Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Esther Perel

There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.

Real sexual conversations are enormously intimate and beautiful because they reveal so much about who we are and what we want. What are the emotional needs we bring to our sexuality and how do we connect to ourselves and connect to a partner? There's such a rich tapestry that can be revealed, but the vast majority of couples have never had those talks.

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

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.

There is no neediness in desire ... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

People grow up learning to be silent about their sexuality, so where are they going to learn to talk about it when they are in a relationship? Shame, guilt, ignorance, reservation, prudishness, all kinds of different cultural systems and social stereotypes shroud sexuality in secrecy and in silence. And there's the romantic notion. "If I say in the beginning, that I am missing something, you are instantly going to think that means you are not enough."

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.

We are afraid that our adult sexuality will somehow damage our kids, that it’s inappropriate or dangerous. But whom are we protecting? Children who see their primary caregivers at ease expressing their affection (discreetly, within appropriate boundaries) are more likely to embrace sexuality with the healthy combination of respect, responsibility, and curiosity it deserves. By censoring our sexuality, curbing our desires, or renouncing them altogether, we hand our inhibitions intact to the next generation.

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.

For most couples who come to me - especially in the aftermath of the revelation of an affair, when they are in a state of crisis and fear the loss of a predictable future - they start to have conversations for the first time about love, sex, monogamy, and marriage. Most couples don't negotiate or don't even converse about any of these things until the crisis of the affair has actually forced them to. Why does it take infidelity to get us talking about the stuff that should be there from the start?

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.

For me, the constitutive element of an affair is the secrecy. It is the secrecy that leads to the lying, to the deception, to the duplicity. It is the structure of an affair - not the sexual or emotional behavior or what people actually are doing.

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

The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.

The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

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 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.

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

There is not one person who can fulfill all your needs. You may choose a partner who is your intellectual equal, and he may not be your most compatible sexual partner. And then there's the duality between security and adventure. A relationship that gives you plenty of novelty, and adventure, may not provide the stability you long for. Time, continuity and familiarity with somebody gives you other things in life but won't necessarily give you the kind of intense lustful experiences that you may have when you first meet someone and are curious about penetrating the mystery of them.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The attraction of dating is that you don't take yes for granted - - you're fully engaged, there's seductiveness, tension.

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.".

At the same time, eroticism in the home requires active engagement and willful intent. It is an ongoing resistance to the message that marriage is serious, more work than play; and that passion is for teenagers and the immature. We must unpack our ambivalence about pleasure, and challenge our pervasive discomfort with sexuality, particularly in the context of family. Complaining of sexual boredom is easy and conventional. Nurturing eroticism in the home is an act of open defience.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.

I believe that the vast majority of people that are unfaithful are monogamous in their beliefs. The ones who are not monogamous in their beliefs either live in poly relationships or consensual non-monogamous relationships, or they have divorced. If it's very bad, then people don't stay married these days in the West. They can be married and have their family, but they want something else - they want something that they don't have in their lives, or simply to be someone that isn't who they are in the context of their marriage.

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

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.

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

One of the big misconceptions is that affairs or trysts are flings about sex. And sometimes they are, but much more often they are about desire. And that is very different. The desire to feel special, to feel seen, to feel appreciated, to be laughed at or with. The desire to be desired. That does not manifest in a sexual act per se. Affairs make you feel alive. Alchemy means it's not about the actual sex, but the sexuality, the energy, the aura. It's the imagination and anticipation of it as much or instead of the actual experience of it.

Acceptance doesn't mean predictability. Sex isn't always for 11 at night - - it's also 'meet at a hotel room at noon'. What you feel during dating can exist at home, if you don't suffocate it.

For some people, a one-night stand doesn't make any difference in a seven-year love affair. I don't believe the degree of betrayal is always commensurate with the egregiousness of the behavior. They are two separate things.

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

In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays.

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.

On some level we trade passion for security, that's trading one illusion for another. It's a matter of degree. We can't live in constant fear, but we can't live without any. The fear of loss is essential to love.

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.

You never know your partner as well as you think.

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.

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

Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there's a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two.

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 whole notion of one person being enough for everything gets instantly challenged when you start to talk with somebody about wanting more or of wanting something else. They take it personally, feel like a failure or feel that they lack something, so you don't talk about it because you don't want to hurt, offend, or scare the other person. You also don't want to be rejected or have them leave you, whatever the reason.