Esther Perel
Appearances
Criminal
Into the Vault
Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast Where Should We Begin, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners and managers. Listen in as I talk to co-workers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done.
Criminal
Into the Vault
Tune into How's Work, a special series from Where Should We Begin, sponsored by Klaviyo.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's the closing of the prefrontal cortex. Pretty much.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But they have a challenge. You see, when you grow up together, you often put a lot of energy into the building of the unit, right? And that unit then is supposed to become your base, your scaffolding from which two individuals can begin to grow and to define themselves.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
When you meet later, you are already two individuals that have defined themselves who now have to find a way to create the energy to come together. So it's a different movement. It's a different choreography. I think that the challenge for young couples today who meet early in college and have known often only themselves and a few people in their teenage years, et cetera, or none,
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
is what happens when they begin to change individually. Can the relationship expand enough to broaden the envelope, to let these two people emerge individually, or is the jacket too tight? Is the vest too tight? And often it becomes a bit of a crisis, because they grew together on the basis of this togetherness.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Um, and sometimes they can, and sometimes it just feels like, is this that in order to become adults, it may need to happen with a different partner. And that's why I always say, I think this moment we have two or three relationships or marriages in our adult lives in the West. And some of us will do it with the same person, but the relationship has to change.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's like the person changes the relationship, but the relationship makes room for the person to change. This is dynamic.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's absolutely correct.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Well, his last stage is the generative stage. It's actually an amazing, I mean, he's the most articulate theoretician of stages of life.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
A good metaphor is rooted in science.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, a good question is a question that has many answers. There's different ways to answer this. I think that more than thinking about it as they were able to overcome crises, it's really the ability to redefine oneself and to redefine a relationship. It's much more creative than problem solving. You can overcome a crisis and put it aside and stay the same.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
this is much more of a generative experience, it's a creative experience, is that you actually become a different unit. The power dynamic is different. The interdependence is different. The erotic charge is different. The connection to the outside world is different. It's really, it's enlivening.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, I think everybody understands the difference between a relationship that is not dead and a relationship that is alive. I am not there to help people survive. My work is about more than that. It's about helping people to feel alive. And the redefinition of having the same relationship with the same person, it has to be alive, not just not dead.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And if sometimes that alive means recreating a new, you know, going to a new person, a new country, a new city, a new social circle, a new profession, a lot of things that we today have access to change, things that people did once. You know, when I ask an audience,
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
If your grandparents grew up in the same neighborhood or in the same town and worked in the same company, I mean, most people raised their hands. And then I go down the generations, and then now it's like, how many of you have had three jobs in the last five years? So this notion that we can...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
create new things for ourselves is actually one of the greatest things that has happened in the realm of relationships. We can have kids much later. We can join somebody who has already had those children. We can marry in our 60s for the first time. We can live in a threesome. There's a plasticity, if you want to use a word, to the world of relationship today.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
that is extremely rich and expansive, but demands a set of skills to negotiate, to understand the uncertainty that comes from having to make so many decisions. At the time, in the past, none of us made decisions about most of these things. They were handed down to us. So that level of freedom is utterly rich, but comes with a tremendous amount of anxiety and demands maturity.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And sometimes couples have become so entrenched and so locked in their story and confusing their story with the truth and feeling that they're living next to someone who has a completely different version of the story that they cannot talk to.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Like there is no greater polarization sometimes than a couple that once agreed on a lot of things that you just think there's no way change can enter this system.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I think you almost articulated one of the most important pieces of my work. I mean, curiosity is one of the top words for me because it stands in opposition to reactivity. Reactivity reinforces the cycle. It just creates narrow repetition, rapid cycles of escalation. It usually involves defense and attack and blame, et cetera. Curiosity is an active engagement with the unknown.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I like when you say without the attachment to the outcome or the emotional investment, I think that's absolutely accurate. And much of what I do is try to have people switch from reactive to curious. But that curiosity means that they're willing to enter empathically and respectfully into the realm of another person whose narrative is completely different.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I'm very invested and familiar with the neurosciences and the whole work on the brain in relationships, but I am very interested in narrative because I believe that the story shapes the experience. And when people hold on to the story and they don't think it's a story, they think it's fact. This is what happened last night. I'll tell you what you did. I'll tell you what happened.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's not the case. And they don't see this as a subjective rendering. It's totally valid, but it's valid as your experience. And much of couples' conversations is pseudo-factual talk, but it is actually subjective. Once you get that, you can become curious. Once you are curious, you open up.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But it is very challenging when people are hurt, wounded, defensive, holding tight to invite that curiosity. It's what's happening in their bodies. is about shutdown and defense and self-protection.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And you want, I'm doing this physically to you because this is where the brain and the neurobiology in that moment is going against what actually is in their best interest psychologically and existentially.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, I have gone to a lot of meetings in the last year on issues of polarization on societal levels. And I often think, like, what is a psychologist or a couple therapist doing in those meetings? Why am I invited here? And then I think, you know what? You actually have a lot of experience with polarizations. Sitting for a long time with couples who once actually...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
thought in the presence of the other, I discover myself now, you know, can be so at odds. They're sitting in the same room. They're listening to the same session. They have a complete different interpretation of what I said and what it meant. And they leave and you wonder, did it happen in the same room? And the same thing is about what they describe about the night before.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's like, and if you didn't see them together and you saw them each alone, you would be completely mistaken. Because it's like Swiss cheese. Everything that one has left out is where the other one starts. So...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We learn a lot from doing couples work around the process of polarization, around the process of intractable conflict, around the sense that you are my enemy and there is nothing in what you say that I can recognize or be empathic towards or understanding. I think on a societal level, the people who have studied intractable conflict
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
basically have a method of how you bring two opposing parties, factions, tribes, you know, who have been in conflict and at war for a long time and how you bring them together. There is... There's actually a method, a process. It's not written in stone, but you certainly don't start by talking about the things that drive you completely apart and unable to talk to each other.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You start by finding some elements of your shared humanity. In a couple, because that is the space we talk about now, in a couple, it's an incredible thing how people can literally think that the other person wants their demise. You live day in, day out with someone who you really think wants to hurt you, is your enemy. And sometimes there is evil. There's people who don't have good intentions.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But in many situations, it's... It's also a projection. It's also experiences that you've had in the past. And this is where what's interesting is that the narrative, the conscious narrative, lives here. And what you call the brain that can only locate itself in three temporal, and the brain and the physiology are in a different time. Implicit memory is completely influencing explicit narrative.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
If I feel it, this is what's happening. That's right. And because we are creatures of meaning, we need to reconcile those things and we need coherence in our narratives. And that coherence is what is so difficult when you work with people who are, what is it that they're holding on to? I mean, one of the classic examples is someone says, I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And the other one says, that's not the case. Like if someone tells you, I didn't mean to hurt you, you would think that someone would say, ah, that's reassuring. I like to hear that. I hope that's true. Makes me feel a lot better. Rather than proving to you that that's not true. You wanted to step on my toes. You intentionally put those heels on or those shoes or those fists to step on me. And
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That coherence of maintaining the idea that if I feel that you hurt me, you must have been wanting to hurt me rather than, you know, I can be hurt and that doesn't mean you intentionally were trying to do anything. It's as if I need to justify my being hurt by the intention of what you did. And to just make sure sometimes that's the case.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's not that there are people who intentionally want to hurt some people. But at other times, what I'm highlighting is that the coherence to make sense of why I'm feeling this way demands that I also define what you are trying to do to me.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's because your apology I screwed up is incomplete. Most of the time, people say that I made a mistake. I'm sorry. But it doesn't acknowledge what the other person felt in response to what we did.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You've apologized many times.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I think apology is an amazing topic in the realm of relationship. It's a huge piece. Apology, forgiveness, ownership, responsibility, accountability, that whole range of things. I think if you give that apology many times somebody, and it's not that you're doing this every Tuesday, the person will probably just say, thank you.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
If you have someone who can't receive an apology and the apology is sincere, that's the first and foremost thing that accompanies an apology. Then you begin to ask, why is this person struggling to receive this? Because it is the thing that you should be getting. And then you start to ask yourself. Is it because if I accept your apology, it's as if I agree that what you did wasn't so bad?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It is repairable. And in order to really make clear that the grievance is big, I cannot receive your apology. That's one of the dynamics that often occurs in that moment. And so you ask sometimes, you know, you sit and you see, you see somebody who pretends to say, I'm sorry. You see somebody who just says, come on, what's the big deal? And then you see people who really are sincere.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And then you watch what's happening to the other person. Are they relieved? Are they suspicious? Are they feeling like they would dissolve a certain element of their identity if they don't hold on to this? Is it as if they're saying, you know, you can get away with it? You know, it's not as bad because accepting the apology is to minimize the issue.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And then you switch the burden on the other side. You know, in Judaism, you apologize three times. And if after the third time, and you've done a real reckoning apology, if after three times the other person does not accept it, the burden passes over to the other person.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
This is my money desk. And I think it's an incredibly interesting idea that at some point, the person has made the amends when they have. And when you cannot receive it, then now the burden passes on you.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And by the way, accepting the apology doesn't yet mean that you forgive. Forgive is your freedom. You decide at what point you do it, and you may do it alone. It's not always a dyadic experience. Apology is a dyadic experience, but forgiveness is freedom.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I love this topic because it's really so many things happen underneath. You know, there's issues of shame around apology. What's the difference between shame and responsibility? What is the capacity of a person to have real distress rather than empathic distress? Real empathy rather than empathic distress. So it's a portal into a lot of things. There are people who can never apologize.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Shame. I think a lot of that piece is around shame. Because self-esteem, as my friend Terry Reel says, is your ability to see yourself as a flawed individual and still hold yourself in high regard. When you admit you're flawed, it means there's something wrong with you. Then it's very hard to say, I'm sorry. This is the essence.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
How do you see yourself as imperfect, flawed, but you still respect yourself and you hold yourself in high regard. If you can do those two things, you can apologize very easily.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
First of all, I like that it's interesting we're going from apology to conflict. It makes total sense. I spent the last year creating a whole course on conflict and how do you turn conflict into connection? Beautiful. What is good conflict? You know, I think conflict is inherent to relationships. And then what are problematic ways to deal with conflict? Yes, on some level...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
there is very little you can hear if you are in a state of hyperarousal. If you are in a position of self-protection, I mean, all these stressful places, all these cortisol levels going up, et cetera, are not gonna help you. But at the same time, you can't, in the moment that someone is completely agitated, talk with them about trusting. It's just like the physiology is not corresponding.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So it's a real dance. I don't do the breath often, sometimes. I actually don't do anything all the time. I am working like a tailor. I do fittings. I mean, I think the richness of therapy is in its art on some level, maybe. But sometimes I just say, I think you need to stand up and move and just listen to what your partner has to say, but don't sit. Sometimes I say, don't look at each other.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Sometimes I say, turn to each other. Some things are better done face to face and some things are better done side by side. You know, parallel play, fishing. There's a lot of, like, you know, driving. Every parent who's ever had a kid in the back knows this. You don't... You have both.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You have moments when you need to be able to look into each other, and then there are moments where you just need to do something about the side by side. Then it's also the limits of words. When is it important to talk? And when we're talking because we are homo sapiens, but in fact, if we were animals, we would be just making noises. We're not really making sense. So stop talking.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What I try very hard to do is to not let people show the worst side of themselves. They can do that at home. They don't need to come and shame themselves in my office. And I do know that certain situations will draw the worst out of people, but that doesn't mean that that's who they are. And that's one of the big things as a therapist is to not fall for that.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Because if you met these people alone, they would be charming. And if you had met them maybe two years before, they would have been charming too. So something's happening between them that is making them act and react from places of deep hurt and fear and attack and all of that and aggression. And sometimes I see them alone.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I don't think that you are capable of having this conversation at this moment because you're not willing to take any responsibility when you're sitting next to your partner. You're in a blame fest. And we're not going to do that. So I'm going to talk with you alone. And then I'm going to prepare you to come to your partner with at least one or two things that you can own.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What am I doing to contribute to this mess? Or what am I doing to make things better? I like to start the session by asking, if I'm dealing with a kind of chronic conflict, low intensity warfare or bigger, it depends what kind, there's different kinds of conflict. But I like to ask, what have you done this week to make things better?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What have you done to make your partner feel that they matter? rather than what happened this week. I kind of have a sense. Please do not tell me the last unraveling. I got it. It goes from zero to 60 in no time. None of this. I don't need the details of the story. I need to know what you're doing to each other, what feelings you're instigating in each other. I don't need the plot. The plot is...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
There's only three dances. This fight, you know, aiming at each other, withdrawing from each other, or one person withdrawing and one person pursuing. These are three types of major choreographies of conflict. Or quiet silence, or one goes after the other who is closing the doors and they follow them through the house. Mm-hmm. which is following them to a lot of other things.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And from that place on, you decide, okay, who is doing what to whom? Who is feeling what at the hands of whom? What is influencing this? You know, this person is once again feeling that when this one didn't talk to them, they were being given the silent treatment that they used to feel when they grow up.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And this feeling of neglect and dismissal is just crushing them because they suddenly feel like they've been rejected completely. And this one is feeling like they're once again being attacked and invaded by this other person who keeps following them and wants to talk when they have nothing.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And it's remembering when they were living in the place where they grew up, where they couldn't wait to get out because they were feeling completely flooded and overwhelmed by the shit show of their house. And these two stories are now dictating what's happening between these two people. These two people are no longer adults in the room. Their younger selves have completely taken over.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Their amygdala is completely flooded. And then it matters. It depends. Sometimes... Because I'm a little bit narrative driven, I may make the mistake to actually go to the story when in fact these two people really put... Sometimes I sit for 10 minutes quiet. I say, we're going to just wait for our systems to regulate. Because even I get agitated. It's not like I don't absorb it.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I say, I think we need some sitting here. Sometimes I put music. I love music, so I put music, you know, um, I just say, I don't think a single word is going to help here. And sometimes I say, I think we should stop the session. I mean, it depends if you think there's something that can be gained, if you start to feel like it's just going to make it worse.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And sometimes I, in the middle of the session may say, when's the last time you made him a cup of tea? And the fact that you can still make a cup of tea to someone who you would like to strangle is really special. It's amazing how we can inhabit two completely contradictory feelings at the same time. I can't stand you. Get me the hell out of here. And I can't imagine my life without you.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Those things coexist, love and hate, side by side.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
No. Pursuer, pursuer is both people go at each other.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Those are escalations.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Two arrows, yes.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
No, not in conflict. It's usually not in a good way. And there's a whole interpretation of an attachment style that underlies why two people in the situation of threat go on the attack. You have two people fighting. You have two people flighting, fleeing, and you have one person who flees and one person who fights. Mm-hmm.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's another language for pursuer, pursuer, distancer, distancer, pursuer, distancer.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's feeling states and physiological states. It's two different things. The physiology is more primitive, more basic. It's physiology, senses, feelings, thoughts.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
is the way I would, you know, but because we, I say it, you know, because we are homo sapiens and we think, we really, this thing about coherence and thinking that what we say has meaning is extremely powerful to the point sometimes of delusional.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, because I have to believe this because there would be too much dissonance if what I feel and what I think and what therefore happened didn't all have a coherence to themselves. And, you know, sometimes when you see it in the room, you kind of say they never said that.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I'm not calling either person psychotic. It's psychotic because it's a disconnection from reality. I would say it's such an inhabiting of an internal reality that it is disconnected from the possibility. And this is where curiosity comes in. It's the possibility that what you are experiencing is completely real in its experience. But that doesn't mean it is...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
factual or it is real in reality you know and to when I'm hurt and when I am thinking that you want to harm me it's very difficult for me in that moment to be willing to be empathic towards you. And there are relationships where this is the truth. I want to constantly come back to that because not everything is imagined.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know? But there are many other relationships where why would he want... Maybe he stepped away because he just thought that whatever was going to come out of his mouth, he would regret. It's not because he doesn't care about you. In fact, it's the opposite. And he knows what he can sometimes say. He, they, she, it doesn't matter. But not because he wanted to just throw you to the wolves.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's funny you call it stress states because stress to me is so physiological that it doesn't include the relational component. I mean, there needs to be a word for stress that involves the emotional reality. And that emotional reality that now may be somewhat imagined and this is why it's complicated, was once true. What now is an internal truth once was what really happened.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And that's why we imagine, and this is how we interpret the dynamic. It's very important to add that. So the past was real. There was someone in the past who actually did this to me. But when you do this, I think of them, I bring those two things together. I collapse the past and the present. And that's why I'm convinced this is what you're doing to me too.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And so how do you take somebody out of their physical and mental and emotional past to be grounding themselves into the present so that they can consider that this person that is next to them is not doing to them what once was done to them?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's probably the hardest nugget of couples therapy. I mean, I do individual work too, but if we talk relational therapy, this is one of those nuggets because people are not aware that they are in their past. They are convinced that this is in the present. It's a collapse of time zones. And realities. It's what makes us so rich. It's what makes us so able to be creative and artful.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But it's what sometimes makes it very challenging for us, especially in romantic relationships. Because you asked. At first, you began with romantic relationships. A lot of what we say here is true for friendships and work relationships, but there is only two relationships that mirror each other.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's the one we had with our first caretakers, mostly our parents, and the ones we have with our romantic partners. People can sit in the office and tell you, I don't have this with anybody else. And it's true. Often. You believe him. Because nobody gets as close to you and nobody elicits in you the kinds of early yearnings and emotional needs than a romantic partner. And that is very interesting.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Tell me more about this repurposing. It's really interesting.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What do you think was the evolutionary logic of that?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, it's interesting because some models of couples work, of couples therapy, will say you have recreated with each other patterns of your early life in order to be able to transcend them.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Correct, correct.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I think it's a very useful idea. You know, I was thinking at one point, it's like sometimes when I listen to you and, you know, there is an exactness in the things that you describe often rooted in science and research, et cetera, couples therapy or psychotherapy, relationship thinking, you don't have an exact answer. It's...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
First of all, you don't have an exact answer because modern relationships are more complex than ever. And I don't think any relationship expert at this point can have answers. You have invitations. You have ways of thinking that are useful. And here is the question. Is it true? For me, it's answered by, do the people, does it resonate for them? If they buy it, then it's true. It's a framework.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I can analyze this tableau in multiple ways. If this is the one that resonates for you, this is what we're going to go with. And that's what makes it true. This is a very interesting thing.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
There's multiple, I mean, to me it's interesting because there's a whole movement within the world of psychotherapy and psychology that wants to actually become much more normatized with protocols and the same thing for everyone. I think that much of what, at least relationship therapy, which is really the world that I practice in, is existential and it's meaning making.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And there's a lot of ways to do that. So if this interpretation works for you, be my guest. But that's not because it is more true than another. It's the one that was useful for you. And that makes you much more humble.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's a little bit like when you raise kids. I used to think that all these things I had done with my first one is because I had such good ideas. Then I had a second one and none of these things worked with them because it was a different person. So I realized that the first one, it worked because there was a fit between my method and the person.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And this is the important thing in therapy is that it's an issue of that fit is what you're looking for.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's a great question, but I have a moment now as if I'm in the session with you where I have like five things that are arriving here in front of my brain and I'm thinking, which one am I gonna enter? I'm gonna actually start with just the actual question, but then I probably is an opportunity to say a little bit about how I approach this thing. I think some naming is, very useful. It frames it.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It gives it a foundation, something to hold on to.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
language matters if we would not be having a conversation without having a shared language at this moment but within that you and i are using the same words and may have very different meanings attached to it so that's the richness of the of the process is what do you mean when you say invitation curiosity you know conflict etc when i for example when i do the work on conflict
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I did provide language. For example, one of the things that happens in conflict is we have confirmation bias. That's a cognitive framework that is often present in situations of emotional conflict, of conflict which involves always something, an emotional dimension could be political too.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Confirmation bias means that I am looking for evidence that reinforces my beliefs and I disregard any evidence that contradicts it. Now, this happens between two people. This happens between two parties. That's a very important naming. It's interesting. I've noticed this, this, this, this, but all you mentioned is that. Okay, cognitive bias.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Another cognitive bias that is very common is fundamental attribution error. We have this idea that I am complex and you are more simple. If I'm in a bad mood, it's because there was traffic. There's circumstances, there's context. If you're in a bad mood, it's because you're a cantankerous person. That's just your personality.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We'll categorize and totalize the behavior of others and we'll have lots of nuance and poetry for our own. That's a concept. That concept is very useful. It's neutral. It doesn't blame anybody. And it says, we all do this. I like that kind of naming. This is very different from the kind of naming that pathologizes people, the kind of naming that unlocks you into one identity.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, you may have addiction, and addiction may be a really important thing It may even have destroyed your life, but to just say you're an addict. I've seen, so I worked in an addiction center for two years and, you know, people had a lot of, there were a lot of other things happening in these people's lives.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And to just focus on this one thing, it reduces the person, but it also reduces your ability to do something with the person. It narrows your lens. So there's always this question about how wide is the lens that you don't get overwhelmed. So you want to make it smaller, but not that small that you're looking through a keyhole. A person is more complex than a keyhole. We don't just treat symptoms.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We work with lives. That's the difference, for me anyway, in the work that we do. And then when you begin to think about lives, then you start to think about culture. What is happening in the world of relationships today? It's such an incredible thing that is going on. And if you don't put that in the broader context, I'm trained as a systemically oriented family therapist.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And that means that you're looking at the interaction of different systems. And I think that a lot of what happens is a hyper individualization of these things. And the naming is useful when it expands your understanding. The naming is not useful when it locks you into a symptom, a reductionistic thing that gives false certainty to prophets. I can't agree more that naming...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Because on the one hand, more than many other forms of medicine or healthcare or care, psychotherapy, psychology, but certainly psychotherapy, was always stigmatized. And still is in many parts of the world. It's for the crazies. It's for people. There must be something fundamentally wrong. I mean, it's something that nobody went around talking about the fact that they are in therapy.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You went to see a therapist. Now you're putting it on your dating app. It's a status symbol. So there is a destigmatizing that is very important. But there is also words that are weaponized. And they are not useful. And they are separating people. And we have enough separation at this moment in our societies in the West. We don't need more efforts to pull people apart.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We need efforts to bring back the collective, the community, the shared experience, because we are too far apart. And that's why I think that some naming is useful and some naming is not always that useful.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Let me start like this. I mean, I've studied sexuality for quite a few decades now in relationships, but I think maybe because of what you said around the world, love and desire are universal experiences, but the way that they are constructed are highly culturally contextual.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And so the most archaic, rooted, traditional aspects of a culture or a society are lodged around its beliefs and attitudes and behaviors towards sexuality and relationships, especially the sexuality of women. American elections case in point. But the most radical progressive changes that take place in a society also occur around sexuality and relationships, sexuality of women in particular.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So sexuality is a window into a society. Sexuality is also a window into a relationship and into a person that invites deep listening, One of the big challenges is that modern sexuality has been, I mean, traditional sexuality was identified with procreation. Modern sexuality is identified with performance and outcome. Sex is something you do.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
To which I say, let's drop the performance and outcome for a moment and let's think of it as an experience. So now you're going to start to see the choreography I draw. When I think of sexuality as an experience and I say sex isn't just something that you do, sex is a place you go. So my question to you is, where do you go in sex? Inside yourself and with another or others?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Do you go to seek deep spiritual union, a deep intimate connection, transcendence? Do you go... to a place for vulnerability, a place to surrender, a place to be taken care of, a place to be safely powerful, a place to be naughty, a place to have just plain fun, a place to abdicate your responsibilities of good citizenship because sexual desire is quite politically incorrect.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I think it is both, completely both. We meet another person. in order to find ourselves. And we meet an other and want to be surprised by the self we haven't known. I think that all of us come into this world with a fundamental sets of dual needs. We need security and we need freedom and adventure. And we need togetherness and we need separateness.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Where do you go in sex? What parts of yourself do you try to connect with? What is it that you're expressing there? Sexuality is a coded language. for our deepest emotional needs. Our wounds, our fears, our aspirations, our longings, it's that. Sex is never just sex, even when it's hit and run. And then it becomes really interesting.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So one of the things that, one of the assumptions that existed very much at the heart of my field and that I challenged or questioned was that sexual problems are by definition the consequence of relationship problems. So you fix the relationship and the sex will follow.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I, together with many colleagues, have helped a lot of relationships get along better, fight less, laugh more, enjoy each other. And it changed nothing in the bedroom. Because, in fact, maybe sexuality is not a metaphor of the relationship. Maybe sexuality is a parallel narrative to the relationship.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And that, in fact, when you change the sexuality in a couple, you change the whole relationship. but not necessarily in the other direction. So that opened up a whole, that was one of the foundational ideas for Mating in Captivity, my first book, because I have been trained to think like this. And then I began to think love and desire, they relate, but they also conflict.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
They're not one and the same, and they don't need the same things. They don't thrive on the same elements. And modern relationships, romantic relationships, have wanted to reconcile those two fundamental sets of human needs into one relationship. That is the grand experiment of modern love.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
No, no, no, not at all. It actually has been remarkably successful. The romantic ideal is tenacious. You know, many other philosophies and ideologies of the end of the 19th century have all gone. This one has survived many others.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Yeah. No, no, no. I think that it's a, but it is an experiment. It's not something that we have tried throughout history, in human history. So I think that If you ask, it's an exercise I like to do sometimes. I say, divide your page with this line in the middle, up from top to bottom. And on the top left, you write, when I think of love, I think of. Then go to the other side.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And when I think of sexuality, I think of. And then you go back and you say, and when I am loved, I feel. And when I am desired, I feel. When I'm wanted. And when I love, I feel. And when I want or I desire, I feel. And when I think about the love between me and my partner, if there is a couple. And when I think about the sexuality between me and my partner.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And then you let people free associate about this. And there are words that you find back and forth. And then there are words who just never appear in the other column.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Yeah, they do it at the same time. Then they read it out loud in front of each other. I do this in groups, you know, huge audiences as well. But what I'm asking people to see is when you look at what you responded in both categories, Create a line between those two. Is it a thick line, like what happens in love is completely separate from me than what happens in desire.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I need a complete different set of things. I express myself differently, I interact differently. Or is it very much that when this exists, it completely ignites that. They are interrelated, interdependent, one feeds on each other, one reinforces the other. There is a degree of variety about that. For some people, love and desire are inseparable.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And for some people, they are often irretrievably disconnected. And I think the model wants them to be really together. And for a lot of people, it's exactly what they aspire to. For other people, it's more challenging.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Because some people... experience love in such a way that it sometimes becomes challenging for them to make love to the person they love. What I mean by that is that love comes with a sense of responsibility, worry, care about the wellbeing of the other person. And some of us sometimes have learned to love in a way that comes with extra worry, extra responsibility, extra burden.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We were the parents of our parents. We took care of our depressed parent. We took care of our alcoholic parent. We learned to love with a sense that is not free, that is not curious or playful because curiosity cannot happen in a state of stress, as you so well said.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So in the relationship, you come in order to create that identification, but also that differentiation. It's a dialectic all the time. But what's interesting is even if I choose you because you represent sometimes the parts of me that are more challenging or that I disavow or that I prefer to outsource so I don't have to be too vulnerable about them.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
When we experience love with that extra sense of burden, it is difficult to be with someone that you feel close to and at the same time go inside yourself and completely chill and relax in pleasure land.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's one of the scenarios, there's many others, but this is one of the more common ones, Michael Bader's work, that makes it difficult for some people to experience love and desire at the same time. The more they love, the more challenging the desire becomes for them. Because desire is to own the wanting. You can't make someone want.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You can make someone have sex, but you can never make them want. Want is your sovereignty, your autonomy, your freedom. And for some people, that wanting cannot exist when they are with someone that they feel so responsible and worried and anxious about. And that's the attachment piece that you're talking about.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So this is how attachment style often manifests in the way that you then organize your sexual self.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Look, I wrote an entire book about infidelity, as in what happens when desire goes looking elsewhere. I think that some people go outside as a response to a lot of discontents in the relationship, loneliness being the first one. Neglect, indifference, conflict, rejection, sexual rejection in particular. But some people go outside and it has very little to do with the relationship.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It sometimes has to do with how they organize themselves in the relationship to the degree that in order to feel a certain freedom or ability to think about themselves, they need to be outside. And I used to say, I have seen a lot of infidelity in happy relationships. It's not always a symptom of a flawed relationship by no means.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And that in those situations, people tell me, it's not that I wanted to find another person. It's that I wanted to find another self or to reconnect with lost parts of myself. And I don't say this to promote or to condone or anything, but I just listened across the globe. One word, it's not that I wanted to find another partner, it's that I wanted to find something else inside of me.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I don't know how to do that in the relationship that I'm in. And that's not because of the person I'm with. That's because of what I do to myself in the context of intimate connection. And the word that you hear all over the globe, when you interview people who are in affairs, is that they feel alive. It's kind of the erotic as an antidote to deadness. They feel that aliveness.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And that doesn't mean this. They often, that doesn't necessarily involve sex. It's about something. Aliveness is the erotic, not the sexual. And the erotic is the quality of aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, hopefulness, curiosity, imagination, playfulness. It's those elements that often people lose. For a host of reasons, life, work, children, dying parents, illness, economic hardship, you name it.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And there's a sense that they need to go elsewhere to find that. Some people would say bullshit justification. And some people understand that at the heart of affairs, there is betrayal and long and duplicity and lying and all of that. But there is also longing and loss. on an existential level. That's a very different lens into this.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What draws me to you in the beginning, because it is different, that I think may expand me and make me change is also the very thing that becomes the source of conflict later, because we want to change, but up to a point, not too much and not on your terms. So we want change, but we sometimes are afraid of change.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So the people for whom that reconciliation that you talk about is more challenging are often people who are often more likely to compartmentalize.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That is the definition of intimacy, or a definition of intimacy. And that is probably the number one task of every relationship, a romantic relationship, is... How do I get close to you without losing me? And how do I hold on to me without losing you? Now, you know, I said to you in the beginning that we grow up and we have both needs, togetherness and separateness.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And then we come out of our childhoods, and some of us need more space, freedom, separateness, and some of us need more protection, connection, togetherness. Of course, we tend to meet somebody whose proclivities match our vulnerabilities. And so you find that in many relationships, you have one person who is more afraid of losing the other, and one person who is more afraid of losing themselves.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
One person more afraid with the fear of abandonment and one person more afraid with the fear of suffocation.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Right. It doesn't switch back and forth. It switches by relationship, but not within one relationship. You may have been in different roles with different partners.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, one of the ways that you sometimes can see this is that I mean, in the tour this week, one woman stood up and basically said, I recently divorced. I would like to be able to enter another relationship again. And I said, is the issue an issue of trust or is the issue, was there betrayal? She says, how do I allow somebody to enter into my life without losing myself?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So it's in the language, you know, it's one person, but this could, and really, I think it's very important for me, many of these things are not gender specific, nor orientation particular. This is human. But then I answered a little bit with some of this and other things. And so then the next question is, how often do you not say what you really think?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And so we let the other person represent the part of us that would want to change, but then we disconnect from it. So you become the representative of that. I am drawn to the fact that you are stable, grounded, structured, solid, reliable, on time, you name it. I know that this is something that I would like to be more of and just a very simple example.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
because you want to please, or you want to harmonize, or you want to avoid conflict. How often did you then resent the partner who actually stood for their ground? Because if you're afraid to lose yourself, you're often more the one who stands for your ground. You don't give in.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And if it's rigid, you don't give in at all because you think that every time, even the language, agreeing is giving in, and giving in is losing a part of myself. I mean, it's built in. It's so, you know, it starts here and it continues all the way. It's like, so, do you know what I mean? And it's like, it's a sequence of things. You break apart in small granular pieces.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
How does it play out for you when you lose yourself? What are the things you do not do? that facilitate this dissolution. And to the other person who is, when you're afraid, sorry, of losing the other. And when you're afraid of losing yourself, like where's your rigidity? Where is your kind of totalistic thinking? Where is this lack of flexibility?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And that may manifest in, I don't travel to those places. You know, the sentence that indicates that we're dealing with this bigger issue is something sometimes very anodyne. You know, I don't go to those kind of restaurants. You know, why shall I go to those kind of places? And you kind of want to say, why is there such intensity about the restaurant?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What are you fighting against and what are you fighting for? And why are you even fighting? We're talking about going out, supposedly meant to be fun. Now you start rewinding, you know, what is this statement connected to that we are going to have, you know, so now you have conflict meeting, identity meeting, connection to another person. This is when, and it is sleuth work.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's fantastically engaging and exciting, right? It's like, I'm sure when you do scientific research, it's that sleuth work that you say, this thing doesn't fit at all. You know, why do you want me to wear blue shoes? Why do you make such a big deal out of the blue shoes? What are blue shoes for you? Don't start talking about the shoes, please. Talk about, you know, boundaries.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But boundaries today is a concept that has become so illused almost. So it's talk about boundaries. how the preservation of the self now involves not wearing blue shoes. I mean, you get what I'm... I do.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But then I start to think of you as rigid because I get a little more than what I bargained for. And now I start to argue with your rigidity and my desire to actually become more structured and solid and punctual and reliable has somehow disappeared.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You just made me think of something. Because you asked before the thing about the sexuality. And I like the concept of erotic blueprints, which I work with a lot. And I try to really kind of distill it in this Desire Bundle course that I'm releasing. Because I thought, how can people ask themselves a set of questions?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Like a lot of my work is about finding the good questions that will, you know, a good question is like a portal, right? And the line on top, which is the answer to your question is, tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make love. not just how you love, but how you make love, meaning that your emotional history is inscribed in the physicality of sex.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And it's all about what you asked me in the beginning, identity and change, holding onto oneself, connecting with the other. Sexuality is the place where this occurs at the most fundamental level. It's to be inside oneself and inside the other at the same time, their universe, not their orifices. That is what is the experience, that temporary oneness that then again opens up as two people.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So people who struggle with that emotionally, how do I stay connected to me and then to you without these polarities, experience that in sex. And then you ask a set of questions. How did you learn to love and with whom? Were you protected by those people who took care of you or did you have to flee for protection? Did they take care of you or did you take care of them?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Did they hold you, rock you, cuddle you or did they harm you or violate you or shake you? Was it okay to laugh and to cry? Was it okay to experience pleasure? Was it safe? A set of questions like that. And this is where people enter their erotic blueprint and get to see
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
that their emotional challenges are directly, if you film them, if you watch them making love, you'll understand their emotional challenges. But then comes the next level. And if you then study their fantasy lives, then you'll understand the depth of their emotional needs, which are brought into their sexuality.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Your sexual preferences, your sexual fantasies are a translation of your deepest emotional needs. Not sexual needs, emotional needs. You know, my mother used to say, tell me about your friends and I'll tell you who you are. And then I said, you tell me about you sexually and I will know a heck of a lot about who you are. But you have to translate.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
The problem of sexuality in modern society is the literalness with which we approach it, and in our pornographic society ever more so, to our detriment.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's confirmation bias. Right.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's right.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I have a segment of my podcast, Where Should We Begin, that opens the tour where basically they talk about how they met and then they fight about everything all the time. And they think that they're fighting. This is the line of the show. They think they're fighting about the closet, the cat litter and the cat.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What I think they're fighting about is that when she says, why didn't you close the closet? He instantly thinks of his dad, who was this military guy who told him, you know, and he's basically in a fight saying to her, you ain't telling me what to do. You ain't the boss of me. So she can never make a request for which he doesn't feel like she's controlling him.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And he answers with this fight and that throws her into the, she grew up all alone, you know, took care of her two siblings, mother was gone, et cetera, et cetera. And she hoped her whole life she would finally meet a partner and she wouldn't feel alone. And there would be somebody to support her. And every time he says to her, you ain't the boss of me. Don't tell me what to do.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Yes. You know what it is? Every system straddles stability and change and then grapples for homeostasis. Every relationship goes through that. Every system in nature goes through that. But the same thing is true inside an individual. We want change. And we need stability. And then these things sometimes are compensating each other, and they are complementary, and at times they butt heads.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
She says, oh, I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. Here I am in the worst place that I always wanted to avoid. This is what they're fighting about. But they're talking about, why did you leave the cat closet open? Beautiful example. Beautiful example.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's a little bit more subtle and complicated nuance than that. I think the frameworks are useful, but they are frameworks. And they're models that help us to think and make sense of things. But it's a little bit like in science, you know, the truth of today is the joke of tomorrow.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It connects to what we discussed about apology.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
There's a sequence to this. And it's true in intimate relationships. It's true in friendships. I'm very interested in friendships these days and in friendship therapy. I do co-founders work. I mean, there's other diets that I'm very interested in beyond the romantic unit, but
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You said something before that I thought actually I may come back to when you said, you know, it's about acknowledging that you were wrong. Sometimes you may not have been wrong, but you were hurtful. And rather than get all, you know, I didn't do anything, I didn't do anything. It doesn't matter.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What you did, even if you don't think it was anything terrible, seemed to have really upset your partner. Do you care about that? Or do you want to just kind of stand? So I think the first piece in repair work, and I think, by the way, that repair is not the end of the story. The revival is the end of the story. Much better word. You know, the erotic recovery.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Erotic in my sense, in my definition of the word. So that's when I say it's not enough to survive. I'm a child of survivors. I wanted to see people who, how do they continue to live? Not just how do they stay alive. And I think there's a fundamental difference in our lives and in our relationships. It's a huge piece of, it's really at the heart of my work and of my life, you know?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So every trauma process, you know, of nations or of individuals demands the acknowledgement of what happened. And that acknowledgement involves remorse and guilt for the hurt and the harm that it caused, even if you don't feel guilty for the act itself and you think the act is justified. The consequences of the act on the other person is where the guilt and the remorse must take place.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Without that, there is very little option for repair. If I don't feel that you even know what you did to me, you, my dad, you, my boss, you, my political enemy, I mean, it's really at the root. So after you do the remorse and the guilt, the next part is is to be really careful that you don't sink into the self, now I'm going back to relationships, into the shame. I'm such a terrible person.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
How could I do something like this? So I feel so bad about myself that I still can't feel bad about you. Now that's narcissism. That's a different story. The point is not for you to still think that you're at the center. You were at the center when you heard, and now you're at the center of your own wound. It's really a process of reckoning with the other person.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And it's slow and challenging for some, and it's immediate for others. And then I think the next piece in a relationship is not just to apologize and to show your remorse, but it's actually to show that you value the other person. Because hurting a person, and especially when it's betrayal and careless, is a devaluation of the other person. You didn't matter. That me mattered more than you.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
For whatever the reasons, it was still selfish and I devalued you. And to become the vigilante of a relationship is that you become the person who protects the relationship by showing that the other person really matters. And in detail, that sometimes means You know, how are you today? Is there anything you want to talk about? Do you still think about it?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, this is a big one to carry every day. Are you able to go to see this movie? Can we, you know, just without being so afraid that every time you ask, You're going to get blamed again or you're going to feel so bad about yourself. It's a little bit step out of yourself and just reach out and just check in half the time when you say, how are you? And do you want to talk?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
The person says, no, I don't. But I just wanted to know that you are prepared to in case I needed to. Set the conditions. Make me feel that you value me and our relationship, which you have just trashed. And then the third thing is what I call the erotic recovery. It's the regeneration or the generation of new cells. And, you know, I need a new skin to come over the scab.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's the real, you know, repair is not yet healing. The healing is, I know I hurt myself somewhere. It's here. I can feel it when I touch it, but I don't feel it the whole time. It's not front and center every moment of my obsessive rumination. But when I touch it, it's tender, it's wounded. It's a place that I need to make sure not to hit again. And don't hurt me again.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And don't do this to me again. I can't recover from that twice. It's very, it's that vulnerable. And then it says, let's go do new things. You know, erotic recovery is not about comfortable and familiar and the return to the status quo.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Erotic recovery is about new, risky, curious, playful, unknown imagination outside of the comfort zone so that we can see ourselves anew as who we are and who we are together. And I think that's where the revival takes place. It's hopeful, it's possibility, it's adventure. It's got that energy.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I can't believe I hurt you that bad. You know, one of the big things is people are often shocked at the hurt. I told you I wouldn't care, or I didn't think about it. Because there is a dissociation that takes place when you take off. And so when people are faced with the raw pain, hurt, wound, suffering, collapse, fracture of the other person, they find it very hard to tolerate.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And this has to happen. You have to be able to know the consequences of your action. If you want to, you know, freedom in the existentialist Sartrean terms involved the ability to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. This is it. I'll help you face that. That doesn't mean that you become the worst creature on the planet, but you have to face that.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And that is something very hard for us because sometimes we meant it. Sometimes we thought we deserve it. And sometimes we didn't think that that was going to be the case. And so it's sometimes easier to stand in front of someone else's anger than someone else's hurt.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
There's a beautiful book by Harriet Lerner about apology that I often recommend in these situations because she really... If you ever do apology, this concept of sincerity, of the apology that actually shows that I care about you and not just about restoring my dignity and my pride and all of that.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
The maneuvers that are about self-preservation versus the maneuvers that are really about restorative justice.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, what's a question that I ask people often, almost in the first session, knowing yourself as well as you do, what do you think makes it hard to live with you?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That will give you some of the material about, you know, nobody's ready. As in, I'm prepared, I'm perfect, I'm fully baked. I say to every person, everyone has relationship issues they're going to have to address at some point in their life. The only question is with whom? Not if, just with whom? Who's the one that you're going to do the work with? We're all works in progress.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We are notoriously imperfect, rather unpredictable. And many relationship problems are not problems that you solve. They're paradoxes that you have to learn to manage.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Different ways to answer this. You know, I think sometimes people say, I want to be with you because you helped me become the best version of myself.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
They're societal.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And so what is that version? You know, who is it that I want to see that I think you will help me become? When you talk about these romantic relationships, first of all, I think there's a different answer if we're talking about cornerstone relationships or capstone relationships. Do you know the concept?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Thank you so much.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Right. So the cornerstone relationship is when we used to meet in our early 20s and together we build the foundation of our relationship. We grew together. We saved our first monies together. We got our first places together, etc. It was very much foundational. Capitalism. is the foundation has already been established because we tend to meet at this point 10, 12 years later.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So during those 12 years, I've already actually worked, so to speak, on my identity. I have defined myself, my values, my aspirations, my constructs, how I want to see my life. And when I meet you, you're a confirmation for all of this. You're a confirmation of what I've already built. And I am putting you and me as the capstone, which we put on top of what we've already created.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You and me, you've done the same thing. So I am looking for someone who recognizes my identity, not for someone who helps me develop my identity from a much earlier age. So there's a developmental arc that changes the mandate. I said it's both, but the priority of if it's a...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
The building of identity or the expansion of that identity, what you call change, differs if you meet somebody when you're young and if you meet somebody when you're in your 30s.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I mean, there is a big age differences a lot of the time. And in gay relationships, you have often a major gap. age difference that means something else, but it creates differentiation. In straight relationships, you often have men who are a lot more, a lot older than the women, very much rooted in evolutionary biology, I think, and fertility.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And now we have more and more a new phenomenon of older women with younger men, but that's actually been very rare in most cultures.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, when you have four movies at this moment that are talking about this, then you begin to see the crescent of a new cultural phenomenon. I think the fact that it appears in the arts and in the culture usually announces something. I wouldn't make it yet a phenomenon. But you asked me a question before about what are the things people need. I mean...
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
When you embark any relationship, again, I tend to think as both end on a lot of things. I come to you with a certain self-awareness. How much self-awareness, the more there is, the better. And that self-awareness, I think, as its best translates in a sense of, you know, I think a good vow to say at the time of your wedding is, I'll fuck up on a regular basis and on occasion I'll acknowledge it.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Yeah. It means that self-awareness comes with self-knowledge about your limitations and your ability to take responsibility for it without blame and shame. And basically accountability. I think accountability is an enormous component of relationship. It's okay. We all do things.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You know, we all have our wounds and our frustrations and our expectations and our unexpressed needs and our unfulfilled longings, etc. But it's a good thing to know it and to admit it and to not pretend that it's not me, but it's you. You know, I often say that couples therapy, I am a practicing couples therapist for almost 40 years.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And couples often come to therapy thinking that you're a drop-off center. You know, they come to deliver their problem and their problem is their partner. And you're going to fix it. And they're going to help you because they're an expert on what's wrong with the partner.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And it's an amazing thing how people have tremendous insight on all the shortcomings of the other person and do not see themselves as part of a system. A relationship is a breathing, living system of interdependent parts.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
That is an amazing question. I could have guessed 10 different other things I've said. I didn't think you would come up with that. But no, I did not. When I began the TED Talk, I was so much into this challenging certain perceived notions that people kind of took as truths, but they were only truisms.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
That, you know, by definition, you look at infidelity from the point of view of a victim and a perpetrator. And that it is a symptom of a flawed relationship. That the transgression is way more serious than any other relational betrayal that may have existed in the relationship before. And I remember thinking to myself, but relational betrayals come in many forms.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
Indifference, neglect, abuse, years of sexual rejection. Why are we not integrating that? Why do we single out the sexual infidelity as the ultimate betrayal, as the queen of all betrayals? And that is not to justify, and that is certainly not to promote, but that is to add layers of complexity here. That people would say, why didn't you talk about it? Why didn't you bring it up?
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
Seriously, people talk and people bring things up for years and can't get their partner's attention until, you know, nothing can compare to this. And I'm not sure these are helpful statements. And so I wanted to make a point, which was to say an affair takes place in the context of a relationship.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
The relationship lives at the center of the affair and the affair lives in the shadow of the relationship or the other way around. But it's a triad. And to just think that it's a dyadic thing, me and what I did to you, rather than, of course, I chose it. I carry the responsibility. I didn't absolve anybody. But I wanted to make a point that it's easy sometimes for the person
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
who is betrayed, who feels violated, who feels lied to, who feels deceived, to enter the role as if nothing before that proceeded and to say, you did this to me, when the story is often 20, 30 years earlier, of so many things that have happened between us that give context. They don't justify, they don't condone, but they give context, layers, complexity, nuance.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
And we need all of this if we want to help the thousands of people. that are living with the experience of infidelity and affairs.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
But it was the most important finding. There are egregious situations where, you know, it's quite black and white. I'm not always thinking it's nuanced. Sometimes it's just like you lift your heads and your eyes and you just say, wow, you know, no context will add up to this. But
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
The line I kept hearing from people is, I love, you know how in mating in captivity, people would say to me, we love each other very much. We have no sex. And I began to hear a parallel line in the state of affairs. I love my partner. I'm having an affair. And I feel torn about it. And I don't know what to make of it, et cetera. But what they would say to me is, I feel alive.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
More than sex or anything, the experience globally, worldwide, the one word that kept repeating, I haven't felt so alive. The aliveness had to do with a lot of other dimensions of relationships. But what they would say and what I got from it is this. Sometimes it's not that you want to leave your partner. but you want to leave the person that you have yourself become.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
And it's not that you're looking for another person, but you're looking for another self or to reconnect with parts of yourself that have gone dormant for decades. And those lines made it so. No, affairs are not always symptoms of troubled relationships. They actually are more existential sometimes. They're a quest for something. They're an antidote to deadness.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
And they are not to blame on the relationship and certainly not on the partner. There's nothing wrong with you. It's not about anything having to do with you not being enough. And that sometimes is even more difficult for people. is to think it has, you know, if at least it had to do with the relationship, we could fix something.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
But if it has nothing to do, then I am really at a loss here, completely helpless. So it was a complicated statement, but it is probably the most important statement in the book because the other affairs have been written about. I mean, it's not that they're not there.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
It's sometimes not even, it's like when you, you know, you hear the stories and sometimes there has been sex once or twice in the course of two years because people are in different places. It's the plot. It's not even, I mean, I remember when you and I talk about this, I think it's different in a heterosexual context than among men. But in many straight stories, the sex is the sexual energy.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
It's the possibility. It's the erotic charge that comes from even discussing movies and music. It doesn't come from touching anything. Mm-hmm. And that's what this alive thing was about. It's different parts of me are talking here that I haven't been in touch with.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
I've been the responsible, caretaking, caregiving citizen of my drunken brother and my sick and demented father and my partners and my children. And for the first time, I'm thinking about me. You bet it's selfish. You bet. Yeah. And I don't want to hurt and I don't want to lie. And it has nothing to do with my marriage.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
And you listen to these things and it's like you scratch your head a little bit. And you know that devastation can follow and the kind of accumulated hurt that is going to happen. My God, the day this thing ends. And you sometimes even hope that, you know, let the thing die a natural death.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
When people died younger and they didn't have devices, you know, you only found all of this after grandma was gone, you know?
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
I think there are two different questions here. If you want an insurance policy, I can't give you.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
No, I don't. I think that ultimately what you hope is that when there is any temptation, I see your face approach from behind the screen and it kind of captures my eye in front of me and I just say, I would love to, but no, it's not worth it. It's not, you know, I won't do this to you. And suddenly you experience the conflict between your desires and your conscience, basically.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
But you acknowledge your desires. And if you have a relationship that can be open enough to make space for those desires, then you even have a partner to whom you can say that and you can talk about this. And that in itself brings air. Fire needs air. If you try to choke it down, you will get a flicker. You won't get a flame.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
And so when I wrote about the eyes of the other, it goes a step further because if another can want your partner, then you never have your partner. This tale that you actually have a challenge to want what you already have presumes that you have. And any affair tells you that you don't. This notion is a contrived illusion of safety. We don't have our partner. They are forever.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
Free agents, they can die, they can get sick, they can fall in love with someone else. As a result, invest the most and the best of you in your relationship so that you have more of them. But no, there is no guarantee. And that is an existential dread with which free love lives with. If you don't want that, go to traditional societies in which... There is no choice.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
You have been married to someone. You are in it for life. And it's a different conception of marriage. But if we want a marriage or a committed relationship that is rooted in free choice, then we have to live with the anxiety that that choice can be at times changed.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
That's right. That's right. I say this so many times. You know, if you want to curse, if you want to put them down, if you want to be dismissive, if you want to talk to them with your face glued to your screen, don't think that there won't be somebody else out there who says, no, you're not. I can't understand how your partner treats you like this. I think you are a wonderful person.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
You know, no, you're not at all a mess. I think you are so inspiring. No, I don't think you're a fuck up at all. I think you have really deep values. I mean, you know.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
Two courses, one that is bringing back desire for people who are really stuck in a sexual rut, in an impasse, can't talk about it or have really poor conversations about it, experience a massive discrepancy of desire with the pursuer and a distancer, and they just don't know where to get the flicker back.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
The second part, playing with desire, and some people just go directly to playing with desire, is for people who feel like they've kept the flicker, but the flame is gone. And they would like to experience something more robust, more intense, more exciting. They feel like they're kind of slouched in complacency and laziness, and they don't know how to jolt themselves out of it.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
And to give a tool that is not just a book, but that is actually a one-hour set of short videos with a great workbook. It's the workbook that never actually accompanied mating in some way. And that gives you practices, tools, ideas, conversations, interesting conversations, not conversations about the fact that we never have sex.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
And that's supposed to make us want to have sex by talking about how we never have sex. No, how do you actually have rich sexual conversations that make you kind of curious about each other to the point of even being turned on to each other, even if it starts from the mind and not from your genitals.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
But, you know, it's that course for anybody, any age, any stage, any orientation, the whole thing, but who say... It's hard to sit on the couch at night for the umpteenth time where each of us is watching TV, scrolling on the phone at the same time, answering with that classic lag of uh-huh, uh-huh, while somebody's trying to say something interesting, and suddenly say, I'd love to talk about sex.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
You know, I'd love to talk about where we are at or I'd love to discuss something that's been really a part of my fantasy life. So, you know, how do you do that? So I have the card game that really promotes a lot of conversations between people and partners. But then I thought something more targeted that isn't therapy.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
That you do amongst you, that you can come back to that workbook for years and you pick one question out of it or one thing that says, I could use exploring that for myself, not just with my partner alone. I need to understand this thing about me. Then maybe I can go and have a chat with you.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
You're saying it daily to your behavior. You don't have to put words to it.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
For many years, I say to people, you know, your relationship is primarily a scaffolding. It's what it gives you access to. But it's not necessarily what exists between the two of you. And that is a model. I say, you are an affectionate, companionate couple. You are deep friends. You are no longer romantically involved. What do you want to do with that?
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
If both people say that I'm good with this at this stage, there's not much that we need to talk about. If one person said, I still want to feel this thing, will I ever get this back? Will I never be touched again? I mean, I can't live like this. I'm drying on the vine. Then you say to the other person, this is a power trip.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
If you say no, but you can't have it anywhere else either, you're in a power struggle here. And the question is, what are you afraid of? You can't trap your partner into the desert to protect you from your fear of abandonment. Or you may not want to reach out anywhere else because you are afraid of the consequences of this.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
And we don't need to make a decision, but we do need to have a conversation about any of this.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
But I did make a chastity commitment. A monogamy commitment is not a chastity vow.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
When we did the course, this was a question that came up all the time. Who is it for, right? And who will benefit from this? And what do we say to the person who says, I've tried to get my partner to engage in this. Is it still worth it for me to take the course? And I say, you will learn a ton about yourself and you will learn about
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
your limits, and you will learn about how important is sex to you. And I'm not talking actually just the fucking. It's being seen by someone. It's someone who looks at you and still notices that you have a body. Somebody who touches you. Somebody who... It's a sensuality. I actually broaden it.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
Because people can sometimes live even with the no fucking, but it's the entire erotic realm that disappears. And that... gives people a real sense of grief. What you're dealing with is not horniness. You're dealing with loss. You're dealing with grief. You're dealing with, you know, I am a cherished spouse or partner, but I am a famished lover. And... That's the experience.
Savage Lovecast
Savage Lovecast Episode 934
It's like it is an experience of deadness. They can feel really loved. And that's why it's so tormenting, because they do feel deeply loved. They feel cared for. They know that there's no one who would be there for them the way that their partner will show up. But there is something about that sensual, sensuous touch, gaze, smile, lick, flicker, you know?