Esther Perel Quotes

Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.

Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.

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.

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

Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.

At this point, we are living one of the greatest experiments in humankind - to create something that has, throughout history, been considered a contradiction in terms - a passionate marriage. Passion has always existed, but it took place somewhere else. Everything that we wanted from a traditional marriage - companionship, family, children, economic support, a best friend, a passionate lover, a trusted confidante, an intellectual equal - we are asking from one person what an entire village once provided. And couples are crumbling under the weight of so much expectation.

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.

People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy. Cheating doesn't begin to describe the ways that people let each other down.

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.

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.

Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy

It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.

Marriage isn't meant to make you happy - it's there because it gives you a life in which you can find happiness.

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?

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

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

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.

Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.

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

The one word I hear when people have affairs is that they feel alive. They don't talk about the fact they're having sex. They feel like they are engaged with their life. They describe an experience that beats back the deadness inside, which isn't the fault of the marriage or the partner. It's often the deadness that they have allowed to creep in for years on their own. But by definition, it's a transgressive act. And transgression is a breaking of the rules. And it gives you a sense of ownership and freedom. And ownership and freedom gives you a feeling of aliveness. It's a chain.

If a woman isn't feeling sexual with herself, she won't respond to advances from any partner, male or female. When this woman goes dancing, she's finding a connection with her own erotic self. It might be about being on a dance floor, feeling free, not having to feel at all responsible for anybody else's well-being. For other people, it might be about going on a hike for four days by herself and reconnecting with nature and strength and endurance and beauty.

It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.

The kiss that you have never given is just as powerful as hours of actual lovemaking. The erotic isn't just what is happening between people's legs. It is also what's happening in their erotic mind.

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.

The mom doesn't become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space.