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Esther Perel pops onto the screen looking exactly as her devoted legions of fans would expect. Her asymmetrical blonde bob is perfectly swept to one side, her silk shirt (black today) is opened just so, revealing one of her favoured drop necklaces from a range called “ladders to bliss”. The twinkle in her eyes is enchanting even in two dimensions.
For the most ardent of Esther Perel’s millions of followers , all of these hallmarks must be as familiar as freckles on their partner’s face.
Women and men have been drawn to the Belgian-raised, French-sounding psychotherapist with cult-like devotion for decades. They come seeking reassurance and reasons for hope when their romantic relationships hit the toughest of times, her charismatic wisdom offering the promise of everything from repair after a seismic betrayal of trust, to advice on returning vitality to garden-variety marriages.
Podcaster, author, TED talker and most recently consultant to Olivia Wilde’s box office hit, The Invite , Perel is such a global star of sex, intimacy and relationships advice that some online dissect her every aphorism. But if Perel, 68, is aware of the weight of the expectations of lovelorn hordes, she wears it as lightly as the hand-harness chain she often sports on TikTok, Instagram or live: it looks as delicate as gold thread but also as steely as chain mail.
For someone attributed with borderline supernatural powers to peer into the heart, her words are down to earth. I open with a question based on the Australia’s recently published longitudinal study, known as HILDA, which examined 17,000 people’s attitudes to their relationships. It exposed a satisfaction gap between genders starting as soon as a couple move in together.
Overall the findings were positive; people in very long-term relationships are highly satisfied. But an odd happiness gap widens between men and women as perceived relationship quality descends until the 24-year mark. That’s when it bottoms out for both, before bouncing back up again as decades advance.
I wonder what insights or solutions the New Yorker who shot to fame 20 years ago with her global bestseller, Mating in Captivity , may add to established understandings of why men seem happier than women, and what it is about midlife that triggers this big dip for both.
“On some level, this is an old finding – that life satisfaction and health increases for men in committed relationships and life satisfaction for women often decreases, and her health for that matter because she’s busy taking care of everybody else’s health, and she forgets her own very often,” she says.
Women are more likely to struggle to maintain a sense of autonomy and individuality because they enter the care-taking and executive role in the family, assuming “a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of others, the home and the domestic, and they often have two jobs,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s glorious for the men.”
Experience has shown Perel that “family life and domesticity, and intimate relationships, are challenging in and of themselves”, leading her to conclude that what family life thrives on is also “what eroticism defends against”, as she puts it to Good Weekend . “There is this notion that if you love, you desire,” she says. “But in fact in a long-term relationship, what love wants – which is consistency and familiarity and safety – are elements that are preconditions for desire. But desire basically lives in the space that is more playful, less responsible.”
“If family life wants routine, and consistency and repetition, desire doesn’t want to return to the same spot day after day. So there is an inherent tension in reconciling love and desire in the same place – because it addresses a set of needs that … are actually polarities.”
In a time when far longer life-expectancies mean couplings are expected and required to bridge more decades of challenge and routine – as well as happy stability – mining the daily conflict between excitment, freedom, and a craving for security remains a super-rich seam. At the many women’s conferences where she is invited to speak, Perel is often asked to articulate how those exhausted by demands of work and home can make space to be themselves and regroup.
“When you find yourself mired in tasks and responsibilities and to-dos and lists, it is not so obvious that at the end of the day, and a long list of things, number 27 will suddenly be ‘connect with my desires and my playfulness and erotic self’.”
She cites a study for which men and women in heterosexual couples were invited to write down the family duties they complete between 5pm and 11pm. Men typically had five to 10 on their lists, Perel says, while women had up to 30 – including ensuring their partner carried out his. Men felt more relaxed at night generally because they expected to do fewer tasks, but also felt stressed that their partner was monitoring them: a passion-killing burden by 11pm if ever there was one.
“So then the issue is: How do you create an erotic space where that part of you can express itself?” asks Perel. No wonder her audiences love her when she makes them feel so seen.
Western couples now expect their romantic partner to fulfil all the roles in life that a whole village once sustained, Perel famously says, and this is too much to ask. And she is openly compassionate when addressing the fallout when things go bad, which includes people having affairs.
Perel emphasises the pivotal role of trust in sustaining authentic connection. But she also says that people can decide to effectively “marry each other again” after their original partnership is shattered by betrayal, for example with an affair – effectively a second marriage to the same person, if the damage or disappointment can be overcome. The million-dollar question is how you achieve that – as the stultified couple in The Invite is advised to do by Piña, the luscious and liberated sex therapist character played by Penelope Cruz.
“There is repair after rupture,” says Perel, who has been married to psychologist, family therapist and author, Jack Saul, for more than 40 years. “There is a way to take accountability for hurt and to bring back the good things in the relationship, because not all infidelity is the end of the relationship.”
This idea of a new marriage to the same person was a line Perel actually coined some time ago, after working with many post-infidelity couples. “And from there came this thinking that many of us want something different at a certain point,” she says. “There’s your 24-year mark – we want something different, and 24 years often means midlife.”
“Midlife often means a time when we say, ‘Is this it? Is there more? Is this going to be my life for the next 25 years? I have one more chance for something different, better, more satisfying. My children are gone, my career is somewhat established’,” she says. “And then the question is: Do you need to be with someone else … or can you imagine a new story for the two of you, and is that something you aspire to?”
The “how?” doesn’t turn out to be simple. It can involve any number of changes. Physically moving to a different place. Doing something professionally different. Starting an entirely different life. “Organising one’s life in a different quadrant,” she says, comes with questions. “What is important that I do that brings me joy? What is important for me to learn and grow and give back? It also depends on what happened in the 24 years before.”
The movie Perel heavily influenced happily discusses sex styles enjoyed by the fresh – but still solidly middle-aged – couple who live above our time-worn, married heroes (played by Wilde and Seth Rogen). It traverses practices incorporated into the mainstream from what was traditionally considered porn territory – for example “pegging”.
But surprisingly for someone unflustered by airing so-called taboo topics in her content, Perel’s team advises Good Weekend that asking what she makes of the fact sexual choking has become normalised, especially among younger Australians, is off the table. And the implications of the way women are depicted in commercial porn now (often very demeaningly), aren’t up for discussion either. Even in the midst of a global debate about why so many young men have been caught up in online worlds that warp their ideas of healthy relationships with women and themselves, a question about whether porn can reduce desire is similarly a no-go.
But Perel is happy to discuss the so-called “sex recession” being experienced in the west, and if repeated claims that young people are less sexually active than ever before are really true. The answer is yes, and the reasons complex.
“One of the big shifts or challenges to our romantic pursuits is romantic consumerism. More and more the heart thinks like a market when we look at relationships, we have brought to it the language of optimisation, maximisation,” she says. “It is one big transactional vocab.”
But sex, Perel says, comes with a plot. And the plot is the relationship. “If you don’t approach people, you’re constantly ‘boundarying’ yourself out of living. If you make sure constantly to protect yourself to not be vulnerable … then you are going to have a sex recession. We’ve had a sex recession for quite a while. But it has taken up way more proportions at this point.”
What she wants to discuss is “relational thinness” – the loss of deep connections, and disembodiment – the fact that so much of what was once experienced in person is now delegated to online personas.
“I think we are experiencing a gradual social atrophy where we are less and less connecting to people,” she says. “The big paradox of this moment relationally is that we know from study upon study how important relationships are for a healthier, happier life, and yet we are increasingly avoiding each other and sleep-walking into isolation.”
This may translate as the phenomenon of “stable ambiguity”, which means we now have a whole set of narrow relationships that give us enough contact and consistency not to feel alone, but not too much either, which could make us feel enclosed or lacking freedom.
“What used to be tight knots, now they’ve become loose threads,” she says, “that allow you to get in and out of a loose bond. That looseness means often commitments become very flimsy and people treat each other like magazine subscriptions that they don’t need.”
As our time ticks down, Perel graciously agrees to answer a question from an Australian fan, a friend whose marriage is aged in its mid-twenties, and who listens to Perel’s couples’ therapy podcast, Where Should We Begin.
“How do you stop the little things turning into big things?” my friend wonders.
“Number one is humour,” Perel replies. “Humour demystifies and brings perspective, it reminds you what truly matters. It is an underused art and resource and if one has it, let that person be the one to diffuse.”
Second is good old mindfulness. “Ask, ‘If this was my last day, would I want to remember it based on the squabble about the toothpaste?’ … Things are going to bother you until the day one of you drops dead or leaves, it won’t change. The only thing that will change is your response to it.”
Even so, the perennial argument about the wet towel chucked on the bed or floor is never really about that.
“It’s about control, power, trust, respect, recognition. ‘I’ve asked you one hundred thousand times about the towel, you don’t care about what I say, you don’t pay attention to me, you only think about you.’ That’s the subtext and what makes a fight big is not the wet towel, it’s what it represents.”
Perel brings her live show Strangers, Friends, and Lovers: A Night Out with Esther Perel to Sydney on December 11, Melbourne on December 13 and Brisbane on December 17.
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