Does romantic love carry a one-fits-all approach, or is it something we can cultivate individually with our partner? Joining Sarah Grynberg is psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author Esther Perel, who is recognized as one of today's most insightful and original voices on modern relationships. In this eye-opening conversation, Sarah and Esther delve into how to make relationships last; infidelity & why even happy people cheat; and the importance of having meaning and purpose beyond caring for our kids. If you wish to restore and bring light back into your seemingly fractured relationships, or wish to understand how to reframe your perspective on the wonder that is love; then let this very special chat and Esther’s heart-felt words not only give you the confidence to cultivate healthy bonds with others, but help you see the presence of love: as the only thing we will ever truly need in this world.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Sarah:
Esther Farrell, welcome. You are here off the back of a sold out tour in
Australia,which is amazing and I like to start at the beginning. I want to
hear a bit about your upbringing and the fact that you grew up with
two parents that were Holocaust survivors, and I'd like to know how
that experience was for you and what you learnt from them.
Esther:
That would be a biography. That's not just one question. I think
that there are two primary lessons. If I think of what the
experience of my parents, who they were, the survivors, but they
were also the sole survivors of their entire family, and so to
speak, they had a five year lockdown in a concentration camps, and
they gave me a lot of lessons about how one maintains oneself in a
literal lockdown. That was one of the big things is how do you face
hardships, and what do you do to maintain a sense of aliveness and
vibrancy and hopefulness, and how do you stay connected to your
imagination and to the spirit, when everything else is dehumanizing
and it doesn't have to be taken in its extreme version, but it is
the permission to experience pleasure in the midst of tragedy, in
the midst of misery, and the importance of experiencing pleasure or
the erotic curiosity, nature, art, and the deep ties with other
people that were offsetting the cataclysmic experiences that they
were having. So that was one major piece. And the second one was
that it's the quality of your relationships that determines the
quality of your life. They had nobody. They had nobody. They were
each the youngest one of nine children in a family in one of seven.
So they had to rebuild community literally and really learn to
create what we today call family of choice. But that was done
without the same name, and that's what we had. And so I think that
my parents were deeply interested in relationships and so am I.
Sarah:
Did they ever talk to you about how they move through that
trauma of having their families die, and then having that isolation
of thinking, who do I have around me? And then obviously they met
each other after they left the camps. How did they move through that
with each other?
Esther:
So I was very lucky that I had parents who were storytellers.
Yeah. And they also were very good curators. They knew to tell the
stories that we could tolerate listening, and they did that for
themselves, probably not even intentionally, but very adaptively.
And they did that for their children and for anyone else who was
interested in them, because they were characters figures that people
really wanted to hear from and what my parents understood.
Naturally, my parents and their entire cohort is that collective
trauma because they had gone through a collective trauma. It wasn't
just an individual trauma. The man that collective resilience, you
don't go through this alone. You find other people who went through
the same or similar experiences. You find other survivors. You find
rituals that you will create with those survivors. You find ways to
commemorate and to bring memory and to keep the dead into your
memory and into the public space. And all of this was done without
any therapy. Very few survivors went to therapy, but they did quite
well. The first thing they did, by the way, is have children,
because if you had a child, you were still human. It meant you could
still procreate. It was a fundamental of the expression of your
humanity was to have children. Some of them were better parents than
others, no doubt. But all in all, it's a group that managed to
rebuild, to move to another country, to learn new languages, to
raise their children in a foreign place, to have jobs. But they did
it very much in a collective way. They came together with other
people who experienced the same thing. Um, and everything has to be
learned. Not everything, but so many things. Have been learned from
watching the way that this particular group of survivors of a
genocide dealt. It was applied to Cambodia, it was applied to
Armenia, it was applied to many other places afterwards and today,
to many of the survivors of all the big catastrophes going on. By
the way, the word trauma was never mentioned. That was not in the
vocabulary. What we went through is undescribable. Nobody could
understand it. We went through terrible things. There was no need to
describe in utter details all the terrible things um, we have.
There's so much we can learn from the way that particular group did
it. And by the way, most importantly, it was the first group that
coined the term adult trauma, really, before World War two. We never
thought of trauma as something that can happen in your adult life.
Freudian theory posited that this was something you experienced in
the first five years of your life. It's all in childhood. The idea
that actually you may have had a perfectly fine life, and then one
day you have a traumatic event that leaves you with scars for the
rest of your life that began after World War two.
Sarah:
Well, isn't that so interesting? It's funny, I was talking to
someone the other day. We're actually talking about you, and I said
that your parents were Holocaust survivors, and my grandpa was a
Holocaust survivor, also in Poland and hidden in the forest, and has
his own story, as they all do. I've interviewed on the podcast, a
Holocaust survivor, she's 91 now, one of the happiest people I've
ever met, and it's so interesting how we can look to them. And I
suppose in psychotherapy and you have the work of Viktor Frankl and
all these amazing people and how we can use that trauma in looking
at today's world and how we move through certain emotions and how we
deal with pain. And these people have been through so much, but it's
really interesting to see how a lot of them prevailed, indeed, in
such a graceful way. And I remember this one woman saying to me, I
don't hate anyone I would never hate. I think what they did wasn't
right, but how could I have hate in my heart? And I just think
that's such an incredible thing.
Esther:
The definition of the word trauma really shifts when you look at
survivors or victims of torture, political violence, war,
psychosocial trauma, disasters, pandemics. You look at the
experience of trauma as a cataclysmic event that leaves you
powerless in the moment and thereby you freeze. And your reaction to
that event is what becomes the basis for PTSD. It's not the event
itself that is the trauma. It's your reaction to it and the
powerlessness, the frozen ness, because something is overwhelming,
like those major events in the recent years, we have redefined
trauma as developmental trauma, primarily issues that have happened
to you in childhood, and they are often more individual based
trauma. And that's a very different definition. So we're using the
same word, but it actually exists now on a continuum. In both cases,
the term that is not often used enough because we are very much
invested in studying post-traumatic stress disorder, and we don't
spend enough time thinking about post-traumatic growth.
Sarah:
What actually does help? How do people come out of it, and what
is the power of social connection for that? More than anything else,
you can do all the self-regulation and all the meditation, all of
that is very useful and important. But fundamentally, the power of
social connection is the most important thing because trauma is
about disconnection. It's about massive loss and unresolved grief.
So the reconnecting is part of the repair.
How come you think some people move through trauma?
It's the million dollar. Question in.
A way that they can deal with it and others can't. Is it to do
with the way that they're brought up, is that.
Esther:
It's really the million dollar question. Honestly, why in the
same family, the two people go through the same events and one
person manages to use it as the source of their impetus and their
drive in life, and the other person gets completely crushed by it.
You know, there's a beautiful project in the prisons in the United
States where they bring in CEOs and heads of companies to go and
spend time with inmates, lifelong inmates. And one of the most
interesting findings about what is the difference between those who
are behind bars and those who are not, and who could have been, who
also almost ran over somebody who also had car accidents, who also
were way too drunk, who also. And the big Distinguisher Discerner is
having had someone who believed in you, the mentor, the teacher, the
coach, somebody who took a special interest in you and gave you
constantly a different picture of yourself than the one that you
were holding.
Sarah:
Isn't that interesting?
Esther:
That is one of the most interesting things. So anytime somebody
has made it, whatever they made, it means they were able to love
again, to create family, to have friends, to have a job, to believe
in, something you know, to create. I think one of the first question
I ask is, who was there for you? Was there someone outside of the
family system, for that matter, a neighbour, an aunt, a grandparent?
And yesterday at the event here in Melbourne, we had one of the card
questions of where should we begin? And it was a conversation that
you could have again. And so many people would probably say, my
grandmother or my grandfather, the person who impacted my life that
doesn't even know it. The person to whom I have a big thank you. The
person that held me in esteem when I didn't have enough of it for
myself.
Sarah:
That is such a big thing, isn't it? And I reflect on that as
well. Being in the line of work I'm in, I always think of those
people that saw something in me when maybe others didn't see
anything, or when I felt that I was at my lowest and they believed
in me. And that belief of someone else having that in you allows you
to move forward. And did you have someone like that in your life?
Esther:
I probably have had more than one. Yeah, I've had teachers,
mentors, friends, my brother, my husband for sure. Yes. I always had
this image of an elevator safety shaft that everybody, when they
fall because we will fall, has this scoop underneath that makes sure
that you can fall, but you won't hit the ground. And it's that
little space between the fall and the crash that is so important.
Who makes it? It depends how well you navigate the institutions. The
one who makes it is sometimes the one who managed to stay under the
radar in school. The outwardly aggressive often makes it less than
the much more collapsed and explosive one, rather than the explosive
one, because it is less disruptive in a classroom. If once you start
to be kicked out of the classroom and you, sometimes it becomes a
snowball effect of all the other institutions where you want last.
So being able to navigate the institutions that socialize us
throughout our lives is probably an important one, too, in terms of
who makes it. It's multifactorial, but it ultimately is one of the
most mysterious questions why this person came out of this stronger.
And the other one came out of this broken arm.
Sarah:
That's so fascinating. You obviously got into psychotherapy, but
you studied theater for a while. What made you move into wanting to
do psychotherapy?
Esther:
I studied both from the beginning. Yeah, I was an I did theater
as a teenager throughout my adolescence, and I was deeply interested
in psychology from my adolescence on starting at age 14. So I was
interested in education because I hated school. I hated the way they
treated us in school as students. I hated the whole repressive
system that I was in, so I got to reading everything about
alternative education. From there, I went into psychology, so I've
always had a deep interest in both. I studied psychodrama, which was
a way of finding ways to use theater. I understood Greek theater and
the power of it, and I understood that much of our life is a
theater. It's a stage. We perform, we perform roles. So psychodrama
became a very good structure for me to integrate the two, and I
became I always thought I would do both. For some reason, when I
came to New York, I realized that I was going to have an easier time
becoming a therapist and becoming an actress. I didn't want to be a
waitress.
Sarah:
I wanted to ask you, obviously, relationships is a big thing to
you, and you talk a lot about eroticism and you do it in such a
beautiful way. And you say, which I love, eroticism is our life
force. And I wanted to talk about that a little bit more and explore
what that actually means.
Esther:
The typical definition of eroticism in modern times is sexual
exciting. Turn on a repertoire of sexual techniques urges. But there
is a long standing mystical definition of eras as life force that
which makes you feel alive, vibrant, energized, vital. That which
allows you to deal with deadness, death, catastrophe, loss. And, um.
It is too bad that the word has been narrowed. Of course, eroticism
is what makes sex great, but it is also what makes life worth
living. Yes. It's the ability in the middle of grief to actually
still experience love, connection, hope. Otherwise, what are we
holding on to? So I have really wanted to use that term, and I
discovered it when I was writing Mating in Captivity, because I
realized slowly that I was not so interested in sex per se.
Sexuality. What people do if they have sex, how often, how hard, how
many orgasms, and all the measurable stuff that I was really
interested in, the experience in the the and that the eroticism is
really defined by the central agent is your imagination, not what
you do. You can do sex and feel nothing. Women have done that for
centuries.
Sarah:
I loved when I was at your talk last night how you got everyone
to stand up. And there was one bit where you asked, has anyone ever
had consensual sex? And that they enjoyed it when they didn't get
much out of it? I think there was not a person sitting. Everyone was
standing when you said that, right?
Esther:
That in itself could be a whole evening, right? The amount of
stories that are behind that. And it wasn't just women and it wasn't
non-consensual and it was maybe consensual, but not wanted or not
clearly wanted, or in any case, it was really lackluster. Yes, that
that is incredible. How many people will have a sexual life that is
not nearly what they would hope for it to be, or sometimes they
don't even know what it could be. Yes. So eroticism is the poetry of
sex. Eroticism is when Octavio Paz talks about it, the senses become
servants to our imagination. It's when you can see the invisible and
hear the inaudible. Or Audre Lorde talks about eroticism as an act
of self-preservation and political warfare. It's extremely
important. There's a lot of it that is subsumed under it, and it's
an intelligence that is cultivated. We are all born sensuous and we
become erotic. We learn what are the ways that we stay connected to
life, to others, to hope, to nature, to art, to curiosity. Everyone
there trajectory for that. But that is the force and it is the
opposite. It's what Freud used to call Eros and tantos. There was a
moment yesterday in the Melbourne talk that was also very powerful,
where one man talked about his trauma, experience with sexual abuse.
And too often when we talk about trauma, we are dealing with the
actual experience of the event itself. But we don't talk about the
rehabilitation. It's one thing to take an arm that was broken, put
it in a cast, then take off the cast. But you still need to retrain
the arm to be used. Yes, that's the erotic recovery. That arm has to
come back to life. It needs to reintegrate the body and then the
world. That's eroticism. Erotic recovery is really core to our
ability to sustain ourselves.
Sarah:
Do you think having a sexual relationship is a must? I mean,
there are so many people who could say that they're in love with
each other, but they don't have sex anymore. They may have had sex
to have kids. As time passes, they don't have sex. Is it fundamental
in a successful relationship to keep on having sex?
Esther:
Depends. For whom? Hmm. For some people, not at all. Yeah. There
is a wonderful way to have an affectionate companionate
relationship. This was a wonderful way to have multiple friendships
with whom you have deep love and intimacy and no primary romantic
relationship. Yeah, that's not one way to live life. It depends for
whom. I would say we can live without sex, but we can't live without
touch. Yes, if we don't get touched, we become irritable. We become
aggressive. We become depressed. Touch is essential. And if it's not
from a person, it will be from a pet. But we need touch. Do we need
the sensuality of touch? Yes, probably. If you watch the way people
stroke the pet, the cat or the dog, you will see tremendous
sensuality. This is sexual or erotic if you prefer. If you see how
people hold little. It is erotic. It is sensual. It doesn't mean
it's sexual, but it. It is vibrant. It is alive. It is connective.
There is pleasure in it. The pleasure of holding this fragile little
human being in your arms. I think that your question needs to be
redefined. Before I answer it, I would have to ask, what do you mean
by sex? Can people live without sex? Means what can they live
without? Heteronormative penetrative sex that ends with an orgasm
and proves something has happened? Yes, of course they can. Yeah. Do
people have a sexuality in their lives no matter what? Because they
have a body. Because they have genitals, because they can touch
themselves. Because they can take care of themselves, because others
can please them, then that's a very different kind of question. And
still you can live a beautiful life that touches on this, but
doesn't really necessarily have a three course meal.
Sarah:
What is the difference between love and lust?
Esther:
Love and desire. Yeah, they relate, but they also conflict. And
that's where the mystery of eroticism lies. You can desire without
love, and you can love without desire. So this goes back to your
question. Can you live without, you know, living in a sexualized
relationship? By the way, it works quite well if both people are
similar.
Sarah:
Yes.
Esther:
The problem occurs because one person wants a very different
experience than the other. But love. Love comes with a sense of
responsibility. Love comes with a sense of worry, of caretaking, of
anxiety for the well-being of the other person. Desire needs freedom
to thrive. It needs to be carefree. It needs to be unselfconscious.
It needs to be able to momentarily enter inside oneself, which is
one of the reasons why sometimes it's a challenge for women, because
they find themselves too often in the role of caretaker, in the role
of responsible for the well-being of others, and at that moment
cannot separate themselves enough from that task to be able to
become playful and enter themselves. So the very things that nurture
love sometimes stifle desire.
Sarah:
I heard you say as well, that idea of caretaking, a neediness,
being sort of a shut down. And I find that so interesting. And I
think that a lot of mothers that I've spoken to, a lot of stay at
home mothers that might not earn their own money, and they're
reliant a lot upon their husbands. They feel this loss of power. And
then sometimes there starts to be this gap between the two of them,
and it's the woman desiring something else, and then maybe the
husband as well, because he sees his wife in the position that that
love and that desire between the two of them seems to have kind of
fallen. Have you seen a lot of that in your experience?
Esther:
I wrote an entire book about it. Mating in captivity is all
about understanding. Yes, the dilemmas of desire in long term
relationships.
Sarah:
Yes.
Esther:
But I will answer it to you. Like this I took a question around
the world for the last 15 years, and I have yet to hear something
different. And the question was, I find myself most drawn to my
partner when and I asked it in multiple cultures, and there were
literally four groups of answers all the time. And that's when I
began with this issue of the caretaking. It didn't just appear out
of nowhere. It's because I kept listening. People would say, I'm
most drawn to my partner when I see them in their element, when I
admire them, when they're doing something that they are passionate
about, when they're in the passionate can be on the horse, on the
beach, on the stage, you name it. And all of it was when I see my
partner radiant, thriving, and their otherness is momentarily
defined in front of me. They are self-sustaining, they're selfsufficient,
they don't need anything from me. And in that moment,
there is this energy between me and them. I'm drawn to them. I'm
attracted to that person. There is never caretaking in that
scenario. Caretaking is deeply loving, but it is an anti aphrodisiac
because you are in touch with the fragility of the other person. And
desire and lust involve a loss of control. They involve letting go
and in order to let go, you need to feel that this person here is
steady. Then you can do this. But if this person falls also, then
there's nothing holding you back.
Sarah:
Yes.
Esther:
Now on the woman is the most interesting one. If I work with
straight couples, it is very common that you will hear a man say
nothing turns me on more than to see her turn down.
Sarah:
S2: That makes sense.
Esther:
Yeah. Giving generous partner will often say that I have never
heard a woman say that highly. Not never. I've rarely heard. Nothing
turns me on more than to see him turn down is rather irrelevant for
her. What turns her on is her own turn on.
Sarah:
Wow. Why is that?
Esther:
Because in desire for the woman of female sexuality at that
moment demands a certain amount of narcissism in the best sense of
the word. It demands her ability to be self-focused. If she's
thinking of the little ones, if she's thinking about the partner, if
she's thinking about her sense of responsibility and caretaking, she
cannot disconnect enough to connect with herself in the presence of
this other person. So this deer that you're talking about with the
women who are continuously defined by what they do for everybody
else and don't have much agency, it's not just the fact of going
into the world and making their own money, it's that this being
outside in the world with agency calls upon completely different
parts of yourself.
Sarah:
Yes.
Esther:
And those become connected with the erotic charge. What turns
her on is what is happening to her. And in order for that to happen,
she needs to be able to focus on herself. And that's what happens
when she's out in the world doing her stuff.
Sarah:
That makes like you right here, right now.
Esther:
It's that whole Viktor Frankl about purpose and meaning is what
made some people last in the camps. Having that outside of your
children and looking after a house and caretaking it does. It gives
you this sense of feeling that you're helping others, but you're
doing also something for yourself that gives you purpose and meaning
in your life. Yep. I want to talk about infidelity. And I wonder
with the patients that have come into your care. Why do you see it
occur? And I feel that for a while people thought it was always the
males that were the ones that were having affairs. But we now know
that there is a lot of women that are having affairs as well, and
I'm sure it potentially is equal. Why do you think that occurs?
Sarah:
S4: Affairs. Yeah.
Esther:
S3: Well, first of all, who have the men been having affairs with
this idea that it was only the men?
Sarah:
You know, the.
Penny just dropped in. Yes.
Yeah.
Esther:
You know, some of them may have gone to other men, but many of
them went to other women. Right? Affairs have always existed. They
have been part of the story of marriage, transgression, infidelity.
It was indeed primarily a privilege of men because they were more
protected. Because women were possession of men, they were the
property of men. And so where the children and she had everything to
lose. And women have rarely done what they wanted. They have done
what would keep them safe and still do so in the majority of the
world. So the rate of female infidelity goes up when women become
more equal and able to take care of themselves and are protected by
law and are not going to lose everything and become destitute. Yes,
that's what changes the rate of female infidelity, economic
independence, legal protections, affairs occur for a host of
reasons. Some of them are connected to the relationship. Loneliness.
Number one sex lessness indifference, chronic bickering, lack of joy
in neglect, act, um, contempt. All the reasons that make people want
to flee. Mhm. So you have a whole range of infidelities that are a
reaction to discontent in the relationship, and then you have a
whole other type of infidelity that may have very little to do with
the relationship that is much more rooted in an individual's
experience of absence and of longing. One of the most interesting
things that I learned after ten years of working primarily with
couples and families with infidelity, is the fact that it happens in
good relationships, too. It happens in happy couples too. Yes, that
sometimes when a person goes elsewhere, they're not just because
going elsewhere, because they want to leave the person that they are
with, but sometimes it's because they want to leave the person that
they have themselves become. Oh, and it's not so much that they're
going to look for someone else as much as they're going to look for
another self or other parts of themselves that have been lost. That
woman that is at home that has been caring for her children, that is
just the mother, the wife that has not thought about herself for God
knows how long, sometimes finds herself when the yearning to once
again bring back the woman behind the mother. And she's not
rejecting her life, she just yearns to bring back a part of her
life, of herself that she doesn't know how to integrate in the life
that she has created. And that's a whole other range of affairs. But
the important part of this, when you ask the question, why do people
have affairs, is to not think that this is something that is
happening in a few places, just only about 85% of us have been
affected by the experience of infidelity as the children of the
parent who was unfaithful, or as the child of an illicit
relationship or as one of the three protagonists in the adulterous
triangle, or as the friend that is participating in a drama. It's
not an unknown story. And so I think, most importantly for me, in
writing a book about infidelity, which was, in a way, writing a book
about what happens when desire goes looking elsewhere. Yeah, it's to
say this is gutting, this is beyond painful, and we need a different
conversation that is going to help the millions of us who are
affected by it to just be black and white, judgmental victim
perpetrator is really not helpful to so many of us.
Sarah:
Do you think people can repair from infidelity? Couples can
repair from it and leave together happy, joyous relationships after?
Or I know that trust is obviously a huge thing in anyone's
relationship with a friend as well. Once that is severed, can it be
replenished again?
Esther:
Some affairs will kill a relationship that was already dying on
the vine, and some affairs will be the most powerful alarm system
that will jolt a couple out of a state of complacency and laziness,
and finally make it realise that it stands to lose way more than it
wanted to. Yeah. And so, yes, there are people who come out of an
affair and they will tell you this was the worst day of our life,
but it changed us and it brought us on a track. And we are a much
better couple today and more honest today than we ever were. That
is, of course, the better outcome that we wish for many people. I
would hope that more people would actually experience that, but
sometimes it's irretrievable and too many broken pieces and you
can't piece them back together. The rebuilding of the trust is
really not just about you won't do this again, because the majority
of people who come to therapy around affairs are people who have
been faithful and. No games for years. Really? Five, ten, 25 years.
The majority are not chronic philanderer and the chronic philanderer
have other issues. So you asked yourself always, why would a person
cross a line that they never thought they would cross? For a glimmer
of what? When they risk losing everything they spend a lifetime
building. Why? Right. That's the original question for me. When I
wrote the State of Affairs story, it was about that. Why do people
go, you know, to that place where everything they worked for,
everything this labored so hard to build could be. And then you want
to know that trust is not just the promise of not reaching out
again. Trust is that you really experience a deep valuing of the
relationship. And the person who is unfaithful sometimes trashed the
relationship. And that's often the case when there's no rebuilding
possible. But often the person who also had an affair is the one
who's been yearning for you to finally pay attention to them, listen
to them, kiss them on occasion, touch them, make love to them,
treasure them. And that's when I came up with the second big finding
in the book, which is that the victim of the affair is not always
the victim of the marriage.
Sarah:
Oh, it gives me shivers. It's so true. You said something last
night about. Our phones are the closest thing to us. And I suppose
if they are, and that you're trying to engage with your partner and
they're constantly working or on their phone, those people who are
loving.
Happy.
May look for an affair because their self-esteem is low, and
they just want to feel like they're acknowledged and attractive.
Esther:
And I prefer to look at it slightly different, which is to say
that relational betrayal comes in many forms. Decades of neglect and
indifference and criticism and poor treatment is also a betrayal.
Sarah:
Yes.
Esther:
Then we are talking about it's not just, oh, I felt bad about
myself and I needed I needed someone to laugh at my jokes, you know,
and I needed a little boost because then it looks very trite. Yes.
And there are, there is that too. But in. But if you really are
going to go in the depth of what allows a couple to rebuild, it is
also to understand, you know, how they came to a place where at the
heart of affairs you will see lying, deception, betrayal, violations
of trust. But at the heart of affairs you also see longing and
yearning for connection, for aliveness, for intimacy.
Sarah:
S2: From your experience, what makes a good relationship?
Esther:
Many, many different things, really. I mean, I'm asked this
question every night on this Australian tour right now, and I could
answer it differently every night, you know? Um, because. What makes
a good relationship is different for different people because they
have different needs, first of all, so there isn't a one size fits
all. I think we really have to be careful to not think what makes a
good tomato soup. Yeah, you want a few basic ingredients that, you
know, a good ripe tomato, lush tomato that there's a lot of taste
will be different than a can. There's a few basic things, you know,
but for the rest, how you play with this spice so that Spice
Relationships has a bit of that too. You need some core features.
And then around that you play with all the other ingredients and you
mix and match and you change them in the course of a life. So what
makes a great relationship, number one, is the ability to change, to
be flexible, to be adaptive to the new reality. The new reality may
be we just moved in. You just had your mother come in. We're in a
lockdown. We've had a third child. I have a new career. We going to
another country? You got sick. Whatever is the ingredients that
reality throws into your relationship, you know? And that adaptation
is really, really important. I think that admiration goes a long
way. You notice couples where one person talks about their partner
with admiration, and you know that the admiration also means that
you're usually quite pleased to wake up with them in the morning.
What makes a good relationship? I just spoke with somebody just
before coming here and who was telling me, having come to the event
last night, I have a lot of work to do. I realize that I've been
projecting on my partner the things that I experienced with my
father, and I often do this and this and this. And I just said, have
you ever told this to your partner? This is 16 years into it,
because just the act of acknowledging, I know that there are things
I do which are painful, frustrating, upsetting, undermine our
relationship. The ability to take responsibility and ownership over
the things that we bring is huge. Because when I bring this to you
and I say, you know, I know that I'm sometimes really harsh and
critical and whatever you do, I barely notice. But whatever you
don't do, I make a big fuss about. And that sometimes is not fair.
But I come with a story, etcetera, etcetera, that that makes the
other person a feel that we're living in a shared reality, that you
see what you do to me, and I don't have to be the one always telling
you, you know that I know that you know, and that you're willing to
do something to make it better because I don't like it. A good
relationship is when you do plenty for the other person just because
it's the other person and not because you particularly care about
it, but you care about them. A good relationship is where people
laugh and are able to have perspective on stuff. A good relationship
is a relationship that has a constantly fluid balance between what
is together and what is separate, what is autonomous, and what is
interdependent. You know where one can say to the other person, go
do your thing and have a great time. A good relationship is where
people communicate without blame and defensiveness all the time. A
good relationship is a relationship that can fight and then also
make up, but they need to know to fight and they need to fight.
Fighting is important.
Sarah:
Why?
Esther:
Why? Because it's energy. Because it's friction.
Well. People fight much of the time because they care. I'm not
talking about all kind of fighting, but a lot of the fighting is.
I'm asking this again because I really care. In many instances, you
can have said I did you no fighting anymore. You're done. But
there's a better way to be connected and to experience heat than
through friction. Or there's a better kind of friction than the
hostile friction.
Sarah:
Yes.
Esther:
So it's a beautiful thing about relationship that actually
there's many things. And I can give you what the research says and
how it studied this thing versus that thing. But I think the nicest
question is to ask a couple what makes you relationship a good
relationship. My partner has my back. I can trust them. He makes me
laugh when I'm in the midst of. They are a good person. They're
kind. They've been so good to my mother. Whatever. I feel safe here.
Or I can be bold here. Or I get a partner who pushes me all the
time. Yesterday I asked a question. The person that challenges me
most and quite a few people said themselves, but many of them said
my partner and they took the word, challenged me in. In the
positive. They push me across a line. They make me be bold. They
give me the confidence I lack sometimes, you know, or they keep me
behind the line when I'm about to cross it. They have a positive
power over me or toward me.
Sarah:
We've spoken about having a lot of teachers yourself, especially
in the early days, and you speak to a lot of people. What's the best
advice that you have ever been given?
Esther:
I'm given advice every day. I am an advice seeker. Yes, I make
my decisions with a lot of consultation, and I think some of the
best advice I get is when people remind me what is the goal? What am
I going for? And help me not get too distracted? The best advice is
when people say, have you ever considered that? And they're taking
me three steps ahead of where I had imagined I could be? It's when
they expand the visions for me, and I think that that's been like
that since I was a teenager. You know, as a kid, I would go to camp
and in camp in Belgium, at the end of camp, everybody would write
little messages to people, and your youth counselors and the other
people would send you this. And recently I found a box of these
messages of what people would write to me that I kept at the end of
and so much of the time it was about, you have a lot of ideas, but
you lack confidence. You know. Yes yes yes yes. Yes. And. I think
that these messages were so perceptive. They just really understood
something that I was more bold than many. So what may have been lack
of confidence for me is still plenty in the general sense. But they
always said, you could do this if you only believed in yourself
more. And, you know, at this point, I'm pretty much at the believing
of myself.
Sarah:
I wanted to say, you've got your new card game and it is so
divine. Where should we begin? And I wanted to know, can I ask you a
question or you pick. It's my first time. Will be like a tarot
reader.
Esther:
Should I say something about what it is?
Sarah:
Yes.
Please do tell. You started this in lockdown. The idea came in
lockdown. So I'd love you to talk about why that came to you then.
Esther:
So there's two moments. Yes. The first moment is I'm in
lockdown. You have been in lockdown here in Melbourne. You know the
story.
Sarah:
S4: I know a lot about lockdown.
Esther:
I get a video and I get these little kids and they're playing
and they're playing that. They're running in a river and they're
chasing away to go hide in a castle. But the river is made up of
rocks, and the rocks are the books, and the pillars are the castles.
And and I'm looking at this whole thing and I'm thinking, wow,
freedom in confinement comes from our imagination.
Sarah:
Yeah.
Esther:
That is the imagination as heroes and as aliveness, as
playfulness, as curiosity and play is what helps us transcend the
limit of reality. And I'm thinking this is for them. This is true
for us, too. How do we remain curious with the people that we're
living with day in, day out? How do we remain curious even about
ourselves? How do we hear new stories? How do we ask good questions
to people we just met, so that we actually get to learn things about
them that we would never have imagined, like the 4000 people did
yesterday in the theater. Stories is the way we tell about our life.
Relationships are stories. Stories are bridges for connection, and
curiosity is the essential element here and in relationships. Much
of our work is about taking people who are reactive and turning them
into being curious.
Sarah:
Wow.
Esther:
So the game creates a safe container for this where you can
experiment, where you can tell stories because you're playing you
you're you're in a whole different frame than if you are in a
literal conversation. And so when I watch parents play with kids,
and I see these kids be able to say things to their parents that
they would never say in normal circumstances, but because they're
playing, they get to tell the story. When I see people on the first
date, when I see couples who are bored with each other and could
really use a new conversation with some fresh air. The card game
creates all of those opportunities, including at work, in a team
that wants to get to know each other. And it's all in the questions.
Sarah:
When the interviewer. I know that as well. Even when I get interviews, I
always think to myself, it is. Your answers are in the questions. So
the questions have to be good and can take it to an absolute new
level. You talk about imagination when I interviewed that Holocaust
survivor, she was six when she was in the camps. And I remember she
said to me, she used to imagine herself back in Poland and the fun
times that she had with her parents, and she used to just sit there
thinking about that and just recreating that in her mind whilst she
was in the camp, and she said that was what was able to get her
through as well.
Esther:
Right. So this is what I mean, that the central agent of eroticism is in our imagination.
It is true when you are in camp. It is true when you are trapped in
a relationship. It is true in lockdown. It is true when you're
trapped in a story and in a way of telling about your life. When
it's time to change, we have the capacity to anticipate and to
project and to see ourselves even when it's not happening, but
experience it as if it was happening.
Sarah:
Yeah, that's so powerful. All right, Esther you.
Esther:
Oh, a rule I secretly love to break. I'm a break rule breaker.
Period. So there's no specific one. And it's not always even secret.
Sarah:
Um, I love that. It's not even secret.
Esther:
It's not even a secret. I find rule breaking very, very freeing because the only
one of the main times I know that I'm doing what I want is when I'm
doing something I'm not supposed to do. Yeah. So if it's about
eating something I shouldn't be eating or staying up to three hours
late when I have to get up the next morning early, because that's
what a responsible, you know, professional would do. Or anytime I
actually have a little rule in my own head. And then I say, yeah, I
find the transgression liberating, empowering, and freeing.
Sarah:
I love that, and very playful for that matter.
I'm like you. I like to break rules as well, and I don't mean it
in a negative way. Like I'm always looking to break rules, but I
have this thing with authority. Sometimes I don't like authority,
and even though I'm very respectful towards it, I always question
things, and I think that's why I ended up in the profession I did.
I'd always go out and question why things are. And I think in that
sense, just because people say we should do something, I don't
always think that that's. Do you think that. That's connected to
your grandfather?
Esther:
Potentially, yes, I think I think it probably is because.
Because he came from a time.
When people did what they were told to do and it wasn't the right thing.
Sarah:
Yes. And I've always probably charged my own path and been able to
get there by not always doing what people say. And yeah, that's I've
never actually thought about it like that. So that's unbelievably
interesting. I wonder, Esther, our final question, what is a life of
greatness to you?
Esther:
I always thought as a child that I would do something big. Big
as in that it would make a difference, that it would matter, because
I felt that I was alive when the rest of my family had been
decimated, and I had to kind of live for all the ones that hadn't
had a chance. So I had this idea that my life couldn't be mediocre
or small or not noticeable. I didn't know what it would look like,
and I dreamed as a child, I fantasized a lot of these stories of
doing something big that would make it feel like I had claimed my
place on this earth to make up for all the dead ones. And today I
would say it's, I mean, being in front of 4000 people and creating
an intimate conversation about relationships that is honest, that
asks the deep questions, and that is light at the same time, deep
and light and provocative and probing, um, to come. To Australia and
to realise that people have been listening to the podcast. Where
should we begin? Or to read my book or to read the blog? That's a
life of greatness. It's like, how did these people on the other side
of the planet, you know, have spent so much time with me, have been
listening to me find what I say valuable, use it to improve their
relationships, and then come with my family and my team and meet my
friends here. I feel like it's abundant, it's playful, it's rich. In
that sense, I consider that greatness.
Sarah:
Esther Perel I always knew this about you, but I saw last night
this hunger, these people coming to watch you and hanging on your
every word, but doing it a way because you provide so much to people
who are sometimes longing for something in their life, in their
relationships. And you've always done it in a way that is so
tasteful, so easy to understand, and thought provoking to so many
people. And honestly, you have changed the life of thousands,
millions, I'm sure, of people out there. So for that I say thank you
very much and thank you for the wonderful chat today. Thank you.
Esther:
S3: So much. Pleasure.
To purchase Esther's card game 'Where should we begin' head to: https://bit.ly/3zUssuB
It's now available on AMAZON with low international shipping fees. Play and enjoy!
Purchase Sarah's Manifest Your Greatness Course here: https://bit.ly/3FQvkMS
Purchase Sarah's Kid's Meditation: https://bit.ly/3kfVJMh
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