Ira Israel deep dives into the unsparing genius of Esther Perel for a fresh perspective on healthy loving intimate relationships.
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For patients who wish to deconstruct the myth of romantic love I always recommend “Love in the Western World” by Denis de Rougemont and the subsequent “We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love” by Robert A. Johnson, “The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other” by James Hollis and “Consuming the Romantic Utopia” by Eva Illouz. To reconstruct romantic love I often recommend “Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love” by John Wellwood, “Intimacy: Trusting Oneself and the Other” by Osho, and “Marriage as the Path to Wholeness” by Harville Hendrix.
Esther Perel commands a much more expansive breadth of knowledge regarding relationships than anyone I have ever read, her insights are blistering, and the manner in which she has aggregated the academic literature and assimilated her clinical observations is nothing short of genius.
Ms. Perel’s primary gift lies in unearthing apparent paradoxes and this is embodied by her own confident yet humble and respectful presentation style. She does not quote scientific studies; rather she changes the playing field and provides provocatively fresh perspectives on relationship dynamics. Some of the paradoxes she explores are our needs and desires for both safety and adventure, security and freedom, and reality and fantasy. She destroys assumptions about sex and intimacy, monogamy and infidelity, and gives an updated understanding of attachment styles.
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Anthropologically she observes that the shift during the Industrial Revolution from village to city life caused the burden of selfhood to shift from the tribe to the individual. Just as Sartre posited that we are “confronted” by our relatively new freedoms, Ms. Perel notes that contemporary urban life places the onus on the individual to decide “how much we eat, sleep, work, and fuck.”
Ms. Perel is aghast that twenty or thirty year-old marriages can be annihilated by a single transgression stating that “divorce offers more dignity than forgiveness” in our culture.
Ms. Perel is most widely known for her work on infidelity which she reframes as “a desire to feel alive;” she claims that the majority of people who stray from their marriages have been faced with their own mortality in some way during the preceding three years and their affairs function as a temporary antidote against certain demise. In her renowned TEDtalk, Ms. Perel discusses the putative incompatibility of eros and marriage by rhetorically asking, “How can you desire what you already have?”
Ms. Perel is aghast that twenty or thirty year-old marriages can be annihilated by a single transgression stating that “divorce offers more dignity than forgiveness” in our culture. Wryly she adds that infidelity is the only transgression worthy of two of the ten commandments.
In session, Ms. Perel asks her patients thought-provoking questions such as “What do you seek to express through sex? Connection? Contained aggression? Spiritual intimacy?” Most poignantly, she reframes monogamy as “a gift – something you give to your partner.”
Esther Perel represents the vanguard of the conversation that we need to be having about relationships. She claims not to have answers, which is refreshing; however, her questions are unparalleled. Her enlightening reframing and reconceptualizing of relationship dynamics will help the rest of us on “Team Transition” shift the dying white, patriarchal, capitalistic, consumeristic, Judeo-Christian paradigm of monogamous marriage for life to the next paradigm, whatever that may be.
If you are interested in the future of healthy loving intimate relationships and have the opportunity to attend one of Esther Perel‘s vibrant upcoming talks don’t miss it!
Ira is the author of “How To Survive Your Childhood Now That You’re and Adult: A Path to Authenticity and Awakening,” which is endorsed by Sting, Reverend Michael Beckwith, Marianne Williamson, Jack Kornfield, Shauna Shapiro, Warren Farrell, Katherine Woodward Thomas, Jai Uttal, Joanne Cacciatore, Lorin Roche, Fred Luskin and many many others. He teaches "Cultivating Meaning and Happiness through Mindfulness and Yoga" workshops at Esalen and Kripalu and has written over 300 articles on psychology, philosophy, Buddhism, yoga, film, art, music & literature for The Huffington Post, Good Men Project, Mind Body Green, Thrive Global, Medium and many other websites. Ira is an NLP Master Practitioner who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and has graduate degrees in Psychology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. For more information please visit www.IraIsrael.com
““divorce offers more dignity than forgiveness”” That is a great quote that I think sums up a lot of the divorces that I know. To me, I think the trick is that we’ve all got to sort out and wear different hats. We’ve got to wear the dad hat, the husband hat, the lover hat, the employee hat, the friend hat, the rational hat, etc, etc. But I think in relationships things can meld together too much that we can look at things rationally anymore from different perspectives.
Ask someone who has ever had to paternity test their children about the costs of “a desire to feel alive.” Or someone with their feet up in stirrups having a full STD screening after years of assumed monogamy. Or someone whose kid found their parent’s sexts. For the people who have had their health, finances, self-respect, and home life decimated by infidelity, the justifications Perel gives for affairs are offensive. And what is the tipping point? Perel writes as if affairs are just one-offs. How many “exuberant acts of defiance” does a person get before they’re just a narcissistic jerk… Read more »
Platinum Member
Jordan Friedman
7 years ago
There are great points in here, and I’m all for submitting entrenched orthodoxies to critical and reflective scrutiny, but I don’t think it’s at all clear that the “Judeo-Christian paradigm of monogamous marriage for life” is intrinsically or irremediably “white”, “patriarchal”, “capitalistic”, “consumeristic” or anything else that’s bad. We can move on from the ancient Near Eastern paradigm that a husband owns his wife while distilling powerful values of love and equality from a bedrock institution of monogamous pairing. We can even recognize perhaps that it is not realistic to expect that each and every pairing last an entire lifetime… Read more »
““divorce offers more dignity than forgiveness”” That is a great quote that I think sums up a lot of the divorces that I know. To me, I think the trick is that we’ve all got to sort out and wear different hats. We’ve got to wear the dad hat, the husband hat, the lover hat, the employee hat, the friend hat, the rational hat, etc, etc. But I think in relationships things can meld together too much that we can look at things rationally anymore from different perspectives.
Ask someone who has ever had to paternity test their children about the costs of “a desire to feel alive.” Or someone with their feet up in stirrups having a full STD screening after years of assumed monogamy. Or someone whose kid found their parent’s sexts. For the people who have had their health, finances, self-respect, and home life decimated by infidelity, the justifications Perel gives for affairs are offensive. And what is the tipping point? Perel writes as if affairs are just one-offs. How many “exuberant acts of defiance” does a person get before they’re just a narcissistic jerk… Read more »
There are great points in here, and I’m all for submitting entrenched orthodoxies to critical and reflective scrutiny, but I don’t think it’s at all clear that the “Judeo-Christian paradigm of monogamous marriage for life” is intrinsically or irremediably “white”, “patriarchal”, “capitalistic”, “consumeristic” or anything else that’s bad. We can move on from the ancient Near Eastern paradigm that a husband owns his wife while distilling powerful values of love and equality from a bedrock institution of monogamous pairing. We can even recognize perhaps that it is not realistic to expect that each and every pairing last an entire lifetime… Read more »