Quotes from Esther Perel

What I can tell you," she says, "is that his kindness makes me feel safe, but when I think about who I want to sleep with, safe is not what I look for.

What I can see, and she has not yet grasped, is that the thing she's really afraid to lose is not him -it's the part of herself he's awakened. You think you had a relationship with truck man, I tell her. Actually, you had an intimate encounter with yourself mediated by him.

While much has been written about the aggressive manifestations of male sexuality, it is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side. The body is our original mother tongue, and for a lot of men it remains the only language of closeness that hasn't been spoiled. Through sex, men can recapture the pure pleasure of connection without having to compress their hard-to-articulate needs into the prison of words.

Eventually, if desire withers, monogamy too easily slides downward into celibacy. When this happens, fidelity becomes a weakness rather than a virtue.

The swiping culture lures us with infinite possibilities, but it also exerts a subtle tyranny. The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.

However authentic the feelings of love, the dalliance was only ever meant to be a beautiful fiction.

We are most intensely excited when we are a little off-balance, uncertain, "poised on the perilous edge between ecstasy and disaster."7

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. —Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Despite living in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom in America, the practice of policing sexuality has continued unabated since the days of the Puritans.

Adultery is often the revenge of the deserted possibilities.

The person I once was, but lost, is the person you once knew.

But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what's a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.

We bitch about our difficulties along the rough surface of our path, we curse every sharp stone underneath, until at some point in our maturation, we finally look down to see that they are diamonds.

eroticism. Though I doubt that they ever used this word, they embodied its mystical meaning as a quality of aliveness, a pathway to freedom

Once divorce carried all the stigma. Now, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame.

The ability to go anywhere in our imagination is a pure expression of individual freedom. It is a creative force that can help us transcend reality.

By turning our backs on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our "significant other." "I have found The One. I can stop looking." Miraculously, our desire for others is supposed to evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction.

Sometimes they come sheepishly; sometimes they arrive desperate, dejected, enraged. They don't just miss sex, the act; they miss the feeling of connection, playfulness, and renewal that sex allows them. I invite you to join me in my conversations with these questers as we work toward opening up and coming a step closer to transcendence.

Affairs have their own brand of passion. Secrecy, torment, guilt, transgression, danger, risk, and jealousy are highly combustible, a Molotov cocktail, an erotic explosion far too threatening in a home with children.

Often, when one partner insists that they don't yet feel acknowledged, even as the one who hurt them insists they feel terrible, it is because the response is still more shame than guilt, and therefore self-focused.

Neutralizing each other's complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness.

Because I believe that some good can come out of the crisis of infidelity, I have often been asked, So, would you recommend an affair to a struggling couple? My response? A lot of people have positive, life-changing experiences that come along with terminal illness. But I would not recommend having an affair than I would recommend getting cancer.

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. —J. Edgar Hoover

Spontaneity is a fabulous idea, but in an ongoing relationship whatever is going to "just happen" already has. Now they have to make it happen.