65+ Esther Perel Quotes On Relationships, Marriage And Trust

Esther Perel is a Belgian psychotherapist, writer, and public speaker. She is best known for her work on modern relationships, sexuality, and non-monogamy. She is the author of the books Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Esther Perel on relationships, marriage, love.

Top 10 Esther Perel Quotes

1. Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy
2. Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.
3. Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.
4. Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.
5. It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.
6. Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.
7. There is no neediness in desire ... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.
8. Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.
9. The mom doesn't become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space.
10. Our partner's sexuality does not belong to us. It isn't just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction.

Esther Perel Short Quotes

• Today, monogamy is one person at a time.
• When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.
• Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.
• There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.
• Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me.
• You never know your partner as well as you think.
• Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.

Esther Perel Quotes About Relationships

A peer relationship is one where the partners experience an affectionate, companionate coupledom. They are friends. They are the product of the egalitarian model; they are good life partners, but are often less sexual. — Esther Perel

The secret to desire in a long-term relationship — Esther Perel

I want to engage people in an honest, enlightened, and provocative conversation about the nature of erotic desire and the intricacies of intimacy and sexuality. The object of my game is to bring nonjudgmental, multicultural understanding to the challenges and choices of modern relationships. — Esther Perel

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

I do consider even going to prostitutes, or seeing a hooker or an escort, as having an emotional component, even if it's not an emotion necessarily in the relationship. Even if you are paying in order to absolve yourself of any emotional involvement. That's the paradox. — Esther Perel

Esther Perel Quotes About Marriage

You know what happens to sex in marriage? Instead of inviting desire, you monitor it. Especially men: You let her sleep late, you take the kids to the park, and all that time you're thinking, "Tonight I'll get some." That doesn't work. — Esther Perel

Marriage isn't meant to make you happy - it's there because it gives you a life in which you can find happiness. — Esther Perel

Affairs can be powerful detonators. They can invigorate a marriage that's flat, jolt people out of years of complacency. Fear of loss rekindles desire, makes people have conversations they haven't had in years, takes them out of their contrived illusion of safety. — Esther Perel

In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays. — Esther Perel

The power of transgression is the archetypal, foundational story of the Bible. We want to break our own codes - sometimes of morality, sometimes of ethics, sometimes of the power structure, sometimes of the institution of marriage - because there is freedom and power in transgression. — Esther Perel

In committed sex, in marriage, people don't feel the need to seduce or to build anticipation - - that's an effort they think they no longer need to do now that they have conquered their partner. If they're in the mood, their partner should be too. — Esther Perel

Esther Perel Quotes About Love

On some level we trade passion for security, that's trading one illusion for another. It's a matter of degree. We can't live in constant fear, but we can't live without any. The fear of loss is essential to love. — Esther Perel

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

Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there's a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two. — Esther Perel

For some people, a one-night stand doesn't make any difference in a seven-year love affair. I don't believe the degree of betrayal is always commensurate with the egregiousness of the behavior. They are two separate things. — Esther Perel

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

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

Esther Perel Famous Quotes And Sayings

People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy. Cheating doesn't begin to describe the ways that people let each other down. — Esther Perel

Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all? — Esther Perel

Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious. — Esther Perel

Acceptance doesn't mean predictability. Sex isn't always for 11 at night - - it's also 'meet at a hotel room at noon'. What you feel during dating can exist at home, if you don't suffocate it. — Esther Perel

Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day - the erotic mind is not very politically correct. — Esther Perel

Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme. — Esther Perel

In desire, there must be some small amount of tension. And that tension comes with the unknown, the unpredictable. You can close yourself off at home and say, "Whew, at last I'm in a place where I don't have to worry," or you can keep yourself open to the mystery and elusiveness of your partner. — Esther Perel

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

Women - - and men - - need to understand that a woman's transition is often much longer. The caretaker must leave the place of orientation to the needs of others to the place where she focuses on herself. — Esther Perel

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

One of the most amazing abilities of sexuality is to momentarily transcend the borders of Self into something that is no longer defined by physical property and that is utterly unique. It's really what many call a religious experience. — Esther Perel

There is no sex without a cue. People who date have their cues at home, before they meet. You think about where to go, what to eat, what to do and say. Sometimes the cue is short - - just before we reach the bar - - but sex is never just spontaneous. Spontaneity is a myth. — Esther Perel

It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become. — Esther Perel

The kiss that you have never given is just as powerful as hours of actual lovemaking. The erotic isn't just what is happening between people's legs. It is also what's happening in their erotic mind. — Esther Perel

For me, the constitutive element of an affair is the secrecy. It is the secrecy that leads to the lying, to the deception, to the duplicity. It is the structure of an affair - not the sexual or emotional behavior or what people actually are doing. — Esther Perel

I have more than thirty thousand hours of family and relationship counseling experience under my belt. Over the years, I have seen changes in relationship trends walk through my therapy office doors. My richest gifts are translating the complexities of love and desire in modern relationships into something simple and accessible. I can offer informed advice that makes people feel comfortable, knowledgeable, and confident. — Esther Perel

We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt. — Esther Perel

The attraction of dating is that you don't take yes for granted - - you're fully engaged, there's seductiveness, tension. — Esther Perel

If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts. — Esther Perel

Are you asking a question because you want to know the answer or are you asking the question because you want your partner to know that you are having this question? — Esther Perel

Sometimes it has to do with other longings that are much more existential. Sometimes you go elsewhere not because you are not liking the one you are with; you are not liking the person you have become. — Esther Perel

As a teenager growing up in Europe, I embraced the romantic ideal. For me, I had to give up the ideal that one person would be there for everything. Once you give up that ideal, then you begin to accept the person that you are with - the person who won't be able to give you everything and who won't be able to know exactly what you want and feel without you even needing to say it. — Esther Perel

We know desire is rooted in absence and yearning. What you don't have is often ten times richer than what you actually experience. An affair is a perfect erotic plot because it fits the erotic equation of psychotherapist Jack Morin: "Attraction plus obstacle equals excitement.". — Esther Perel

Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become. — Esther Perel

Success, to me, is helping one person or many people counter the isolation and pseudoconnectivity of our lives by boosting their ability to connect to themselves and to others. — Esther Perel

Real sexual conversations are enormously intimate and beautiful because they reveal so much about who we are and what we want. What are the emotional needs we bring to our sexuality and how do we connect to ourselves and connect to a partner? There's such a rich tapestry that can be revealed, but the vast majority of couples have never had those talks. — Esther Perel

Most affairs do die a natural death. Today, you look at your partner's phone to find out the weather, and you find out about a lover. It has never been as easy to cheat as it is today, and it has never been harder to keep a secret. — Esther Perel

The whole notion of one person being enough for everything gets instantly challenged when you start to talk with somebody about wanting more or of wanting something else. They take it personally, feel like a failure or feel that they lack something, so you don't talk about it because you don't want to hurt, offend, or scare the other person. You also don't want to be rejected or have them leave you, whatever the reason. — Esther Perel

When we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner we're turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become. — Esther Perel

Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do. — Esther Perel

In my community there were two groups of people, There were the ones who did not die and the ones who came back to life. — Esther Perel

Life Lessons by Esther Perel

1. Esther Perel emphasizes the importance of communication and understanding in relationships, showing how even the most seemingly irreconcilable differences can be overcome through honest dialogue.
2. She encourages us to be mindful of our own emotions and the emotions of our partners, and to take responsibility for our own actions.
3. Esther Perel also encourages us to be open to change and to recognize that relationships are constantly evolving, and that we must be willing to adapt in order to keep them strong.