Esther Perel Quotes

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.

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.

Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.

Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.

It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.

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.

There is no neediness in desire ... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.

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.

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

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

You never know your partner as well as you think.

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.

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

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.

The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.

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.

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

There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.

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

Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.

Today, monogamy is one person at a time.

Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.

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

We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.

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

It's hard to experience desire when you're weighted down by concern.