Top 140 Esther Perel Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We’re walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.”

— Esther Perel

52. “When I ask her if her open marriage isn’t painful, she answers, “Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s not. But monogamy – which we never negotiated, by the way – was painful, too.”

— Esther Perel

53. “There’s something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.”

— Esther Perel

54. “Today I am a woman torn between the terror that everything might change and the equal terror that everything might carry on exactly the same for the rest of my days. – Paulo Coelho, Adultery.”

— Esther Perel

55. “Introducing uncertainty sometimes requires nothing more than letting go of the illusion of certitude. In this shift of perception, we recognize the inherent mystery of our partner. I point out to Adele that if we are to maintain desire with one person over time we must be able to bring a sense of unknown into a familiar space. In the words of Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

57. “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.”

— Esther Perel

58. “Is jealousy an expression of love or a sign of insecurity?”

— Esther Perel

59. “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

60. “Morin’s now-famous “erotic equation” states that “attraction plus obstacles equal excitement.”6 High states of arousal, he explains, flow from the tension between persistent problems and triumphant solutions.”

— Esther Perel

61. “In uncertainty lies the seed of wanting.”

— Esther Perel

62. “When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.”

— Esther Perel

63. “Love is an exercise in selective perception, even a delicious deception as well, though who cares about that in the beginning?”

— Esther Perel

64. “Despite a 50 percent divorce rate for first marriages and 65 percent the second time around; despite the staggering frequency of affairs; despite the fact that monogamy is a ship sinking faster than anyone can bail it out, we continue to cling to the wreckage with absolute faith in its structural soundness.”

— Esther Perel

65. “Marriage is imperfect. We start with a desire for oneness, and then we discover our differences. Our fears are aroused by the prospect of all the things we’re never going to have. We.”

— Esther Perel

66. “The best ideas rarely arise in one isolated mind, but rather develop in networks of curious and creative thinkers.”

— Esther Perel

67. “The extended family, the community, and religion may indeed have limited our freedom, sexual and otherwise, but in return they offered us a much-needed sense of belonging. For generations, these traditional institutions provided order, meaning, continuity, and social support. Dismantling them has left us with more choices and fewer restrictions than ever. We are freer, but also more alone. As Giddens describes it, we have become ontologically more anxious.”

— Esther Perel

68. “If you trade passion for stability, you basically trade one fiction for another. Both are products of our imagination.”

— Esther Perel

69. “Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living. – Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”

— Esther Perel

70. “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

71. “Beginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Through love we imagine a new way of being. You see me as I’ve never seen myself. You airbrush my imperfections, and I like what you see. With you, and through you, I will become that which I long to be. I will become whole. Being chosen by the one you chose is one of the glories of falling in love. It generates a feeling of intense personal importance. I matter. You confirm my significance.”

— Esther Perel

72. “Affairs are always harmful and can never help a marriage or be accommodated. The only way to restore trust and intimacy is through truth-telling, repentance, and absolution. Last but not least, divorce affords more self-respect than forgiveness.”

— Esther Perel

73. “Humans have a tendency to look for things in the places where it is easiest to search for them rather than in the places where the truth is more likely to be found.”

— Esther Perel

74. “The “symptom” theory goes as follows: An affair simply alerts us to a preexisting condition, either a troubled relationship or a troubled person.”

— Esther Perel

75. “We have hundreds of virtual “friends” but no one we can ask to feed the cat. We are a lot more free than our grandparents were, but also more disconnected.”

— Esther Perel

76. “To the American way of thinking, respect is bound up with honesty, and honesty is essential to personal responsibility. Hiding, dissimulation, and other forms of deception amount to disrespect. You lie only to those beneath you – children, constituents, employees.”

— Esther Perel

77. “My husband deals with pain; I deal with pleasure. They are intimately acquainted.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

79. “Erotic intelligence is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life.”

— Esther Perel

80. “We ground ourselves in familiarity, and perhaps achieve a peaceful domestic arrangement, but in the process we orchestrate boredom. The verve of the relationship collapses under the weight of all that control. Stultified, couples are left wondering, “Whatever happened to fun? What ever happened to excitement, to transcendence, to awe?”

— Esther Perel

81. “The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustained desire becomes a real possibility.”

— Esther Perel

82. “It is always astonishing how love can strike. No context is love-proof, no convention or commitment impervious. Even a lifestyle which is perfectly insulated, where the personality is controlled, all the days ordered and all actions in sequence, can to its own dismay find that an unexpected spark has landed; it begins to smolder until it is finally unquenchable. The force of Eros always brings disturbance; in the concealed terrain of the human heart Eros remains a light sleeper.”

— Esther Perel

83. “While love promises us relief from aloneness, it also heightens our dependence on one person. It is inherently vulnerable. We tend to assuage our anxieties through control. We feel safer if we can contract the distance between us, maximize the certainty, minimize the threats, and contain the unknown.”

— Esther Perel

84. “Given the transient nature of life, given its ceaseless flux, there is more than a hint of arrogance in the assumption that we can make our relationships permanent, and that security can actually be fixed.”

— Esther Perel

85. “A woman’s sexuality depends on her authenticity and self-nurturance,” she writes. Yet marriage and motherhood demand a level of selflessness that is at odds with the inherent selfishness of desire.”

— Esther Perel

86. “Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination.”

— Esther Perel

87. “Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risks falling into chaos; but one that is too rigid or static ceases to grow and eventually dies. This never-ending dance between change and stability is like the anchor and the waves.”

— Esther Perel

88. “Some relationships originate in feelings of warmth, tenderness, and nurturance, and the partners choose to remain in these calmer waters. They prefer a love that is built on patience more than on passion. To them, finding serenity in a lasting bond is what counts. There is no one way, and there is no right way.”

— Esther Perel

89. “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

90. “Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy.”

— Esther Perel

91. “Adultery is often the revenge of the deserted possibilities.”

— Esther Perel

92. “We no longer plow the land together; today we talk. We have come to glorify verbal communication. I speak; therefore I am. We naively believe that the essence of who we are is most accurately conveyed through words.”

— Esther Perel

93. “Eroticism challenges us to seek a different kind of resolution, to surrender to the unknown and ungraspable, and to breach the confines of the rational world.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

95. “We see what we want to see, what we can tolerate seeing, and our partner does the same. Neutralizing each other’s complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness. We narrow down our partner, ignoring or rejecting essential parts when they threaten the established order of our coupledom. We also reduce ourselves, jettisoning large chunks of our personalities in the name of love.”

— Esther Perel

96. “Oscar Wilde wrote, “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is getting what one wants, and the other is not getting it.” When.”

— Esther Perel

97. “Neutralizing each other’s complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

99. “If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel