Do you know a single person who would treat their business the way that people treat their relationships? The business would be dead. Love is not a permanent state of enthusiasm that just exists.

Esther, why are you shouting at me?

Estelle Perrell, the most famous relationship therapist on the planet. Podcaster. They're selling all of that. I think.

One of the most.

Weird headtalks of all time. In order to want sex, it needs to be worth wanting. So when women don't want sex, is it really that they have less desire, or is it that they don't have desire for the sex they have? And this fear of rejection is one of the most important emotional vulnerabilities for many men. It's part of what is so alluring in porn, which takes care of three major dilemmas around sex. The first one is and this leads to lying and cheating.

I want to know how I avoid getting to that place.

People end up in a rut because they're so lazy, so complacent. If you give the best of yourself at work and then you bring the leftovers home, taking out your phone and not present, slowly your relationship degrades. Because the more he refuses to be present, the more alone she feels. And the more alone she feels, the more she tests him to see if you're really not there for me. It's a Figure 8 loop. And whether it's money, kids, sex, every topic could become part of the loop. But the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships. Without it, we die.

What do we do about it, though?

Well, this is one of the best things I can offer to people, is that.

Every now and then I meet someone on this podcast that I classify as a wizard or witch. And I say that because the impact they have on me is so profound, so life-changing, so pivoting in terms of what I thought I knew that I look at them like a witch or a wizard. I just think, How does this person seem to just know everything? Esther Parela is one of those people. She's magic. What she knows about relationships, love, sex, and everything in between will both blow your mind, inspire you, and unlock a bunch of answers that I think the vast majority of us are currently looking for. I've spent 10 years thinking that relationships are slightly confusing. They're a bit of a black box. I've wondered why some people are needy and others are anxious in relationships. Why do some people in relationships run away and others chase them? All of these answers, these black boxes as it relates to relationships, love, and sex, Esther has the answer to. I can't wait for you to listen to this episode. It might just change your life. Before this episode begins, one favor to ask you. You probably know what this favor is if you listen to this podcast frequently.

The majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the Follow button. I can't tell you how much it helps. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love. Thank you so much for your time. Esther, what is the mission you're on? We spoke before we started recording about a plethora of different subjects that you're innately curious about. If you were to summarize all of those subjects, what is Esther Pareil's mission?

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships. Relationships are often not taken very seriously as a subject of inquiry.

Why?

Because in various worlds, it has a certain attitude. The easiest one would be in the business world, relationships have usually been seen as soft skills, fluff, feminine skills or feminine concerns. Feminine concerns you can always hold in high regard, but then disregard in reality. I think that for so long, relationships were structured, organized through social order, religion, communal structures, and so people didn't really have to think about them so much. They were very, very codified. They still are codified in most parts of the world. But in our Western world, where we have dismantled all the structures that used to define relationships, relationships are going through a massive transformation, a massive makeover. We don't necessarily have the skills of how to deal with all these changes that are literally happening under our feet. My mission is to guide people, to help people make sense of what their relational lives are about, friendship at work, romantic relationships, family ties, and to develop understandings, insights, skills to be able to handle what is probably in my mind, one of the most important dimensions of our life. Without it, we die.

Without it, we die.

We don't die a natural death necessarily, but it's a death to the soul. A life without relationships. There are a few hermits, but the vast majority of us are socially wired. We exist in relationships. We define ourselves in relationships. I know who I am by being with you. Who am I outside of that? It's in the presence of the other that we discover who we are. Alone, there's nothing to bounce off often. I am passionate about the relational lives of people, the challenges of relationships in the modern world. As we enter the 21st century and as machines are entering to replace people, I'm interested in how people heal from broken relationships or from relationships that broke them. That's the mission.

You've spent a long time working with people that want better relationships in a therapeutic environment as a.

Therapist, right? Yes, I have been a psychotherapist for more than 40 years.

I'm so compelled. I want to start where we all start, which is with our childhood and the role that plays in the relationships we then go on to have or not to have. I imagine most of the couples and people you see, you can understand the way they are today as adults based on what they experienced when they were younger or what they learned?

A lot. But we are not just what happened to us, we are also who we become. Sometimes we become on the basis of what happened to us. When you ask people sometimes, What are some of your most important inner resources? Those very resources come from some of the misery of their childhood, too. It's not linear. It's not bad leads to bad. It's that some absence, some deprivation can lead to an acute awareness of something that makes you become the exact opposite. It's a dynamic dialog with your childhood. It's not just the determinism. The determinism that your childhood will determine what's going to happen to you later. I think that all of us... This is one of the many, many frameworks around childhood, but the one that I wrote about in Mating in Captivity was to say that we all need security and we all also need adventure or change or freedom, and that some of us will come out of our childhood wanting more safety, more protection, more connection, more grounding. Some of us will come out of our childhood wanting more more space, more freedom, more individuality, more personal expression. That doesn't mean it's static.

The beauty of us is that we are forever changing creatures and we can rewrite the story. We can't change the story as it occurred to us, but we can change its legacy, its meaning, its influence in the most extraordinary ways.

How many people have you... How many couples have you sat with?

You.

Must start to see patterns emerging. When a couple is sat there, they've got some dysfunction in their relationships. The guy or the woman starts describing their childhood and saying that their parents were never around. You must start to see some patterns and how that caused dysfunction and causes dysfunction later in life. Is there any patterns that we can use as stereotypes or hold on to with childhood?

Separation, in a pattern to me. But I wouldn't even call them as stereotypes. I think there are a lot of patterns. But the pattern is not just what you bring from your childhood and how it manifests now. The pattern is what two people create. That's the pattern. A pattern could be, okay, let's say I grew up and I felt that I was left to fend for myself, that all of it was on me, that I was taking care of my younger siblings. I'm thinking of a recent episode ofWhere should we begin? When he is absent, when he doesn't respond to a request, she doesn't just think, Oh, he doesn't want to do what I just asked him to do. She instantly goes into the, I'm always alone. There's never been anybody there for me. I've always been alone. My life is never going to change. Why is it always me who has to do all of this? I carry the burden. The pattern is what she asks that makes him react, that makes her amplify. It's what I do that makes you be and do what you do that makes me be what I do.

It's a Figure 8. That's the pattern. The more he refusess us to just do it, let's say, and the more alone she feels, and the more alone she feels, and the more she tests him every time to see if the next time she asks for something, he's going to actually respond in kind. Since he feels the pressure and the test and he comes from a story that says, Nobody's going to tell me what to do, that's a dance. So couples have dances, and the dance is how you see one person trigger or evoke in the other a survival strategy. His survival strategy is, Nobody tells me what to do. And that survival strategy is going to then trigger in her the vulnerability of, Well, if you won't do anything I asked, then I'm again alone. Then when that person feels that alone, her survival strategy is to go and knock at the door and say, Are you really not there for me? The dance between the vulnerability and the survival strategy is one of the most common patterns in a relationship. What's really essential to understand is that what makes the difference is the form.

It is figuring out what is this Figure 8 look like in this couple, not the specific detail. Because once you've noticed the loop, it doesn't matter what they're talking about. Every topic could become a part of the loop. Whether it's money, kids, sex, in-laws, trips, it will look alike. If I always think I'm alone and I can't count on you and I feel abandoned and let down, then that becomes the filter with which I enter most of these conversations. If your thing is nobody pushes me and nobody imposes their will on me, because I have been telling my dad for a long time that he's done being the boss of me, this is the filter. You look for those filters, and then you begin to see it's like music. If you really listen to a sentence from a music to a phrase, after the first four notes, you have a good idea of what are the next four notes. That's how you do pattern recognition in couples.

Me and my partner are going through this. I think at the moment we've figured out what our figure of eight our pattern is.

Right, tell me.

It's exactly what you just said. Which one? I'm the guy, she's the woman in this scenario.

So you're the nobody tells me.

I'm the one that feels like everything's threatening my independence. I don't like to be told what to do, as in-.

You also interpret any request or invitation as a command.

As a threat on my independence.

Right, as a command, which you have to push back as an intrusion.

Yeah, like the walls are.

Closing in. Right, as a violation of your... And so you do this. And when you do that, then?

She goes... She comes... It's almost like... I'll give you an example. I'll be sat at home after work. I've come home, it's maybe 9:00 PM. I'm quickly throughout my laptop and I'm doing some work, whatever. She says something to me. Because I'm busy here, I give like a half acknowledgement. Because I've not turned away from the laptop or because I've not given my full attention, she'll then start asking me seemingly completely random questions that she wouldn't ordinarily ask me. What do you think of this? Picking up something random in the house. What do you want to drink? There's a lit tea cup of water already in front of me.

You know what that does, right? The more, the more you call this. Yeah.

The more she starts doing it to me, the more I start giving the blunt responses.

But what it means when you say the more, the more is that we make the other. You are creating a knocker.

Yeah.

She's creating a withholder. The more she knocks, the more you withdraw or withhold. The more you withdraw half attention, artificial intimacy, and the more she experiences you as absent and she comes looking for you in full force. What that says is that we create the other person. We contribute to making them the very thing we don't want. If you wanted her to not do this, you could change this in a minute. How? By basically stopping for a moment saying, This ritual of acknowledging each other at the end of a long day means a lot. Actually, it doesn't just mean a lot to her because you don't have to deal with it because she makes sure that you don't get forgotten. If she was not coming and she disappeared for six days in a row and never came to check in with you, you would begin to wonder what's going on. She holds the flame for you. If you stopped, actually, and it's nine o'clock, you've had your long days, you've been on your own, you've done all your stuff, and you actually said, Come here. You took literally 30 seconds for a beautiful kiss, a hug, a gaze, a moment.

Then you said, I'll be done in probably 20 minutes. I'm excited to spend some time together. You would relax her nervous system. She would not be after you and you would actually feel like your boundaries have been respected. But what happens in a couple is that you want her to change. You want her to stop annoying you and do what you do. Doesn't she see that I'm busy? I'm almost done. Why doesn't she wait? We always think the other will change and then my life will improve. But if you actually want your life to change or your relationship dynamic to change, you could do it like this because you're the one who is you and her. I would say the exact same thing to her, by the way. This is so symmetric. I would say to her, If you actually want him to not push you away, here's what you can do. If you want her to not keep knocking, then here is what you can do, because when you do what you do, you are increasing her knocking.

I've noticed that.

This is fundamental to couples thinking. It says we are not essential creatures. We become someone as part of the dynamic that we are in with another someone. This is when people begin to understand that in couples therapy, things begin to change. It's like a light bulb goes on.

I also really resonate with the sub-point you made that if she stopped knocking, I'd be like, What the hell is going on? That's right. I'd eventually end up lonely and unhappy. You're right, she is carrying the, as you called it, the flame for the relationship.

Yes, she's the pursuer. Yeah. You're the distancer. The distancer doesn't have to deal with his feelings of longing or desire for closeness because the other one is holding up the quota.

Then why do we go to we go for people that are opposites in this regard?

No, you go for people who express the part of you that you don't want to deal with. Okay. Meaning you're telling me I'm the person from whom being intruded upon, violated my independence, my independence. But we all have needs for independence and we all have needs for connection and dependence. But those you have outsourced on her.

We.

Outsource the things. She is taking care of the feelings that you are disavowing or the needs that you are disavowing inside of you. As to why are you shouting at me? I put my finger on top of it. Was I? No, I'm joking.

I'm joking. No, it's but.

It's so true. Do you understand? Hundred %. We outsource. It's not that we find someone who's the opposite. It looks like it's the opposite. But what it really is, is we all have needs, that's what I was saying, for the connection and for the space of the independence. We all need both. We need home and we need journey. We need predictability and we need innovation. We need commitment and we need freedom. We need both different degrees, but we need both. What happens in a relationship sometimes is that I assign to you, I outsource to you the parts of my needs that I am conflicted about, and you are more conflicted about your dependency needs, which are actually totally normal. You're much more aware of your independence needs. That's your persona. She may be exactly on the opposite of that. It changes when people begin to actually integrate the part that the other one is playing. This realization that if she wasn't coming after you at some point you would suddenly say, Wow, where is she? That is basically the giveaway.

I know this in our relationship. I think shes because when I'm over here, I'm over here in New York at the moment and she's in London doing her retreats and stuff. She's got a breathwork, barlybreathwork. Com, a breathwork retreat she does. When she's not here, not around me, I fall into -.

I can miss her better.

Yeah, 100%. Also I fall into really like, I'd say, bad balance habits. I'm out of balance in my life. I go all in on independence and work. I've always referred to her. She's like a counterbalance in my life because she's the one that says, No, we need to go to the beach for two hours. I would never do that on my own volition. I appreciate it so deeply because I go, I know what my life looks like when you're not around and it is a unsustainable life. They often say opposites attract. I think she's-.

Do you tell her so, by the way?

Which part?

Of how much she balances you, how appreciative you are of it, how much you rely on her for that, how out of kilter you would be if she wasn't doing so. Do you actually acknowledge that and show her the appreciation for it? Or is 90% of your speech to her the part of the I need my time, my independence, my this, my that?

It's a very good question. I would say I don't tell her enough. At the same time, if it's possible, maybe this is a mistake, that she knows. I say she knows for two reasons. Reason one is because there are moments where I express that gratitude to her. Number two is because I'm so open about it in terms of publicly, which isn't always the best way to communicate with someone. Don't tell me off, but I'm so open about it on this podcast. I talk about it all the time. She listens to it and she's a big fan of yours as well. But you're right, in the moment, in the heat of the moment, and I'm all about defense. I'm like, I can descend into blame a little bit too much.

I often like to ask people, What's the one thing I said that stayed with you that made a difference? It was a situation where a person basically was talking about how when they are late, when they miss an appointment, when they miss an activity that a couple had agreed upon, or a game of the children, or whatever it was, that they make a point of apologizing. I said to them, if you're still at a computer at 10 o'clock and you're apologizing, you consider that being considerate. I'm aware and I'm apologizing. But when you apologize about your absence, what you missed, what you didn't do, you're basically still saying, I'm super important. I'm that important, but I couldn't be there. But if you actually said, I'm so thankful that you're here because I could not have stayed at the office late. I could not have gone to that last-minute dinner. I could not have gone and seen so and so if you were not here. Instead of apologizing, you think, then you are actually saying, I couldn't do this without you, which means I am an independent person who is completely interdependent with you. That interdependence is the part that the independent person is struggling with.

It's whatever you are doing, and this is what you said, she balances me, she tells me let's go to the B. Whatever you are doing is bolstered by someone who is making this possible for you. That acknowledgment, it's not just to be nice and to say thank you, it humbles you. It says, I could not do this without you. That gives the other person not a sense that they are superfluous or intrusive or annoying or choosing the wrong moment, but that they matter. That they have a presence and a meaning in your life, and that is a secret to a connection.

Making the other person know that they matter and have meaning in.

My life. Yeah, I couldn't do it without you. I'm having a huge day at business or a huge day at work, and I can do this and I can stay late because whatever, you've taken care of 10 different things that would make it possible for me to have my mind completely focused. I'm here. I'm with a, I'm talking or whoever all the other guests are. I can do that because there's someone there that has taken care of all of the stuff I don't have to worry about. When you acknowledge that and you thank a person for that, you're basically saying, I couldn't do this if you didn't do that. That's the interdependence.

Our relationships. I think we will certainly I think I have for much of my life, and I say that because I look at my actions. What I might say is different to how I think I've behaved over the last 10, 15 years. We see them as an afterthought to everything else in many regards. The amount of effort I put into my businesses and to the podcast and to every little detail, the creativity, the thought, the brainstorming, all of that, the relationships, we all just think they just happen. If it doesn't happen perfectly, then it's broken and I need to find a new one.

Yeah, that's a terrible way to think. I mean, and everybody knows it. If you give the best of yourself at work, if you bring the leftovers home, if when you come home you say, I've given everything I had. Now I'm just putting my feet on the table. I just need to chill. I don't want to make any effort. Slowly, your relationship degrades, period. Then there's all kinds of ways it ends. None of them are particularly joyful. Basically, if people were able to put a little bit of creativity, attention, attention into their relationships as they do with their customers or their guests, relationships would be doing a lot better and my profession would be seeing a lot less people. There's no doubt. Why are people so lazy, so complacent, so unimaginative with their relationships at home? I see so many people when you… Here, you're not taking out your phone. You're looking at me, you're paying attention on occasion, you look for your questions and where we go. But basically, you're with me. But at home, if you do this or this- I'm looking at my phone. -and then when the person tells you something really important, you go, .

. You're there, but not present. That's the beginning of a modern loneliness, actually, is that this idea that you can share something really important to someone who is half there, half there. I think that that's what's happening with a lot of younger people these days, is that they experience a lot of half theirness. That begins to cultivate a real sense of loneliness that has to do not with, I'm physically alone, that has to do with, Do I matter? Who hears me? Who cares? Who pays attention? Who notices? Sometimes the advice is very banal. It's to tell people, put your freaking phone down. Take an hour, and put your phone down.

But I'm busy. Huh?

But I'm busy. Well, you will be busy and there won't be a relationship. Sooner or later, there won't be a relationship. It's not difficult. You can wait. You can wait for the kids to grow up if there are kids involved, things like that. But in the end, there isn't.

Just because someone was on their phone.

Well, it's not just on the phone. It's on the phone means I am continuously saying something is more important than you. We come last. We're a cactus. We don't need to be watered. We can survive in the desert. There's a term I've been using for this that I borrow from something else. It's called ambiguous loss. Have you ever heard of this term?

Ambiguous loss? Yeah. No.

Ambiguous loss is a term that was developed by a colleague, Pauline Bos, a wonderful psychologist. When she talked about what happens when you have some parent, for example, that has Alzheimer's. They are physically present, but they are psychologically gone. They're emotionally absent. You can't really mourn them because they're still physically there, but you're caught in this in-between, in this ambiguous loss. On the other side, you can have somebody who is deployed, hostage, miscarriage. They are emotionally very present, but they are physically absent. In both cases, it's an ambiguous loss. Are they still there or are they gone? Who knows? When we live with this phone thing, when we are... Because you've been at work, you've been at the computer, you come home, you think, I'm so happy to finally let go of the computer. You turn on the TV, you turn on the TV, and then you turn on the phone at the same time. You're watching here, you're watching there, and there's a person next to you. Most likely, they often do the same thing in the end, too. Gradually, there is less and less of a thread of conversation, of connection, of joy, of sex, of intimacy, all of what...

That becomes ambiguous loss. Somebody is there, but they're not really present. Is there a difference between me and the sofa? It's comfy. It's routine. You sit on me. But comfy and routine do not give us joy or meaning or relevance or connection. That's what we still seem to want. It means saying to people, it's actually not very, very complicated. What did people do for so centuries? They took walks. That's one of the few times you can't click. Take a walk. Don't sit. Don't try to dothat. Take a walk around the block and just be in motion. Then you're parallel. It's not face-to-face, it's side-by-side. You can talk about the day. If you, instead of just saying, Stop, stop, stop, you just said, Let's go for a walk. It's London, but still you can… You do half an hour walk. You'll come back to me and you tell me what it will do. But it's amazing how these small interventions that are playful, creative, not digging change the dynamic of the relationship because she is only pursuing you in part because of how much you are withdrawing. You change, she change. If you want to change the other, change yourself.

Once you understood the figure eight and how we create the other, you understand that if you do something else, sooner or later, they do something else, too. If you want to change the other, change you. This is part of the question you asked me, right? What are some of the essential understandings of working with relational systems? This is true at work, in companies. This is true in intimate relationship. This is not just for romantic love. This is foundations of relational systems. Feedback loop, it's called in cybernetics.

So many busy couples can feel the spark in their relationship waning away slowly, but work isn't necessarily the first place you look. Pulling out the phone at dinner isn't necessarily the place people look because that seems so small. They aim at bigger things. They'll say, I don't know, something bigger. But are you saying that you believe a lot of it, much of it often starts with those small moments of disconnection where the person basically ends up becoming the sofa?

The gutman's call them bids for connection.

Bids for connection.

It's the little things. It's the difference between turning towards someone or turning away. When you read something, there's a classic example they give, Do you read something? Do you actually say, 'Hey, did you read this? Let me send you this article. ' That's a bid for connection. It's not a big declaration, but it says, We're in this together. When I see something that's interesting that I think you would like to read as well, I'm thinking of you. I know you exist even if I'm not with you.

Do you know what? My partner said to me something about a year ago, and we stayed with me because I thought that's such a strange thing to say. She said to me when we were in conflict resolution, so we were talking about things, she said, Why don't I send you things on Instagram? In Instagram DMs. I'll be out here now in New York. If she sees something interesting on Instagram, she sends it to me. She goes, You've stopped acknowledging it. I used to just double tap on it or make a comment back. She goes, You stopped acknowledging it. I thought, Why does that matter? You send me something, I watch the funny video, I crack on with my day.

Because it's like when you receive a birthday gift, do you think? Yeah. When you buy a birthday gift, is it important to give it? Yeah. Okay, that's reason. How would she know that you watched it if there is no acknowledgment? The acknowledgment is not about the video or the DM. The acknowledgement is we share something.

Well, it's even worse because it says seen on Instagram. It says that I've seen it.

Yes, but the seen means that I have seen the video. The acknowledgement is we are part of a thread. We're connected. She's absolutely right. In that sense, when people lose the spark, it is a lot of these small details that people say so much in the beginning. All the positive stuff that people lose, and it's actually only more important with time rather than less important with time. The death of a relationship is when people take each other for granted. When you stop acknowledging those things, it is part of the mechanisms of taking for granted.

I had a really good friend of mine sit with me a couple of weeks ago, and she has been married to a CEO. She's also a CEO herself, and she's just going through a divorce now. I sat with her in America and she said to me, He was very busy. I was very busy. We had this kid and I just think I don't really know what happened. Along the way. It just seems like we fell out of love. Ever since she said that to me, it made me think that it is often quite a gradual process, this drifting apart. This kid coming into the picture as well complicates that. What she said to me was we both had our businesses to take care of and then we had the kid as well. The relationship was, I guess, the residual beneficiary. It got whatever was left. That's caused this divorce now and the child is, I guess, going to have to live in two different homes.

I have two thoughts about this. The first thing is, this is the first time in history that the survival of the family depends on the happiness of the couple. If the couple doesn't nurture itself, there is no family. You don't stay married because you have to. Women have an economic independence, in her case at least, to be able to leave. You have divorce laws, you can go. The only thing that holds the couple together, you don't get excommunicated, none of it, is the relationship quality. If you don't have that, there is no family, here's your child. The second thing is, when she says, We just fell out of love, that's not the way it goes. Love is a verb, and you conjugate it actively in many tenses. It's a practice. If you stop doing all those things that you're telling me, the acknowledgements, the hellos, the thank yous, the sharing of the videos, et cetera, all of that cushioning, when that thins out, it means that you have not been conjugating the verb. Love is not a permanent state of enthusiasm that just exists. Do you know a single person who would treat their business the way that some people treat their relationships?

The business would be dead. I say it emphatically, but I'm not saying anything somebody doesn't know. You have to take that lazy attitude towards your shop, end of story. Therefore, end of relationship. But it's not that it just happened. It's that they stopped doing, saying, expressing, showing, feeling, giving, receiving, sharing. Those are the nerves. Wanting, imagining, playing, experiencing, exploring. Those are nerves that have to do with relationships and love.

On that first point about this being the first time in history where the health and happiness of the relationship determined whether the family stayed together, not the church or some other external pressure. Could this go to explain why people are having less and less kids as well? Because they don't feel as secure as they once did. I think this is a little bit about my... Because with my partner, I feel like she's said or indirectly said that she will be... She'll feel happy and safe to have a child when she feels more secure in the relationship. Imagine once upon a time, you just knew that you were going to stay with them regardless.

You also knew that if you had sex, you had a good chance of being pregnant.

True.

Yeah. That's the first and foremost big change that took place. End sex was mostly a woman's marital duty not that long ago. I think that many people, the lesser they have, the more children they have. Because children becomes an expression of abundance, of care, of more hands to help, of the riches of a family. People who have less food have more children. It's not people who are more insecure or live in more precarious situations. I don't think that that is the reason. I think that there is a certain attitude towards not wanting to give up the comforts of one's life, the freedom, the comings and goings that make some people not want to have children. Then there's also the fact that for a long time you didn't have a choice, and some people today want to exercise that choice. But you're talking about the love that goes. You asked me before, one of the subjects that I'm very interested in, in light of that, is conflict. I called the course that I just created, Turning Conflict into connection. Because it's easy to look at your situation and then begin to see the strife and the arguments and the bickering and the conflict and to focus on the conflict.

But this conflict is occurring because there is a fraught connection. There's a tear in the fabric of connection. That too, if you say to people, Would you run a business that allowed for that conflict and bickering to take place? Nobody. Yet you normalize it in your relationship. You think that that's an okay thing. I mean, if I give you an assignment that you're never going to say, I would say, Of all the things we talked about, I would love for you to choose three things that you're going to do differently, change, and that you know would improve the relationship. You don't have to go look very far. You've already listed the half a dozen. Then you stay with it. You commit yourself to it. You don't do it contingent on what she does. You don't say, I did that and she still did the same. Give it a time and hold yourself to it. You will see, relationship is not something that happens out there. It's actually something that we are very much in charge of creatively, like a business. By the way, a business is made up of relationships as well. Products, but relationships.

Leadership is relationships. It's vision, it's efficiencies, et cetera, it's operations. But it is also relationships. If those don't work, you can have the best product. You can have the most exquisite system in place. If the people don't like each other, don't want to work together, don't know how to rely on each other, don't want to share the information, your system is not going to work very well. Relationships sometimes is the thing that's right here, and sometimes it's the thing that makes the rest possible.

Conflict resolution. If I want to be a master in conflict resolution in my romantic relationships, man and woman, let's just use that.

Two men, two women, two men, everybody. Two men, two women.

Is there any differences between the way that genders typically approach conflict resolution? Because there's stereotypes, right? That men don't want to talk and that women want to talk.

Yes, but when you have two women, there's often one that doesn't want to talk as well. I think there is gender, there is culture, there is linguistics. There's a lot of different things that play themselves out. But it's not in straight couples you will attribute certain things to gender, that in other couples you will attribute to roles because the behaviors are not that different. There's a whole... I think one of the most important thing is that instead of asking what are we fighting about, ask yourself what are we fighting for? When you go into the beakering around, You see, I'm busy. Why are you bringing up all these stupid questions now that you... What are you fighting for? What she's fighting for is to connect, to have some time with you, to have attention, to not just go through the day, do everything, and let this thing die on the vine. There are relationships that are not dead, and there are relationships that are alive.

Tell.

Me the distinction. Same as the business. Well, you can survive or you can thrive. You can survive and go through the motions, or you can be alive, erotic, radiant, vibrant, vital, creative, curious. It's those experiences. Now, we use eroticism as a life force, not just in the sexual sense of the word. That aliveness gives you energy for a lot of things that you do elsewhere. You would not be here the same if she wasn't there. How do you cultivate aliveness? How do you cultivate the erotic is essential. When I say to people, What are you fighting for? Usually, people fight for about three things. They fight for trust. They fight to feel like the other person has their back. They fight for recognition, to be valued, out, and they fight for control. They want to feel that their needs, their beliefs, their expectations have priority, too. Control, trust, recognition. Those are probably three of the main things people fight for, but it doesn't look like that. It looks like they're fighting over money or time together or how often they have sex or that stuff. That's a big one about how you deal with conflict.

What is productive conflict and what is destructive conflict? Because conflict in itself is intrinsic to all relationships. People fight. People want to have equity. They want to have justice. They want to be heard. They want to... It's a useful thing. But we all know what fighting looks like that is not useful and that is destructive and that harms you, and that you've seen when you are a kid and that travels with you for the rest of your life. We know all of those versions, too. I think that these days, we live in a society that is also more and more conflict-avoidant. We really don't know how to... We have so much less face-to-face with other people. There's a question that I have loved asking recently that has to do with conflict. When you grew up, did you play freely on the street?

Yeah. Okay.

Do you know... You don't have kids, right? No. But you have friends with little ones.

Yeah, my brother has three kids. He's only one year older than me as well.

All right. How much do his kids play freely on the street?

They don't play freely on the street.

To me, this little piece of information is so important because what happens when you played freely on the street? You had uncoreographed, unmonitored, unscripted, free play with other kids with whom you learned friction, rubbing, fighting, making up, competing, collaborating, being jealous, making alliances, breaking alliances, recreating. You learned a ton of social skills and dealing with conflict and disagreement and reuniting and all of that. This entire universe of experimentation that children had gone. You really don't learn it by playing games on the screen. We find ourselves a little bit socially atrophyed. Then comes a pandemic and comes the virtualization of our lives. There's a lot of things coming together here and we are more and more unable to deal with conflict and we polarize. People keep telling you, How do you stay connected with people who disagree with you, who have different points of view, different politics, different belief systems, et cetera. We are conflict avoidant, we lack the social skills, we are socially atrophyed, and we polarize.

What's the cure?

I think that a major piece of it is, and I hope Alpha Generation is actually showing us a little more of that, is close the screen and go outside and play and meet people in real, in whatever version. Two groups, sports, no sports. But it's not about structure, activities. It's about the happenstance, serendipity, chance. Chance is an essential piece of our life. Why is this so important? Because if everything is controlled, everything is predictable, every technology is trying to give you a polished, friction-free answer to every problem that you have, you learn to not tolerate uncertainty. If you can't tolerate uncertainty, you become increasingly more anxious. If you become increasingly more anxious, we're going to talk about the mental health crisis. This mental health crisis doesn't come from nowhere. It's connected to a whole bunch of things that are happening in the world around us. Let your kids go and have sleepovers. Connect with other people. Don't just stay in your little nuclear system.

Are younger generations less resilient, in your view, because they didn't get to play on the street?

They are definitely less able to deal with disagreement, divergences of opinions, conflict. They polarize, but so do other people, older people too. There is definitely more polarization because what they do show is increased levels of anxiety, increased levels of all kinds of other symptomatologies of around mental health from eating disorders, you name it, that start earlier and earlier. Difficulty experimenting, making mistakes, not being so perfectionistic, not attributing everything to themselves as I'm not enough, I'm not enough. There's the whole manufactured insecurity going on. Those things, yes. I think that you notice it. We notice it, parents notice it, teachers notice it. I think we could say that there is less resilience, but I think that that's a dangerous statement because there are plenty of kids who are extraordinarily resilient in very, very challenging circumstances. I would not want to say younger kids these days. But I do think that they struggle with certain things. Uncertainty is essential. You can't innovate without uncertainty.

Without an appetite for it?

Yes. You need to be able to take risks. You need to be able to take chances. You need to be able to try out certain things. If it instantly becomes, I'm afraid to fail, I cannot. I have to know before I even try. I have to know in advance, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't just affect one individual.

Why did you write this book, Mating and Captivity? You could have written about anything, but for some reason you felt compelled enough to take on this subject of unlocking erotic intelligence. Why did you write about this?

At the time, this book is 17 years ago. It still lives as if it was yesterday. I guess that means it touched something that had a timelessness to it, which was really, how do we reconcile the two sets of fundamental human needs that we have never wanted to reconcile in one relationship? Our need for security, safety, predictability, dependability, and our need for freedom, exploration, change, risk, they have traditionally... They come from different sources. They pull us in different directions, and we've rarely really wanted them to be in one relationship. Today we want a passionate marriage or a passionate relationship. Those two things have never had to do because they demand different ingredients. I was very interested in that. What does it mean that romantic love has promised us that there is one relationship in which we can have all of that? There was one reason. I was interested in writing this book because I thought this is... We used to have religion to experience belonging and continuity and identity, and then we had family for security and economic support and children and social status. But now we want the partner to be a best friend and a trusted confidant and a passionate lover.

On top of it, I want you to help me become the best version of myself, and I'm going to start calling you a soulmate. A soulmate used to be the realm of the divine, not a person. It is an incredible thing. We've never expected more from one relationship and asked one person to give us what usually an entire village used to provide. That interested me.

Something must be broken there.

I mean, it's just an incredible shift. It's a unique thing. It's a grand experiment in our life. Then the third part was sexual. Sexuality went through major transformations. It went from duty to desire. It went from being inexorably linked to children to being now... I mean, if you only have two kids, you have sex for the long haul for pleasure and connection. There's no other reason. What does that look like? Why do people always say that sexual problems are the consequence of relationship problems, which is sometimes true? But in many instances, sex and intimacy, they are a parallel process. They're not just a metaphor of each other. I've seen many couples improve their relationship, and it did nothing for the sex. But I've seen couples who, when the sexuality changes between them, it transforms the relationship. That demands a deeper understanding of what is sexuality, not what do you do and how often do you do it and how hard and how often and how many. I mean, the measurable stuff. That is sex had become this thing that you measure rather than where do you go inside of you with another? What is the experience like?

What is the meaning of sex? Not what is the frequency of sex? All these questions had not been discussed much, certainly not in the field of couples therapy and not in the general culture at large. To explain that dilemma seemed to have been something that till today people found really... There's not an answer, by the way. There's not an answer? What? No, the book tells you that because relationship issues are not binaries, they're not black and white. They're not problems that you solve. They're paradoxes that you manage. The strength of the book is that it didn't have an answer. The strength of the book is that it told you you have to learn to live with some of these contradictions.

People don't want to hear that. People want to know the two steps to fix their sexless relationship in 60 seconds.

Yeah, well, they won't find that with me, but they keep finding something else with me. See, you want yourfreedom. You want your freedom. You want your travels. You want to be here. You want to do your podcast. You want to do the stuff that is interesting to you, but you also want your girlfriend. You do want both. You're looking for, How do I not bring all my passion, all my energy, my creativity, my erotic charge, my imagination, my curiosity, everything to this part of my life, and I let that other thing dry up. Once you will find that it's not so much a balance, it's really a distribution of your resources, you will experience a very different level of satisfaction in your life because you won't half the time be guilty.

When you look back through different cultures- Is that true? -you're right, of course it's true because you said it.

No.

Not because I said it. No, it's true because everything you say is true.

Oh, come on. No, absolutely not. I sound very confident, but I actually never think I'm right.

No, but I think you're right. That's what I'm saying. On this contradiction point about us expecting everything from one person, are you telling me that we just have to live with the contradiction that that creates? Because you're right. We want spontaneous and excitement and all of these erotic fantasies, but at the same time we want safety and belonging and familiarity, which seem like a contradiction. Is it that we just have to live with the contradiction or are we meant to be polygamous and a bit more, I don't know, reckless and have lots of different partners. Some of the people used to have throughout history and some people have in different religions.

I think it's two separate questions, what you're asking.

Yeah, one of them is about monogamy and the other one is about... Yeah, well-.

The other one is about how you keep a relationship alive. That I think we have somewhat addressed. It involves doing more things. The contradiction is when you stand, if you really want to stand, it's actually about constantly moving the weight from one side to another. It's not about neutralizing the two polarities. It's about playing with these polarities. There are times of the day or times of the year or times in your life when you want to bundle. Then there are times when you want to explore and play and be creative and curious and do unusual things. I don't think that it is inherently impossible to do it in relationship, but it demands activity. Look, every system, every relational system, every company straddles stability and change, continuity and innovation. If you don't change, you fossilize and you die. Will your relationship, so will your company. If you change all the time and you're running, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, you will dysregulate and you will be chaotic and you will be exhausted and you will forget what you're even running towards. So nature knows that. We continuously straddle these two polarities. That's what I call the contradiction.

But monogamy is a different question about that. It has to do with what do we think are the viable relational arrangements at this moment? For whom is this a model that appeals? It has opened up a wholeista about what does consensual non-monogamy look like? Or what does polyamory look like? For whom is this an expression of liberation? And for whom is this actually tortuous? I think what it says to us is that you can't have a one-size-fits-all. When it comes to love relationships, we have usually not been the most innovative. Family models have changed, but couple models haven't changed that much.

Romantics and realists.

Yes.

You discussed this in chapter one of your book. How do you define a romantic?

Romantics are aspirational. Romantics are living the realm of the imagination. They live in the realm of how do you transcend the limits? How do you project yourself outside of the narrowness of your own reality, boundaries, consciousness, body, et cetera? When I say aspiration, intentional, idealistic, longing, yearning, discovery, exploration, unknown, an active engagement with the unknown, and a reverence for the connection. Realists are more pragmatic. Realists are basically, instead of this is not possible, there must be more. They say, This is fine as is. Why should there be more? This is a conversation I just used these two terms because they were handy. It's not because I had entire definitions of them, but I understood that in relationship, you often have one person who says, Why do you always want more? Then one person who says, But there is so many possibilities. Then the other person says, Yes, but so many minefields or landmines.

Do you see a gender difference between those two? No. No. Not particularly, at all.

No. I think that what makes the gender difference is the dynamic as well. No, I refuse to just make it a man-woman, because I see the dynamic in old couples. There it's less defined around gender and more defined around childhood story or gender identification in the broad sense of the... I know. Yes, the classic old line that you could see in a heterocouple is when mister says, But it's like, so that is cliché. Everything's fine. And if she was fine, everything would be fine.

Is speaking a man's strength, though?

Is.

What? Speaking. Communicating about how they feel. Is that a strength.

That men - It depends how it's said.

Because people think of intimacy as verbal communication often. It's one of the things I saw in chapter three of your book.

That we - Here's the thing. I don't buy the thing that men talk less. I do think that, yes, men are often emptied out from the vocabulary of emotions by age seven. It's siphoned out of them. The socialization of boys does not really prioritize an active engagement with one's emotional life and one's interiority. It's much better to be stoic, to be fearless, to be competitive. Those values are more. But when I sit alone with men, it's not because they don't have a vocabulary that they don't have the feelings. I've been a therapist of many men for decades. It was actually something I actively sought. When you take your time and you listen and you support the expression, things will come out. When they come out, here's the thing. When a woman talks to you, many times you know that she's already said that to somebody else, which doesn't diminish it. But when a man talks to you, you know that he's hearing himself for the first time, himself. But that's not because that's what men are. That's because that's what we make men to be. That's how we socialize men. I think that this notion that women want more connection...

Look, you were asking me about sex before. I think every gender has been given license to what needs they're allowed to have publicly and officially, and in what language they're entitled to talk about them. Men will not necessarily talk about the need for tenderness, connection, care, intimacy, holding, because that is not the vocabulary that has been assigned to them. They will talk about it in the language of sex. Women have basically not been given the license to say what they want sexually. That is really not what they have been educated to develop. They have learned that they are allowed to speak about relational needs, and wrapped in their relational needs are all kinds of other longings for sexual intimacy, for seduction, for pleasure, for connection. Every gender is allowed to ask for the same things, but in a different vocabulary. Men are allowed to talk about sex. Women are allowed to talk about intimacy. But that's not the fact that it's not the same as saying men and women want other things. Actually, they are more similar than we think they are, and all research supports that.

But it's just the socialization is causing a different effect.

We like to think that man's sexuality, it's autonomous, it's unprompted, it's spontaneous, they don't need anything. They're always ready. They're always looking for an outlet. Men are creatures of nature and women are creatures of meaning. Whereas for her, it's the context, it's the quality of the relationship, it's that elicits the desire, et cetera. Seriously? On what basis are we saying things like this? You want to know men have a range of very deep emotions that completely affect how they experience sex.

You know, the rise in feminism and equality of the genders in every regard. Do you think that has had implications for relationships and specifically sex in a way that you've seen over the last decade? Because you've been working with thousands of couples over the last couple of decades. Is there any way that feminism or gender equality has influenced sexual dynamics? I'd say I want to ask it because it's one of the chapters in your book from, was it 17 years ago or something, talks about how some of America's best features, the belief of democracy, equality, consensus building, compromise, fairness and mutual tolerance, can, when carried to- Pongtiliously.

I'm so glad you knew what words you'd written, because I had to say that word. Into the bedroom results in very boring sex. Yes.

Sex is not always politically correct. Sometimes we demonstrate during the day against the very same things that we delight at night. If it's playful, if it's consensual, if it's voluntary.

That feels like a contradiction.

Do you understand? But so do children. Children play prisoners and children play firemen and victims and doctors and patients. Would they understand that when they play, they enter a universe of as if. Nobody wants to be pinned down and-.

Tied up.

For real. They want us to be taken down. As against their will. As in a.

Situation-.

Nonconsensually. -a nonconsensually. We're without the meaning that says this is for pleasure, this is for connection, this is for surrender, this is for this very powerful ritual. When kids are tying each other up because they are the prisoners, they are not tolerating it because they know that they are in the realm of play, as if, make belief, and it gives it the fun and a whole different meaning. Nobody wants to be trapped when it becomes real. If you play hide and seek, the most amazing thing is when you're hiding is to know that somebody is looking for you. But the minute you begin to wonder, are they still looking for you? The thrill turns into terror. This is what happens in sex, too. It's extremely important to differentiate when it is sexual, when it's a form of play, when it's a particular practice you enjoy, and everything around it is coming together to clarify that.

Are you seeing couples struggling, though, with these newly defined gender roles as it relates to their sex lives? As we said, like feminism and the equality of the sexes and all, has it changed anything?

I think that one thing is to talk about sexual rights, and one thing is to talk about sexual pleasure and experience. I was teaching this course yesterday. I think it's about 97% of research on desire is about women. What does that say to you? That says that we think women have challenges around desire. Men don't have to be researched because the assumption is they're always interested. Just to give them an opportunity, which is so not true.

But the science.

Is completely bought into the bias.

What's the difference, though? Why does it matter whether if all the research is... Are you getting different.

Results from men and women? No, because yes, the experiences are different. But what it says is that the science has decided that women need to be helped around desire, that they have hyposexual desire disorder. Today it's that. In the past, it was the opposite that we were researching, and that men don't need to be researched because men don't have challenges around desire. First of all, it leaves many men unattended to. It puts an unfair burden onto the women. That is not about feminism. That is about but science and political changes and social changes, they intersect with each other. Have women changed fundamentally around the fact that at least in the West in most situations, hopefully sex is no longer just a woman's marital duty, but that it is also about her desire, her pleasure, their connection together. That is huge. We first separated sex from reproduction when we got contraception. Then we separated reproduction from sex when we got artificial ways to conceive. Now we are separated anatomy from gender. Those are huge revolutions that change the way we conceive of the relationship. We used to think sex, elderly people, that is the weirdest thing possible.

But when is elderly people start these days? I mean, we understand that there is a way to stay intimately, physically, sensually connected till the end of your life.

Are you having more and more couples come to you? This is difficult, I guess, because maybe it's just more people talking about it now. But are you having more couples come to you that are experiencing problems in the bedroom? Sexlessness in their relationships? Of course.

But what does that mean, sexlessness? Because in a relationship, in a relationship or in a culture where the woman's experience doesn't really matter, there may be sex, but that may be miserable sex.

Do you think there's a lot of miserable sex?

Of course. When women don't have desire, is it really that they have less desire, or is it that they don't have desire for the sex they can have? In order to want sex, it needs to be sex that is worth wanting.

I've said this before, but it's worth saying now again. My partner turned around to me one day and said, I don't like having sex with you. I was shocked. I was like, This was super early into our relationship. As a very young man, I didn't understand what that meant. Very emasculated by it. I thought she must be broken in some way. There must be some medical defect. Maybe she needs some pills or a doctor or something. We ended up breaking up. We spent a year apart. She ended up doing some work on herself. I did a little bit of work on myself. We got back together and went on a bit of a journey together to find out what the actual answer was. It turns out it wasn't that she didn't like having sex or having sex with me. She very much enjoys sex, but there was a series of blockages and I almost described it like I thought sex was one language, Spanish. It turns out she thought that she was speaking French. I just assumed because she wasn't speaking Spanish, that we couldn't have sex, basically. At some point, I've just started to view it as maybe there's ten different languages or five different languages of sex, and maybe my job is to learn the language that she is speaking.

I have to say, and I give this conclusion because there's a lot of people that are in that situation right now. I know that because I'd say at one point, about 20-40% of my friendship group were, We have a great sex life now. I say that because I think couples often think they just can't turn it around. They think that when one partner turns and says, I'm not enjoying this, they think the other person's broken. We managed to turn it around.

It's wonderful. It's wonderful. What is not said often enough is that when people are able to change this, it changes the whole relationship.

That's.

What I said before. I said, You can change the kitchen, but it won't change the bedroom. But when you change the bedroom, it changes the people who walk into the kitchen. It's very, very important. But you need to do things. You can't talk about not having sex or everybody differently. It's difficult to want to have more sex by talking about not wanting to have sex. You have to try new things. That means you take chances, you risk, you explore together. When it doesn't work, you try something else. That is what people often find really challenging. They'd rather take it as a criticism and then they are defensive and then they counter attack, and then you say to her, There's something wrong with you, et cetera, et cetera.

Do you know what I struggled with was that first day when I tried to initiate sex and then I basically got rejected. That created this almost anxiety going forward. And then there was maybe about a year, not even a year, maybe less than that, I don't know, six months, where if I'd tried to initiate sex, I'd be rejected. And that just totally turned me off. Even when we fixed the situation, I almost had to do a lot of work on myself just to... Because then she starts initiating all the time. When we get out of the other end of the situation when we resolve it. Then that's basically a problem because I've learnt this habit that she has to initiate sex now because there was these periods for six months where I was just rejected all the time. That was difficult because I tell you what, when you've to get an erection, the last thing you want to be doing is thinking and thinking and thinking, Am I going to be rejected? Does she want to have it? It's the last thing you're going to be thinking.

This fear of rejection is probably one of the most important emotional or sexual vulnerabilities for many men. It's part of what is so alluring in porn, by the way. You never rejected in porn. Chio never says not now. She always says, me too, more, more, more. That takes care of one of the very important sexual vulnerabilities that many men grapple with. By the way, the next one would be you're also never incompetent. You never have performance anxiety. It doesn't matter. Whatever you do, you do it. It's for you. That takes care of the second vulnerability. The third one is that you never have to wonder is she enjoying it because she only screams and makes sure that she lets whoever the actor is know how phenomenal he is.

Also you've searched out the fantasy that you want, so you're getting - Absolutely. -there's no rejection in.

The fantasy that you're - It's very interesting thing when you look at what does porn do for many men is it takes care of three major emotional dilemmas around sex. It's not that it just takes care of the sex, it takes care of the vulnerabilities, the emotional vulnerabilities around sex. That's a really different way of understanding. When you say to people, What are you looking at?

Are you not concerned that with artificial intelligence on the way in virtual reality, that literally if porn is taking care of those vulnerabilities that are standing in the way of many men.

So we'll bots. Yeah, exactly. So we're machines, ever.

More so. A machine, I put a headset on, I buy the machine on the internet, and then.

It can talk to me. I have an augmented reality and they never say no and they know exactly what I like and they accompany me everywhere. I don't have to feel like I want too much or too little or I'm doing it wrong or anything. Yeah, absolutely. It's a fantastic, idealistic world in which one can enter. Scary and understandable.

Especially as people are getting lonely, they'll see that as a substitute for the real thing. Maybe a better substitute for the real thing in some people's minds. Yes.

Those who will seek it out will want to believe that it is a good substitute.

You look concerned.

It's a world that I don't know yet that I'm watching. When I say I don't know yet, I know plenty. But I... There are things that are changing where I say, I'm excited. This is phenomenal. Then there are things that are changing that I'm saying, Where is this taking us? I'm a lot more cautious. This is one of them.

When couples do come to you with sexlessness in their relationship, I canand we have to define what sexlessness is, but they stopped having sex. It's been six months since.

They've had sex. Oh, six months. Why not 16 years?

You've had that?

Six months? Yes. When we talk about a block, some't a breach, an impasse, a shutdown, we're not talking months. By the way, this is not people. This is your best friends, and you don't know.

I asked them.

And I was shocked. That's why Where should we begin? People begin to see that this is not just some others or just them, that it actually is very common. Sexlessness is not about frequency. Though at some point for some people, it means nothing, nothing for years. Then you ask, Do you still kiss? Do you hold? Do you touch? Do you rub skin? Is there any physicality still? Is there affection? That may not be sexual touch, but that is affection at touch. You really look at the broad definition. Then you ask, What is it that you would want? Do youAre you prepared to take the chance?

I don't want that. I want to know how I get back from that place, but also I want to know how I avoid getting to that place. It's two separate answers, I guess. There's 16 years in no sex. How do we get back?

First and foremost, maybe this is a place to start. When I think about the conversations I have about sex with the people I work with, individuals or couples, and I think probably the best way for you is to listen to it in the podcast episodes because you can hear how one begins to have this conversation, is that sex is not about a five-minute foreplay that is just in preparation for the real thing. And the real thing in a straight couple is penetration and orgasm, and then you know it worked. That model, that performance model with an outcome is so not what I'm talking about. This is what couples have had for centuries. People have had sex. You can do it and feel nothing. That's not the goal. I don't care how often. I'm care about the quality of the experience that the connection you have with yourself and with another. We talk about touch. We talk about giving touch and taking touch. We talk about fantasy, imagination. We talk about how do you ask for the things that you like? But that doesn't mean just touch me here, touch me there. It's how do you communicate sexually?

What is that translation from Spanish to French? How do you say to somebody, I enjoy this. I would enjoy that more. How do you create a vocabulary that isn't negative and critical and castrating? How do you pay attention to how the other person is responding and not just say, Why don't you like this? Everybody else likes this. That and the stuff. It's very, very rich. The definition of sex is really way beyond this. You start to ask people about their imaginative life around what excites them, around peak experiences that they have had around the touch that they enjoy around what do you look for in sex? Is it a communion? Is it a spiritual union? Is it a free experience of being dominated, of giving yourself over to someone, of being naughty, of not having to be responsible and take care of other people, which you do the whole day? What do you look for in sex? Where do you go? What do you seek to express there? These are conversations a lot of people, most people have.

Never had. Sometimes one person in the relationship doesn't want to have that conversation, and the other person does.

Then I meet with them alone. Because some things need to be sometimes articulated separately first. What is it? Sometimes it has to do with smell and body, and sometimes it has to do with trauma. Sometimes it has to do with lingering resentments. Sometimes it has to do with a fundamental inequality in the relationship in which one person expects and assumes. What blocks the sex? It's a sleuth work. It's not just... It's stopped.

Does sometimes couples say to you in private that I'm just not attracted to them anymore?

Of course. Sometimes they say it flat out to each other, too. Really? People say hurtful things, yes. Sometimes I can't believe somebody would be attracted to me. I don't find myself attractive. I have been ill or I have struggled with weight or I have had addiction issues. Sex intersects with a lot of things. It intersects with your health. The vast majority of couples, 55 up, that stop being sexual is actually because of the men in heterocouples. Because the men are often on medication for diabetes, for blood pressure, for prostate, for depression, and others. And all these medications have sexual side effects. If you are a man who basically has focused your entire sexuality around you and your penis and your erections and your ability to get hard and last and have autonomous, spontaneous erections, and suddenly it doesn't happen, and you suddenly think, Now I have to ask for help. Help. What a man? This is no longer... Then you give up. The notion that actually you have an entire body to make love with and that your penis doesn't make the decisions, it's a person who makes decisions for the penis, that's a very different story.

And that you actually can experience pleasure in all kinds of other ways, or that you have had all illnesses with which you've grappled with. Human sexuality is a very broad topic that evolves in the course of your life that changes with your successes, with your illnesses, with your children's lives, et cetera, et cetera. That is one of the best things I can offer to people is that suddenly the conversation, when you say the person doesn't want to talk about it, it's because what they've talked about is that narrow. Why don't you want to have sex? You never want to have sex. All you can think about is sex, that thing. Once you've actually invited them into a whole other conversation about what is pleasure for you? What is connection? What is the difference between desire and arousal? What does it mean to start because you're in the mood versus to start because you're willing?

I've had partners before where I thought, know what? If I laid out the full menu of what I find pleasurable, they would think I was a weirdo. Listen, I'm not into anything extreme. I have a very... Look at me apologizing. I'd think they wouldn't be into that, so I just won't tell them, or it might make them run off, so I won't tell them. I think it dawned on me a couple of maybe about a year ago when my girlfriend turned around to me and actually asked me the question for the first time about what my fantasies were. I was like, Do I give her the vanilla menu or do I tell her about the-.

That's where the card game comes in.

This card game?

Mine, yes. This one I have on the floor? I have a whole bunch of sexuality-related questions. Because you're playing, it's the pink triangles are the sex ones. But in play mode, you can ask this question about fantasy in a way that is much less directed.

Yeah.

All loaded. Loaded, confrontational. Yeah. There's 60 cards on that subject to load, and that creates a very different conversation. I really think that to put it in the context of play and playfulness invites a very different revelation and honesty. Are you looking?

Yeah. This one says, My guilty pleasure is...

Give me the stack and I'll get you. Quick one.

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The most sensual sexual experience I've had without having sex.

Oh, that's a good one.

That's a beautiful one.

It'd probably be being in the shower with my partner, which is a very vulnerable experience, but there's something quite central about that experience.

Absolutely.

That's the first thing that came to mind.

I'll just read a few and then you can decide.

Because you're flaccid at that point, so you're not looking your best. You're a little bit...

Because one of the earliest sensual experiences that we have is when our parents or our caregivers wash us.

Oh, okay. Interesting.

When they wash our head, when they wash our back, when they rinse off the soap. There are a lot of imprints in the best of circumstances of being washed as one of the most initial, pleasurable, sensual, without it being sexual at all. Little kids, you sit in the tub and somebody puts the water over you and rinses you. A lie I've told about my sex lives. A fantasy of mine I'm conflicted about. I've got a couple of those. I'll never forget the time I was seduced by.

You say that in chapter six. You say a lot of your work is to do with people who have shame and anxiety around sex as people withdraw from a lover as they fear being judged or rejected by what their sexual.

Fantasies are. That's a piece. But shame and anxiety is because a lot of people... Look, if it's one in four women and one in six men have experiences of unwanted sex or abuse or violation or assault. A lot of people carrying a lot of very negative experiences, traumatic experiences around sex. Let's start with that for a minute so we don't go in la la land. People carry a lot of shame, a lot of guilt around this whole dimension of their being. Then it's a subject that we often are trained to be silent about. That means that suddenly, now as an adult, we have to be able to communicate about this out of where. I did a thing when I was in London recently, and I'm going to ask this question again when I go back on tour, it's extremely powerful. I ask people to please let me know if sexuality was central in their family growing up. Of course, the vast majority of people say, No, it wasn't. Why? Because we never talked about it. I never saw my parents being close with each other or affectionate with each other. Then you begin and you say, But if sex was hidden or obfuscated or minimized or only hinted at with dirty jokes, does that make it absent or does that make it more central?

If sex was violated or misused or abused, does that make it more peripheral or does that make it more central? If there was infidelity in your family, does that make sex absent or does that make it more... In the end, you have 90% of people telling you sex was central in my life growing up, and 10% saying, No, it wasn't. It flips the whole thing. From there, you begin to have conversations about sex. You don't plunge into the sexlessness. You ask people, How do you avoid each other? What's the dance here? One of you goes to sleep two hours before the other. You make sure you pretend you're asleep. How have you developed this whole avoidance thing? Or one person wants, one person doesn't want, one person counts the days. I've just read an episode recently, and literally, he would have wanted sex every day, and she is just besides herself. Then it becomes clear that the part of it is because he needs help to go to sleep, but he doesn't need her necessarily. He can also take care of himself if he wants, and that he would have a much more willing partner if she wasn't just an alleviation for him.

Basically, they have a system. She counts. She knows two days is okay, by the third day it's not. She braces herself. She just gets through it. You think, This is really not a good situation. They have fantastic relationships. They tell me, This is the only thing that's been an issue between us. Now they have had four children, so he waited patiently and he thought once the kids are a little older, they're going to resume. She is not at all interested in resuming to that. He is so rejected, but he has no concept of how much pressure he puts on you. She does not necessarily understand how much he would love for her to enjoy it and to experience some of what he loves to experience. She has no connection. It's a very powerful episode coming up. It gives you... They are not sexless, but in some way, I could say having sex doesn't make you not sexless.

I took all the most replayed moments from some of the interviews you've done, and I looked at those moments. I went through all the YouTube interviews you've done and basically the spikes in conversation are the parts that people have replayed over and over again, and I've got them all.

Written here. Wow. What?

I can give them to you after. People are so compelled when I tell them that we do that. The first one was about cheating, but specifically this idea that even people in open relationships cheat as we can't resist what is forbidden. The situation you were describing there seems stereotypically like a situation where the man would then go on to cheat because his needs aren't being met. Why do people cheat?

I don't know.

I just- Because we tend to think it's because one person isn't getting what they want or because one person is a bad person.

Look, people cheat for a host of reasons. Some of them have to do with the relationship. A loneliness is probably the biggest one. I can't wait.

I was going to say the variance between men and women when they cheat.

The first one is why do people cheat? Second one is, is there a difference between infidelity in men and in women? Let's start with the first thing. I put much of this in the State of Affairs in the book because I had spent 10 years studying affairs and infidelity. When you ask me how many couples, it's a lot of couples. I really thought this experience is so shattering in so many relationships. There must be another way to understand it. It is more complicated than... And there's so much suffering around it. I want to really delve into this deeper. People cheat because they're lonely. They cheat because they have been sexually frustrated for so many years. They cheat because they are resentful. They cheat for vengeance and vindictiveness. They cheat because they need to constantly be affirmed by anybody that can make them feel better about themselves. They cheat for a host of reasons that have to do with conflict and discontent and disconnection in their relationship, but they also sometimes have affairs that have nothing to do with the relationship. That's what was one of the big discoveries for me in the book, it was that sometimes that affairs happen in happy couples too.

That sometimes it's not that you want to leave the person that you are with as much as you want to leave the person that you have yourself become. That it's not that you want to meet another person as much as you want to meet another self or other parts of yourself that have disappeared in your life. That at the heart of affairs, you find betrayal and duplicity and lying and cheating. But at the heart of affairs, you also find longing and loss and yearning. The word that I heard the most, and this brings us right back to the beginning of our conversation all over the world—I've gone to 22 countries on this one—is that when people would describe their affairs, they would say how they talk... I'm not talking about paid sex, every night sex. I'm talking about affairs in a more meaningful sense, but people really talked about the fact that they felt alive. Affairs are erotic plots. They're not just about sex, actually. They're about feeling alive and reconnecting with an essence of something for many people. But there are many different stories around affairs. For most of history, men have basically had a practically had a license to cheat.

It was explained that they are more nomadic and roamers and conquistado and that they are more quickly bored and they are in need of novelty. Basically, we gave them all kinds of justifications to explain and to rationalize why it happens to them and not to women, when in fact, it didn't happen to women because the consequences were far more dire on women than on men. We said that when women cheat, it's because they are lonely and they are in need for intimacy. All of these stories have beenhave rewritten by now.

The biological consequences of a woman cheating were she would get pregnant back in.

The- That's why. She'd get destitute? Yeah. She'd lose her children. Come on, we are talking till the '70s. Women didn't have access to their own bank accounts. On what was she going to survive? She would be working with the Scarlet letter. Everything you want. The consequences on women, women have not necessarily had different aspirations or fantasies than men, but the women have done what makes them safe more than what makes them feel good.

I felt like I was alive. You hear that from people who have cheated on their partner. Does that then infer that one of the causes of cheating is that it felt like the relationship or us as a three, her, me, him, and the relationship were dead?

Yes, they don't. Yes. An affair is often experienced as an antidote to that details. Yes. But of course, my next sentence would be if people were to put 10% of the creative imagination that they put into their affairs, into their marriages or primary relationships, those relationships would be doing so much better.

They put the planning in.

The- The planning, the attention, the creativity, the messages, the texts, the flowers, the whole thing, the production. If people were bringing that full self, so to speak, that creative, imaginative, effervescent self that they bring to their lovers, to their relationship, their relationships would not be agonizing.

Do we need novelty?

Of course we do.

How did we get 40 years into a relation... Almost 40 years into your relationship, into a marriage?

You.

Give me a. You look like you're trapped.

No, by far not.

How would you keep the novelty 40 years in?

Doing new things together. This is the research of Eli Finkel in the all or nothing marriage, is that if you do the things that you enjoy but habitually, we like to go to this cafe, to this mountain, this hike, this restaurant, this beach, that that breeds a lot of friendship and warmth and satisfaction. But if you want to experience desire, it is wanting something that you don't yet have. It's exploring something that you don't yet know. That means that couples who do new things together that involve element of risk, not because it's dangerous, new things together could be a conversation that they've never had. New things.

Could be- Going to a hotel.

-something outside of the ordinary that you don't do anymore when you are together for 40 years or 20 years, whatever it is. It's that, the regeneration of new cells, putting yourself into situations where you are not predictable to each other. You look suddenly at each other and you're like, What was that like for you? What was that like for you? This we know is one of the elements that creates aliveness in relationships. That is the distinction. Now, not everybody wants that. And that's okay too.

Is there a part of when you've been cheated on that you suddenly value your partner more? I say that because it highlights that someone else was attracted to them and then presumably you're seeing them through not as Dave who just comes home and just lays about.

Like, horizontal. That is one of the responses. There are many different responses. But when you ask people, I can ask you, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner? Not just sexually attracted, but most drawn. What would you say?

One of the times was when I went and saw her doing her thing at work. When I go and see her doing her thing in the breath work studio, it's like looking at a completely, I guess, a new person in some way.

That's right. And what would be another one?

When other people notice how beautiful she is. Right.

You've just basically named two out of the three most important answers I have heard for decades now about this one. Worldwide, by the way. I'm most drawn to my partner when I see my partner in their element. Oh, interesting. I'm passionate about something competent. It could be on stage, on a horse, on a slope, whatever it is, on a piano. It's when I see my partner as a separate other person that is already so familiar, but that is yet again somewhat mysterious, somewhat unknown, somewhat elusive. In that moment when they are radiant and in their element, they don't need me. She's not pursuing you. She's doing her thing. That space between me and the other is where lies the erotic alone. This is the bar none the most important one. The second one is when people talk about, I'm drawn to my partner when we reunite, when we've been away from each other. Oh, God, yeah. Which is the second one you told me before when you talk about- Yeah, that's the other one. The third one is when I see my partner through the eyes of a third. That allows me to see my partner not just as my partner, as Bob, but as a separate person who other people see things that I no longer pay so much attention to.

Can we create that in our relationships? Yeah. I can go watch her do her thing in her element. I can create some distance. We spend time apart. I travel. I do my own thing, whatever. Also, I don't know, I go and ask guys if my girlfriend's hot.

I mean, you can do it that way. But of course, she needs to have her breath work. There needs to be something that it can be breath work. It can be what she's done with the house, what she does with other careers or with her parents or with her children. It doesn't have to just be-.

Can't it just be laundry? Can't it just be like a.

New- I have rarely heard somebody say that. Because also I wasn't talking about I'm attracted to. I asked you when I'm drawn to. Okay. That drawn to is a very particular... But this answer, when I went and I saw her do her thing, is bar none the number one.

So interesting.

The only one, by the way, that is gender specific, is when women say when he plays with the kids, because it is not... When a woman plays with the kids, it's called motherly. It's not drawn to. That's the only one that is gender-different or specific. All the others, I can't tell you the breadth of different countries were the same answer. There's something about this thing. I'm drawn to. It's an elan. It's a movement towards. That movement towards is because there is an other. That other means there's a bridge to cross. That bridge to cross is that erotic energy.

That's what cheating is.

Yes. Can people experience that in their own relationship? Yes. But of course, it demands recreating it. We are living twice as long. Not everybody is going to be married for 60 years.

We're working from home.

Yeah, that is recent.

But yes, that too- Dave sat over there all day in his pants. Yeah.

That was a killer for a lot of people, is to see you the whole day doing your thing. It strengthened the friendship for many people, and it lessened the erotic for many people. But I think that seeing her do her thing or her saying that to you, I find it a very beautiful answer because it really says when I see the other as an other.

It was like meeting her for the first time. That's what it felt like the first time I went to one of her breath work sessions and I was just hiding in the corner. I was completely irrelevant. It was like spying. She's got all of her clients there. There's 25 of them. They're all hypnotized, so none of them even know I'm there. She's doing her thing. I'm like, Who is this person and who are all these people? And, What's this place? It felt like I was, I guess, meeting her for the first time in a way.

It's beautiful. Also they have a different relationship with her. Me as a partner, we become encrusted in a certain way of being with each other. That's why the opening up in the triangular gaze is so important, how others see her allow you to see her differently again. That is all generative. Those are all new cells.

I'll read you these most replayed moments anyway, just so you know them. We've got a bigger list of them, but I just pulled off the that I thought were pertinent. The things that all erotic couples do have sexual privacy for, plays crucial, have an erotic space where they abandon their usual roles, responsibilities, and desire, don't go together. The difference between men and women cheating is how to balance love and desire. An erotic is being engaged and giving the best of yourself to your partner, whereas most people give their best of their self to their friends, their colleagues, and give their partners the leftovers. Then in our other guests that we had on that speak about relationships and love, the five most repaid moments from those conversations were the best techniques for dating apps and different attachment theories. Attachment theories is very popular. Paul talked about the importance of longer engagement periods in being physically but not sexually attracted to someone. Marisa Pia, who is about sexless relationships again, and Tracy Cox, who again has been talking about sex and relationships for about 20 years.

Yes, Tracy Cox, I know. I know.

Is what her emotionally played moment was why hot sex stops after two years in a relationship. The only way to keep going is by swapping in partners constantly and never finding long-term happiness, it's a myth that you can keep hot sex in a long-term relationship easily.

That's true. You can have it on occasion here and there if you think about it as hot like that, that's true. That's not necessarily the goal of many people either. I think there are people for whom this is essential in their life, and it's the gate that opens them up to a lot of other important experiences in their life. Then there are people for whom this is not nearly as central. They enjoy it, but they don't need it to be hot. They enjoy what is often called maintenance sex. Erotic couples have a lot of maintenance sex. And on occasion, they get suddenly this really unusual, hot, different, wow, it's been a while. Out of nowhere. Out of nowhere. But they have actually a lot of maintenance. They do have an understanding of not just I'm drawn to this person who is different from me, but also a person who has their own erotic interiority of their own and they are okay with that. They're not threatened by it because each of them have thoughts and fantasies that are not necessarily just about the relationship, of course.

How do we conclude, Esther?

Our conversation?

Yeah. How do we conclude? We've talked about relationships, love, connection, all of these things in between. Is there a through line of advice, a conclusion that would help people? Maybe something that is actionable, maybe something that feels somewhat easy or simple.

Maybe not easy. We can go back to the things that we talked about together and about you as well. I said to you, relationships is an active engagement. It demands risk, it demands vulnerability, and it demands accountability, which we didn't talk about them as much. Typically, when people are in trouble, they want the other person to change and to do the work. I said, if you want to change the other, change yourself. Ask yourself, What can I do that would make it better? And do it. Don't begin to say, But why me? Just do your thing because it's ultimately what you want because there is such a thing called enlightened self-interest. Do it because it's the relationship you want. The relationship is the third. It's exactly the way you said it. When you are about to say or do something, ask yourself, What will this do to the relationship if I do this now or if I say this now, or if I don't say this now? Do things not because they suit you, but because they suit the relationship, because ultimately the relationship is there to serve you. But it's a back and forth.

Love is a verb. I think it's a very important thing. That means you actively do a bunch of things. Iand it's the same with food. Some people just are okay eating whatever is in their fridge, and most of the time it's nothing on the shelf. But some people are actively searching the right ingredients. They go to this market, to this store, they put it together. There's an art to that. It's an art, a relationship. And that art you can bring to your love relationship as well. I think a lot of people end up in a rut because they're complacent, they're lazy, they're unimaginative, and they have a lot of imagination for a lot of stuff outside, but not with their partner. And then they say, I'm bored. Well, then do something. And it's amazing how hard it is for some people to do it. In one of the things I think is really interesting, imagine instead of the DMs and stuff, we just had a long conversation. This evening, when you go to wherever you stay and you just basically write a letter and you write a letter to your partner and just say, I had this woman there today and we talked about all this stuff.

It made me think. It made me think about the first time when we met and I told her about being there in the background watching you do this work. I realized that it's been a long time since I watched you do this work. I probably should show up again because I don't even know what you've been doing since I don't do the same thing as five years ago or however long we are together. I can't imagine that you are. I realized that I expect a certain cozyness, but then I'm thinking, Oh, where is the novelty? I don't pursue the novelty, but there is novelty. I have been doing new things. You must have been doing new things. Why am I asking is novelty important? It is, and it's there, but I need to go look for it. I was talking about the maintenance sex, and I was talking about the shower, and I was talking about so many moments between us. I just thought I should share this with you. When people sit down with themselves and they start to write, I've been thinking about this, and it's been a long time since I even said any of these things.

Man, this is like filling up a tank of gasoline.

Why?

Because you say, I value this, and I value you, and I value what we've created, and we matter, and it's important, and I cherish it, and I adore it, and I sometimes don't pay enough attention to it, and I just take it for granted. That is not a good thing to do. It's like food that stays on the shelf for months on end. Well, it rots and there's something about something fresh and it breaks through the calcification. It is a lubricant in the full sense of the word.

Speaking of something fresh, you have an online course called Turning Conflict Into Connection. We've talked about connection, we've talked about conflict. Why did you make this course and who is this for? This turning conflict into connection course.

It's a one-hour course. It's very short. It's eight videos and a fantastic workbook. It's for people who say, We keep getting into the same arguments. It's for people who say, How do we turn this thing around? It's for people who say, We're in a rut, and who are willing to try things without having to go to therapy necessarily. It gives you a very clear understanding of what's the difference between what is it they're fighting about versus what are you fighting for in terms of what are the underlying unmet needs? Behind every criticism, there's a wish. What is it that you're wishing for rather than how do you turn what is called negative sentiment override? When a relationship becomes overly critical, judgmental.

Spirative.

How do you turn the tone around? How do you remember the fondness for another person, et cetera?

Well, everyone needs that.

That's why I created it because I think people are lacking the skills. Therapy is not the only place to do it. I think that we are avoidant in conflict. We don't have enough of that free play practice. I thought, God, the thing that I hear so much is people who are not talking to their friend, people who are saying, This is too difficult. We shouldn't have... I thought, Before you throw the whole thing, let's see if you can... Some of these things are changeable. Of course, you have to be accountable. But if all you want to tell me is how you are the saint and the other is the villain, we're not going anywhere. I thought, Let me create a few courses like this. I've done the conflict. I've got one coming out on sex. The things that I've been talking about, that I've written about, and I thought after that or even the thing you listen to on the podcast, but now I want you to have something where you can actually do and practice some things that I think will help you.

We have a closing tradition, as you know, which is the last guest leaves a question in this book not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. I don't get to see it until I open the book. Here we go.

What is the one piece of advice you received in the last decade that you think about most frequently?

I think whenever I'm thinking this way, the first person that comes up for me is my father, who was illiterate, had gone to school for three years, and who basically would say to me, My little one, do not get impressed by the money, by the fame, by the education. Look at the decency. I was a hitchhiker for many years as a young person. I traveled a ton, and that became the thing I took with me. I was taken in by the kindness of strangers in various circumstances who knew nothing about who I was, who probably had the most different political opinions from me you could imagine, who had never heard about where Belgium could be, anything. They just were kind, decent, caring human beings who shared whatever little they had. Sometimes they had no electricity, no nothing. They just cooked me an entire meal with a candle next to them. I think that that has really stayed with me. Look at the decency of the person and don't get impressed by the accutromance and the status symbols and all of that. I really thank him for that. It gives you clarity. It keeps you very grounded and I love the message.

I've actually passed the message on to my own kids as well.

Esther, thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Thank you for your brilliance. Everyone has been hammering me for many a year on all of my social media channels in my team in London here all over to have this conversation with you and you exceed all expectations every single time. You're such an incredible human being that I'm so glad exists because there's something so special about you that, as I said, you can't replicate that. It's brilliant. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to meet you. I mean, it's a lot. I mean it with every word of every fiber in my body. Thank you, Esther.

Thank you very much. As you.

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Okay, go and use it right now. Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.