Top Esther Perel Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Esther Perel Biography

Esther Perel (born 1958) is a Belgian psychotherapist notable for exploring the tension between the need for security (love, belonging and closeness) and the need for freedom (erotic desire, adventure and distance) in human relationships.

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Esther Perel Quotes

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.

Fault, Feelings, Giving, Ownership, People, Sense

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

Expression, Free, Looms, Loyalty, Trouble

What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict?. . . Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.

Conflict, Eroticism, Inspiration, Lies, Lying, Motivation

Many couples have never had a conversation about sexuality and sexual boundaries. The presence or lack of sex, the quality of it, the satisfaction and dissatisfaction, the unmet needs. An affair upsets the status quo by not only bringing the subject of sexuality to the forefront but every other aspect of their relationship as well. An affair yields conversation that should have happened in the beginning, but that people were afraid to have because, well, what would that mean about their relationship?

Couple, Dissatisfaction, Mean, People, Presence, Sex

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.

Dancing, Feelings, Floor, Free, Male, People

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.

Affair, Believe, Betrayal, Degree, People

You never know your partner as well as you think.

Know, Partner, Partners, Think, Thinking, Wells

I think love is often a bit selfish, even before we had consumerism. That's not new. A consumer society gives you the illusion of having massive amounts of choice and saddles you with the freedom of being able to dabble in that choice. And at the same time, you are left with the tyranny of self-doubt and uncertainty about whether you made the right choice.

Dabble, Love Is, Selfish, Society, Thinking

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

Hide, Left, Nothing, Seek

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.

Constitutive, Deception, Duplicity, Emotional, Lying, People

To look at infidelity from the point of view of sex is a complete narrowing of the phenomenon. There's a reason that the commandment is repeated twice in the Bible - once for doing it and once for thinking about it. We have always created structures and broken structures. It is essential to the human spirit.

Broken, Infidelity, Phenomenon, Spirit, Thinking

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.

Adventure, Equal, Giving, Long, Needs, Novelty

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.

Bring, Choices, Games, Honest, People

Even a good marriage leaves people with longings for certain things their marriage will never be. So, do they accept that, make compromises, and say, "You can't have everything in life," which is what we always did? Or do they say, "I deserve more. I want to experience that thing and, you know, I have fifty more years to live than I used to. " It's not necessarily that we have more desires today, but we do feel more entitled to pursue them. We live in this "right to happiness" culture, and yes, we do live half a century longer than we used to.

Certain, Culture, Desire, Desires, Half, People

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

Imagination, Person, Persons, Responsible

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.

Different, Imagination, Manifest, Mean, Special

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.

Exist, Home, Hotel, Mean, Meet, Sex

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

Desire, Inspiration, Motivation, Mutuality, Protection, Responsibility

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.

Elsewhere, Leave, Looking, Person, Self, Want

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?

Answer, Answers, Asking, Know, Question, Want

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