Top 140 Esther Perel Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “No woman should give any man the power to shatter her romantic ideals.”

— Esther Perel

102. “Ours is a culture that reveres the ethos of absolute frankness and elevates truth-telling to moral perfection. Other cultures believe that when everything is out in the open and ambiguity is done away with, it may not increase intimacy, but compromise it.”

— Esther Perel

103. “We no longer get work out of our children; today we get meaning.”

— Esther Perel

104. “We liken the passion of the beginning to adolescent intoxication – both transient and unrealistic. The consolation for giving it up is the security that waits on the other side. Yet when we trade passion for stability, are we not merely swapping one fantasy for another? As Stephen Mitchell points out, the fantasy of permanence may trump the fantasy of passion, but both are products of our imagination.”

— Esther Perel

105. “This is the challenge of sexual intimacy, of bringing home the erotic. It is the most fearsome of all intimacies because it is all-encompassing. It reaches the deepest places inside us, and involves disclosing aspects of ourselves that are invariably bound up with shame and guilt. It is scary, a whole new kind of nakedness, far more revealing than the sight of our nude bodies.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

107. “Once we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love, passion, and undivided attention it promised.”

— Esther Perel

108. “Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance. Excessive monitoring can set the stage for what Stephen Mitchell calls “acts of exuberant defiance.”

— Esther Perel

109. “He invites us to recognize that our values evolve as we mature and “move from an understanding of ethical and moral issues in black and white absolutist terms to comprehending the gray ambiguity of most matters.”6.”

— Esther Perel

110. “It’s hard to experience desire when you’re weighted down by concern.”

— Esther Perel

111. “The honeymoon phase is special in that it brings together the relief of reciprocated love with the excitement of a future still to be created. What we often don’t realize is that the exuberance of the beginning is fueled by its undercurrent of uncertainty. We set out to make love more secure and dependable, but in the process, inevitably we dial down its intensity. On the path of commitment, we happily trade a little passion for a bit more certainty, some excitement for some stability.”

— Esther Perel

112. “For these couples, fidelity is defined not by sexual exclusivity but by the strength of their commitment.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

115. “I got rid of my motorcycle when Jimmy was born. I’m not allowed to die in a bike crash anymore.”

— Esther Perel

116. “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.”

— Esther Perel

117. “So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. – Gaston Bachelard.”

— Esther Perel

118. “But when we reduce the conversation to simply passing judgment, we are left with no conversation at all.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

120. “Erotic, emotional connection generates closeness that can become overwhelming, evoking claustrophobia. It can feel intrusive. What was initially a secure enclosure becomes confining. While our need for closeness is almost as basic as our need for food, it carries with it anxieties and threats that can inhibit desire. We want closeness, but not so much that we feel trapped by it.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

122. “At one time you pursued Stephanie with great creativity, but no more. There’s an assumption – and you’re not alone – that we need only pursue what we don’t yet possess. The trick is that in order to keep our partner erotically engaged we have to become more seductive, not less.”

— Esther Perel

123. “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.”

— Esther Perel

124. “Infidelity hurts. But when we grant it a special status in the hierarchy of marital misdemeanors, we risk allowing it to overshadow the egregious behaviors that may have preceded it or even led to it.”

— Esther Perel

125. “In our efforts to protect ourselves from intimate betrayal, we demand access, control, transparency. And we run the risk of unknowingly eradicating the very space between us that keeps desire alive. Fire needs air.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

127. “Almost everywhere people marry, monogamy is the official norm and infidelity the clandestine one.”

— Esther Perel

128. “When people live on top of each other, there is no isolation to transcend, and they are far less interested in embracing western, middle-class ideals of intimacy. Their lives are entwined enough as it is.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

130. “Acknowledging the third has to do with validating the erotic separateness of our partner. It follows that 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. It doesn’t.”

— Esther Perel

131. “The caring, protective elements that foster love often block the unselfconsciousness that fuels erotic pleasure.”

— Esther Perel

132. “In this setup, the pressure is always on the non-talker to change, rather than on the talker to be more versatile. This situation minimizes the importance of nonverbal communication: doing nice things for each other, making attentive gestures, or sharing projects in a spirit of collaboration.”

— Esther Perel

133. “You would think that the safety of an established base would make it easier to take these kinds of risks, but no. A secure relationship does indeed give us the courage to act on our professional ambitions, to confront family secrets, and to take the skydiving course we never dared consider before. Yet we balk at the idea of establishing distance within the relationship itself – the very place that grants us the delicious togetherness in the first place. We can tolerate space anywhere but there.”

— Esther Perel

134. “In my work, I see couples who no longer wait for an invitation into their partner’s interiority, but instead demand admittance, as if they are entitled to unrestricted access into the private thoughts of their loved ones.”

— Esther Perel

135. “Monogamy, it follows, is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it is the marker of our specialness: I have been chosen and others renounced. When you turn your back on other loves, you confirm my uniqueness; when your hand or mind wanders, my importance is shattered. Conversely, if I no longer feel special, my own hands and mind tingle with curiosity. The disillusioned are prone to roam. Might someone else restore my significance.”

— Esther Perel

136. “A couple’s emotional life together and their physical life together each have their ebbs and flows, their ups and downs, but these don’t always correspond. They intersect, they influence each other, but they’re also distinct.”

— Esther Perel

137. “These couples, in their own ways, have chosen to acknowledge the possibility of the third: the recognition that our partner has his or her own sexuality, replete with fantasies and desires that aren’t necessarily about us. When we validate one another’s freedom within the relationship, we’re less inclined to search for it elsewhere.”

— Esther Perel

138. “The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man’s thoughts. – Louis Aragon.”

— Esther Perel

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

— Esther Perel

140. “It is a radiant parenthesis, a poetic interlude in the prose of life.”

— Esther Perel

141. “Armed with an ideology of love that advocates togetherness, we are awkward about pursuing autonomy. This is especially true of the individuality of our desire.”

— Esther Perel

142. “By telling them not to touch I was mapping a space that would give her room to go after him. That, in turn, would give him the feeling of being desired.”

— Esther Perel

143. “Marriage is imperfect. We start with a desire for oneness, and then we discover our differences.”

— Esther Perel

144. “Erotic excitement requires that we be able to step out of the intimate bond for a moment, turn toward ourselves, and focus on our own mounting sensations. We need to be able to be momentarily selfish in order to be erotically connected.”

— Esther Perel

145. “Big data analyst Seth Stephens-Davidowitz reports in the New York Times that Google searches for “sexless marriage” outnumber searches related to any other marital issue.3.”

— Esther Perel

146. “We blame our partners for failing to make us whole.”

— Esther Perel

147. “Most of us get turned on at night by the very things that we’ll demonstrate against during the day.”

— Esther Perel