Quotes from Esther Perel

Hence, popular theory holds that women's jealousy is primarily emotional, whereas men's is sexual. Interestingly, the research shows the reverse among homosexuals: lesbian women tend to express more sexual jealousy than gay men, and gay men cop to more emotional jealousy than lesbians. Arguably, this reversal highlights that we feel most threatened where we feel least secure.

Erotic intimacy invites us into a state of unboundedness where we experience a sweet freedom. We get a temporary break from ourselves—the legacies of our childhood, the habits of our relationship, and the constraints of our respective cultures.

Not everything needs to be revealed. Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.

For me, infidelity includes one or more of these three constitutive elements: secrecy, sexual alchemy, and emotional involvement.

Imagination—that's the key word here. With your affairs, the arousal starts on your flight over there. You don't need the blue pill because what turns you on is the plot, the planning, the carefully chosen clothes. All the anticipation is what fuels the desire. When you come home and the first thing you do is take off your nice clothes and put on old sweatpants, nobody's going to get turned

Imagination—that's the key word here. With your affairs, the arousal starts on your flight over there. You don't need the blue pill because what turns you on is the plot, the planning, the carefully chosen clothes. All the anticipation is what fuels the desire. When you come home and the first thing you do is take off your nice clothes and put on old sweatpants, nobody's going to get turned on.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break. —Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

The adherents of talk intimacy (often, though not always, women) have a hard time recognizing these other languages for closeness

In fact, I can imagine that the level of dissociation that they bring to their sexual fixes is a direct response to all these uncomfortable emotional pulls. I would suggest that precisely because male sexuality is so relational, many guys seek sexual spaces that are the exact opposite, where they don't have to confront the litany of fears, anxieties, and insecurities that would render the biggest stallion limp.

Emotional involvement is the third element that may play a role in infidelity. Most affairs register an emotional component, to one degree or another.

In order to bring lust home, we need to re-create the distance that we worked so hard to bridge. Erotic intelligence is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life.

I thought I knew what love was, but I have never felt like this before" is a common refrain. People in this state talk to me about love, transcendence, awakening, destiny, divine intervention—something so pure that they could not pass it by, because "to deny those feelings would have been an act of self-betrayal.

So many "emotional affairs" are pulsing with sexual tension, regardless of whether genitals have made contact, and giving them a new label seems to me to promote erotic reductionism. Clearly, affairs can be sexual without involving a penis entering a vagina, and in such cases, it is more helpful to call a spade a spade.

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.

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.

Today, monogamy is one person at a time.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.