Quotes from Esther Perel

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl distills a profound truth: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."9

What is different is that modern life has deprived us of our traditional resources, and has created a situation in which we turn to one person for the protection and emotional connections that a multitude of social networks used to provide. Adult intimacy has become overburdened with expectations.

Sexual desire does not obey the laws that maintain peace and contentment between partners. Reason, understanding, compassion, and camaraderie are the handmaidens of a close, harmonious relationship. But sex often evokes unreasoning obsession rather than thoughtful judgment, and selfish desire rather than altruistic consideration. Aggression, objectification, and power all

But, for many of us, renouncing the illusion of safety, and accepting the reality of our fundamental insecurity, proves to be a difficult step.

The one theme that I hear above all else from those who have bitten into the forbidden apple is this: It makes them feel alive.

Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so too has the taboo against it. It has been legislated, debated, politicized, and demonized throughout history. Yet despite its widespread denunciation, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Secrecy is the number one organizing principle of an infidelity. An affair always lives in the shadow of the primary relationship, hoping never to be discovered. The secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge. "Sex and subterfuge make a delicious cocktail,"7 writes journalist Julia Keller.

One of the powerful attributes of secrecy is its function as a portal for autonomy and control.

We explore their erotic templates, how their emotional history expresses itself in the physicality of sex. "Tell me how you were loved and I will know a lot about how you make love" is one of my guiding questions. Unearthing these issues helps to release the sexual blocks.

Being wrapped in duplicities can be isolating, and with the accumulation of time, can lead to corrosive shame and self-loathing.

By talking about sexual alchemy, I want to clarify that affairs sometimes involve sex and sometimes not, but they are always erotic.

I help them learn how to relinquish control intentionally, as a means of personal growth and self-discovery

As Marcel Proust understood, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

These stories make a critical point—many affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.

All these discussions inevitably raise the thorny question of the nature of our erotic freedom. Do we expect our partners' erotic selves to belong entirely to us? I'm talking about thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and memories, and also turn-ons, attractions, and self-pleasure. These aspects of sexuality can be personal, and part of our sovereign selfhood—existing in our own secret garden.

She is his selection, part time. You know the story too! Look, When it is over he places her, Like a phone, back on the hook. —Anne Sexton, "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman

In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do.

Love arises from within ourselves as an imaginative act, a creative synthesis that aims to fulfill our deepest longings, our oldest dreams, that allows us both to renew and transform ourselves." Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.

we can tolerate seeing

Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss.

Looking back, he asks himself, "How could I not see?" But it is human nature to cling to our sense of reality, to resist its possible shattering even in the face of irrefutable evidence. I assure him that his "cluelessness" is not something to be ashamed of. This kind of avoidance is not an act of idiocy but an act of self-preservation.

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. Mexican essayist Octavio Paz describes eroticism as a thirst for otherness. So often, the most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner; it's a new self.

It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial—a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake and we have too much to lose. The mind needs coherence, so it disposes of inconsistencies that threaten the structure of our lives.