networks of curious and creative thinkers.”

“We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long.”

“We seek connection, predictability, and dependability to root us firmly in place. But we also have a need for change, for the unexpected, for transcendence.”