Esther Perel - Sex & Infidelity

Full transcript: Esther Perel on London Real

6:32 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose.

7:00 My guest today is psychotherapist Esther Perel, who is one of the world’s leading experts in relationships, couples, sexuality and the paradoxes besetting modern marriage. Your two TED Talks, titled The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship and your most recent, Rethinking Infidelity, a talk for anyone who has ever loved, have eight million combined views and they keep going up. You’ve been profiled by The New York Times and The New Yorker. Your book Mating in Captivity is an international bestseller that’s been published in 24 different languages.

7:31 And on top of that, I think you’re pretty cool too. Esther, welcome to London Real. Thank you, it’s a pleasure. No New Yorker yet? No New Yorker yet.

7:38 Okay, so New York Times twice, right? Yeah. Okay, all right, we’ll wait for them to come. Um, I want to talk about relationships and sexuality because, quite frankly, we don’t really talk about that enough on London Real, and so I’m really curious to jump in. We’ve got all sorts of things to talk about, but before we do that and talk about your book and your TED Talks, I just wanted to hear a little bit more about you.

7:58 You’re from Belgium, you speak nine different languages, you grew up in a community of Holocaust survivors that you said comprise two different groups: those who did not die and those who came back to life, which I think your parents were included in that group. I was just wondering if you could maybe take us back to then and talk about how you grew up and what that was like. You know, it’s interesting when you are talking about subjects that often are considered on the forefront or the vanguard or the cutting edge of cultural thinking, it’s difficult for people to imagine that I may have grown up in a very traditional background.

8:35 But that’s exactly it. I grew up above a store that my parents owned, a clothing store. I worked in the store since I could talk. I was the Jewish family in the neighborhood, and it was the refugee family, and it was the family with the accent. And everybody knows that image.

9:00 It doesn’t really make such a difference where the refugee is from. We know the foreigner on the block. So I have always had a keen awareness of sameness and difference, and I am sure, without having to break it apart, that that is a piece of what made me become a cross-cultural psychologist that looks at the intersection of relationships, family life, couples relations and cultural changes. My parents were indeed Polish Holocaust survivors and they arrived by fluke to Belgium, and I grew up in Antwerp.

9:38 So we were Flemish speaking, we were French speaking, we were German speaking, Yiddish speaking and Polish. We had five in the house and then the rest I picked up, you know, on the road, at school, horizontally. So your father and mother were the only survivors in their family, is that true? Both my, my father comes from a family of nine, my mother had seven siblings, and both of them were the sole survivors, and they met on the day of liberation as they came out of the concentration camps, and they arrived to Belgium by chance.

10:15 And then they only had permits for three months. They came because my father had helped someone in the camps who was also from Belgium and kind of gave him a false address and a way of coming there, and then basically they were supposed to leave after three months, which they did not do, and so they stayed as illegal refugees actually for another five years, and only then did they become legalized and they start to live above board. But this precedes me.

10:44 This was the life of my brother more than mine. I saw a video, uh, from a few years ago when you said that when you were younger that you used to talk just openly and frankly about what happened. That person died, that person was gassed, and it was just something that was always spoken frankly since you were a little girl. Look, there were different kinds of families. There were some families that were very silent about what had happened, and there were families who spoke, but among the speakers there were those who had victimization stories and there were those who had heroic stories.

11:19 And of course it’s not always so clear-cut, but let’s say that my family was definitely into the heroic stories. So it was about how they survived, how they managed, how they count- how they were able to, you know, bypass this one and be lucky here and almost died there, and it was really a heroic tale of how they had come to where they were. And yes, in that sense there was no taboo around, you know, “Why don’t I have grandparents?” Because they were gassed.

11:51 “Why, you know, why do these people have numbers?” Because they were in Auschwitz. I mean, it was a bit of a- And what I’ve often said is that my parents had very little sense of child development. It was like, you know, truth, what’s spoken without necessarily thinking, “Oh, this is a five-year-old asking,” or “This is a ten-year-old.” asking you just were meant to absorb the truths of the world.

12:16 So there was very little naivete in that sense. You knew what can happen, and you were living with both, and you lived with the sense of dread about what can happen, and you lived with the sense that you had to take full advantage of life because of what can happen. Right? And you saw the people that would live scared and there’s some people that would live more bold, and they were just making a choice about how they dealt with circumstances from the past.

12:43 I think that in response to trauma you, this, this is not specific, I would say, to survivors of the Holocaust, but I think generally, you know, we are all today talking about grit, resilience, strength. These concepts have permeated everywhere. Why is it that one set of circumstances knocks one person down and becomes the resource with which another person builds themselves up? And what is the difference between people who after extreme experiences basically survive because they’re not dead versus those who are alive and come back to life?

13:28 And what does it mean? When you survive, you live very close to the ground. You are often suspicious, you don’t trust, the world’s a dangerous place, and you cannot leave the base, because in order to leave the base, like a child who leaves the lap of the parents, you need to feel safe enough that there is a base to come back to in order to go and to take risks and be creative and be playful. All these experiences of be an entrepreneur, all these risk-driven experiences require you to be able to deal with the unknown, because all of them have an element of uncertainty.

14:07 If you are too afraid of the unknown and all what you try to do is protect yourself from it, you cannot go out in the world and do all those things. On the other side, if you understand how to create an antidote to death, how you actually use this very same thing, how you maintain yourself alive in the face of adversity, that’s when you enter into the continuum of resilience. You know, to experience pleasure you cannot be worried. It’s just, don’t go together.

14:38 You cannot be at the same time anxious and vigilant and experience pleasure. Pleasure comes with an element of freedom and unself-consciousness, a surrender, and that surrender you can only do when you have a modicum of trust in the world, in yourself and in the people around you. And that’s how, so when people have that trauma they need to get that trust back before they can then go venture more, take more risks. And some people never do. And some people never do.

15:07 But even the ones who take the risks don’t necessarily believe that there is no danger, but they manage to insulate it enough so that it doesn’t control them, and they can go and bifurcate it and enter the world and do, and loads of survivors did extremely well. In the community of my parents, I mean, you know, they became major business people, major real estate developers because it was, and you could almost see it as the, the, the continuum between the victimized and the heroic. You know, those who in a way, if you have been able to survive four or five years in a concentration camp, you’re an entrepreneur, let’s put it like that.

15:51 It’s a different way of looking at it, but you have managed the most unconventional situations. I never thought of that that way. And so then maybe this ultimate frankness of you as a child and also being kind of the outside of the immigrant, I think that’s translated into your work. I mean, you’re really frank about the way you look at situations, and I think people really find that refreshing because you go right in. Both your TED Talks, you’re like, let’s talk about this.

16:20 I’ll tell you where I think that my background probably does, um, influence me, is that I am a person who, when I see certainties, when I see truths which are basically constructs, when I see rigid patterns, I question them. When I see a certain way that people think, this is how it has to be, anything that could resemble fascism or authoritarianism, rigid structures that don’t make room for freedom, for questioning, for challenging the authority, for what today people love to call disruption, that’s where I enter. But I did it long before the word disruption ever came to be.

17:05 It was a kind of a mentality that, that, um, you know, things could happen because authoritarian systems were ruling, and an authoritarian system can be a school, it can be your parents, it can be a cultural framework, it can be the romantic ideal, it can be, you know, set gender roles. I mean, it’s the rigidity that defines it. It’s not the particular content. And wherever I see stuff that sits there like that, I tend to say, is it really like that? Is there, is this because we just have come to agree with it because it’s convenient, maybe more than true?

17:46 And that I’m kind of attracted to that sometimes, and I don’t mean to be a provocateur and a disruptor, but I think on some level there is a piece of an agent provocateur in me, mostly because I think that it creates blind spots. It’s linked to discrimination, it’s linked to racism, it’s linked to judgmentalness, it’s linked to narrowness, and those are all things which I like to unpack. Okay, and I want to talk about some of those. I mean, I was scribbling notes when I was watching both of your TED Talks recently because you’re hitting people with these paradoxes of marriage, is this, but now it used to be a village and now it’s twice as long as we thought it was and we’re putting all this pressure on one mate, and I want to get into that stuff, but I also want to ask you.

18:32 You said that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships, which sounds like a simple concept, but it sounds like one that we don’t necessarily even acknowledge on a day-to-day basis. We talk about in income levels or, you know, uh, starvation or all these other issues, but I don’t think people really think about really just the net, the net sum of the relationships in their life. How do you get people to think about that more or have that conversation?

18:57 Unfortunately, many people come to think about it on their deathbed. The research about what people regret or what people wish they had done differently when they are about to die is basically mostly about relationships. “I worked too much and I didn’t spend enough time with my children” is the number one for men. “I didn’t do enough of what I really wanted to do.” “I didn’t trust my gut and I did what was expected of me more than what I really wanted.”

19:29 “I didn’t spend enough time with my friends and I didn’t cultivate my relationships enough.” I mean, this is men and women, men and women. The one that is specifically about men is work. Okay, they all work too much, right? It’s just a plague.

19:44 They all work too much. We talk about that. It’s interesting you say that. I mean, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, talks about his regret minimization, you know, theory, and that’s why he went and did Amazon, because he was in Wall Street and one of the firms there, and he thought, if I’m going to be at the end of my life, I need to go do things and take those risks, and he always talks about that, but we’ve heard this time and time again, people on their death.

20:07 But it’s not how much they wanted to work, it’s the people and the relationships. And with men, I mean, I heard an interview you did recently, uh, with Jordan, I believe, and you were talking about how as men, and I’m one of those two, that’s probably why I’m asking you this, this is my therapy session, um, you know, we are so, there’s so much pressure and judged on what we’ve done in our work and all of these pieces, and the ritual of becoming a man, and is that something that you see as one of those pieces where you’re like, wait a second, this is a fascist or this is something that’s really out of whack? But it’s an out of whack that has already, uh, changed quite a bit.

20:42 I mean, probably the most important change for modern men is the invention of fatherhood, fatherhood that is no longer solely defied by being defined by being a provider and by the materiality, but fatherhood in which you can become an econom and an emotional unit, a father that is, that has an emotional relationship with his children, fathers that spend way more time with their children than any of the generations before. So I think that there has been a major shift, which is that if people worked a lot before and because they had to, that’s a different story versus those who want to. But in the past, they probably didn’t experience the same kind of conflict because it’s not like they wanted to be home with their children and they were working, and then they were justifying their working because after all they’re doing it for their children, but they will not need see those children enough while they’re doing all of this stuff for them.

21:43 Yeah, that kind of the 50s Mad Men mentality. Yes. So now you have more conflict about it, which is why you have men of all kinds trying to find other ways to work without having to forego their entire personal life, family life, emotional life, you know, and stu- and and relationship with their children and partners, men partners, female partners. So I think there’s already a big change, but I do, as a child of survivors, I will say one of the most important books I read at 15 or so was Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a book that for a while has been forgotten and has had now been brought back, even by Business Week in its research on happiness.

22:28 You know, it’s like the man won’t die, because the man actually said something that is essential, which is that we are creatures of meaning, and that ultimately what will make us feel good is meaning, and one of the things that gives us meaning is our accomplishments, our achievements, our legacies. But the other register of what makes us feel meaningful is what we represent for others. It’s how others carry us inside of them. After all, that’s why the legacy will last, because somebody will remember what I did.

23:00 I can have done lots of things, but if you don’t remember it, it will no longer exist after I go. So we need others. We are creatures of meaning. We are also wired for connection, so we want others to matter to us, and we want to feel that we matter to them. It’s what allows us to move around in the world.

23:20 I can walk around freely in the world because I know that there are people all over the world that are thinking of me, holding me inside of them, and I do the same, so that I am alone and never fully alone. It’s a both/and, because on the one hand we are really alone and on the other end we’re not really alone. And it’s that thing that makes me say that the quality of our life depends on the quality of our relationships, because the relationships give you both the connection and the meaning, the meaning not just of the connection itself but of everything else you will have done.

23:54 If no one knows about it, has it really happened? Yes, I can do a lot of things by myself and for myself, but does it exist differently if others know about it, share it, distribute it, create a legacy? Right. So as men were changing, I mean, I think about these things all the time. I think about the work and the family and the trade-off.

24:22 So we’re obviously changing than say Don Draper 60 years ago, when, you know, maybe it was all about work and he would tell the woman that I’m doing it for you, and maybe he was actually just. I still hear that. I still, I still hear that. Right? I mean, whenever, you know, you talk with men who work very hard, who work in, I mean, I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs and tech people but also with finance people, and the sense of responsibility is there.

24:47 If they have a family, if they not have a family, it’s a different thing. I don’t just do this for me, I do this to give something to my family, to my children. But it’s a paradox, is that my doing for others is predicated on my not being there with them. And in the past the role was set, that rigidity was in place. I don’t even have a choice of asking, do I really want to do that?

25:11 Is this the only way to live? There are more choices, and more and more men are saying, is this the way I want to go about it? You know, maybe when I sit with a couple, a major change, for example, is, is it by definition, when there is one partner who may not continue to work outside of the house, is it always the woman? Is it going to still be divided by gender or will it be divided by competence? Maybe, and I’m talking about a heterosexual couple, but because among homosexual couples it’s a much more equalitarian negotiation: which one among the two of us is the better person to provide materially, and which one has a value addition that is not financial, as in making money, but that is in every other aspect of value addition, and then we are partners in the home economy.

26:07 In the heterosexual frame, until now only the woman had the freedom to even ask the question. For the first time, maybe she actually would rather work outside of the house and know that she can do it because the family is really well taken care of by a male partner who is very happy for a while to do that. And maybe as we go along it won’t be an either/or. There’ll be a period where one person does it and the other one takes care of other aspects of the life, and it switches, because we just live long enough that we can have a few roles in our life.

26:44 We no longer are just going to do one role and die six years after we are done raising our children, which is what was happening a hundred years ago. Right. You’ve said that the, the lives of women aren’t really going to change until the lives of men change, which is a really bold statement, and then to actually think about it that way. What do you mean by that? Look, we have about, what, 60 years now of women’s movement and major changes pertaining to women, and we are way not done, and there’s still so much, so much to do.

27:16 But I do think that in our interaction with men, the life of women will not change until men also get to go through their revolution and their men’s movement and the questioning of the main values attributed to men, the identity structures that are available for men, the relational structures that are available. I mean, women have had a space in which to question some of these things way more than men, and I think that men deserve it. It’s necessary, and it’s what will allow women to make more changes.

27:54 It will allow a greater fluidity in general, and if everything in our economy is about flexibility and fluidity and then optimization and everything, I believe that the same thing needs to happen in the relational space, and men have not been given that permission. I mean, you know, there are some countries that will give you paternity leave, and there are some countries that will understand that, you know, men deserve more than two days away, or that men don’t have to prove that they’re really committed to the job because they come back two days after the kid is born. You know, because if he stays home, then he’s less of a man and less of a high productivity guy, and it’s all of that, and those are the permissions that have not been given yet to men.

28:43 What about the tension? It feels like if the men have all this tension over here, of course it’s going to affect everyone else in the world. And we’re busy pushing each other to prove each other that we’re men, and we’re busy always asking each other, “Why, what have you been productive and what have you produced and what is the market cap of your company?” And how are we going to make those changes? Look, we are born women and we become men.

29:05 There is not a single culture where women have to go to the bush and to the woods in order to prove her femininity. This is across civilizations, whereas boys have to continuously prove that they are not women and that they are real men. There is no “real woman.” And maybe it has to do with our ability to have children, and therefore there is just a given fact until now that’s the one thing that it’s part of our nature, our biology, and so we have, we don’t have to prove that.

29:39 But I think it’s even chromosomally. We start XX and then we become XY, and so men are continuously having to prove that they are men, whatever the concept of men will be in the particular culture in which they live. What are the attributes of what it is like to be a man? Generally it goes with fearlessness, competitiveness, self-sufficiency, things that ultimately have made men often quite lonely, lonely even if it’s lonely at the bottom or lonely at the top.

30:15 Lonely. Um, the place where they probably are the least lonely is in the military, because in the military men are allowed to care for each other, they have to care for each other, they’re allowed to weep for each other, they’re allowed to die for each other, they’re allowed to have love for each other, and maybe sports next, and they’re allowed to touch each other. In sports they’re even allowed to touch each other without having to fear, you know, their homosexual panic.

30:45 So you really see through the matrix, don’t you? You know, I mean, seriously, the, the business world is the opposite of the, of the military. The business world, everybody has to climb above the other. In the military, everyone understood that the strength of the pack or the team. The sports, it’s the same.

31:04 The two places where the strength of the pack, where male bonding is normative rather than a byproduct or a threat. Now how we gonna fix this? This doesn’t sound like we’re going in the right place. But I think that the younger generation is a different story. So, for example, I just spent a couple more days with a group of millennial entrepreneurs, and they were describing to me brotherhoods, peer groups where they come together every Monday for four years.

31:38 They meet to discuss life, self-led, only men, so they don’t have to deal with all the impressing anybody. And I think a lot of it is because the millennial generation are the children of the divorced and the disillusioned. But let’s just go, which means that the vast number of them grew up with single mothers, and they are much more fluent in the language of emotions than the boomer generation and the traditional generation, and so they talk in ways that my generation and the gen- the men of my generation definitely didn’t speak.

32:20 You can feel it, they’re at ease with it, they’re looking for it. They want a place for authentic communication, authentic connection with other men, that isn’t about numbers, that isn’t about our doing, that isn’t about pretending that everything is great when you are not sleeping because you’re losing money every night and you’re like awake and you can’t say it, because then they won’t do business with you, because you constantly grapple with shame. Shame is the big, big, big dark spot of men.

32:50 Guilt is more for women, but shameless shame tremendously so. We’re all going to die out is what you’re telling me? No, I think we have a goal generation that is basically saying there’s another way to live. I don’t want to do it but my father did. I don’t want to be like my grandfather.

33:05 I want to do it differently. I want to continue my relationships. I don’t want to become a partner in an intimate couple and then lose all my friendships, which is what used to happen, and have my wife be the minister of social affairs, you know, or these kinds of breakdowns, which should have lessened. Gay couples, I mean two men together, you know, have, are not bound by the traditional structures. And you know, but I think the younger generation is introducing a host of gatherings of bringing back connection, authentic communication, safe spaces to actually get support and not to have to perform masculinity and perform manhood, but just be the person I am and, and get mentored by, from it without fearing that any show of weakness is a slope down on my masculine, you know, treadmill.

34:04 This is all taking me back to my my upbringing when you say things like that. Is there embracing of technology, which ultimately connects people? Does that facilitate that movement or that new idea? Does, does the tech help in that sense? Yes, the tech helps, absolutely, and nothing will match face to face.

34:30 Something about us, we are embodied people and we want touch, and we don’t want virtual touch only, and we want eyes, eyes that take us in, eyes. It’s like the same eyes that gaze. It’s the foundational gaze. And I think so the online, we can communicate fast, it’s immediate, I can reach across the globe, it breaks down the geographic boundaries. I mean, it’s unique, but it’s a both/and.

34:58 I don’t think that one will replace the other. I think that people will online quickly, quickly book their tickets so that they can fly somewhere else in order to meet someone in person. Right. Let’s talk about relationships and what have we done so far. I know that’s true.

35:13 All right, let’s talk about, uh, amorous relationships, because that can mean a lot of things. Your, your first TED Talk, which is amazing, The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship, you started off with the question, can we want what we already have? And you spoke about again another one of these paradoxes of the pressures, um, the, the assumptions that are involved with a traditional long-term relationship. Where did those ideas come from? And again, how did you, because you seem to really look in and find out these, these pieces that are really in conflict with each other, but to us would just look like normal marriage.

35:51 So this is a good example of where I was confronted with a set of assumptions, and at one point I began to think, maybe these are in fact exactly that, assumptions. They’re not truths and facts, such as that when we love, we desire, that greater intimacy begets sexuality, always. It’s the “always” that mattered. That security and adventure in a relationship, they go hand in hand. That if you have sexual problems, it is the consequence of relationship problems, hence if you fix the relationship, the sex will follow.

36:34 And I am still very much a practicing psychotherapist working with couples and coach, and I saw many couples improve a great deal in every area of their relationship, but it didn’t necessarily change what was going on in the bedroom. So I began to think, maybe it’s not so simple. To talk about people who don’t like each other and lose their sexual and erotic connection, it’s kind of obvious what’s to- Right. What I was interested in is all these people who come to see me and they say, we love each other very much and we have no sex.

37:08 I know he loves me very much, or she loves me very much, and it’s been years since I felt wanted. And they knew the difference. And I began to think, love and desire, they relate, and maybe they also conflict. Let me go explore that. Why is it that people who continue to love each other as much as ever will also sometimes lose the very erotic connection that brought them into being?

37:34 Why is it that good intimacy does not always guarantee good sex? In fact, quite the opposite. There seems to be a puzzling inverse correlation where greater intimacy sometimes leads to decreased desire, because what nurtures love isn’t necessarily what fuels desire, and may even be paradoxical. And can we love what we already have? Because in the romantic ideal it’s all about I have my partner and I am the one and I am the chosen one.

38:02 And so what does it mean when your partner is actually only on loan with an option to renew and doesn’t belong to you? And what would it be like if we actually say, no, I don’t have what I already want. Actually we never have it. Hence, if we can live with that, we probably will want it more. That’s the idea of this notion.

38:26 It’s an illusion to think that we have, and then to complain of boredom. No, you don’t have. In fact, your partner can leave any moment, from death, from illness, from falling in love somewhere else, from any other reason. And if you live with that, which is a certain anxiety that we don’t want to have these days because we have enough unknown and enough anxiety in our business lives and everywhere else, so our partner should just become a piece of furniture on which we can reliably sit, and it will always receive us in the same way.

38:56 Eh, not true. So then how do you continue desire then when you have, uh, when you have a long-term relationship? But I think one element is this. Once you understand that this partner that’s next to you, which you think you know so well, like the inside of your pocket, for which you sometimes think you can answer their questions and all of that, if you actually are able to accept otherness right next to you, if you know that you, the persistent mystery of your partner is right there, if you know that they’re not for granted, that they actually could leave at any moment, you make an effort.

39:35 You make a different effort. You make the effort that you make with your clients, you make an effort that you make with all your business partners, because they wouldn’t take this stuff, and because you never take those for granted. It’s a very interesting thing. I often say to the people I work with, treat your partner the way you treat your client, with the same charm, the same seductiveness, the same humor, the same kindness, the same, and you will have a great marriage.

40:00 But you no longer do that. It’s as if you do it when you’re not sure that you have the client yet, and since a client can always leave you if they get better service somewhere else, then you continue to be on your best behavior. But many of us are on our best behavior at work and we bring the leftovers home. You made a great point in your TED Talk where you said when you’re having, when you’re looking at your partner very close, it’s hard to get that, you know, that desire, but when you’re doing it kind of at an arm’s length, where you’re watching them do something well or watching them interact with others, you can kind of rekindle the mystery about them.

40:37 Did I get, do I understand that right? See, I was always saying that desire needs space. That’s an interesting concept. Yes, desire needs space, difference, otherness, a bridge to cross, somebody to conquer, to bring toward you. Attention, you know that, but I could never uh, concretize it.

41:00 Like it’s an abstract concept. So I began to ask people in 22 countries, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner, not just sexually attracted, drawn to your partner? And I began to listen to the answers. This took a few years of my answer, asking this in Turkey, in Argentina, in Israel, in Brussels, in Paris, in New York, you know, and then I began to see that a certain group of answers would appear each time. A whole set of answers had to do with when my partner is at on stage, when he’s passionate about things, when she’s competent, when, um, when they’re thriving, when they are radiant.

41:47 Was really the word that would, the word isn’t used, but that’s what it represented, their radiance. It can be because they are good at something, because they’re in their element, because they’re being admired. Admiration is the piece here more than respect. And all of these where, when I actually, you know, involve otherness, when I look at my partner doing the things that they are so good at, if my partner is at the piano, I’m not sitting next to them.

42:12 If they’re on stage, I’m not next to them. The only one that is gender specific is when he plays with the children. There is no female version of that. Nobody thinks it’s sexy if she plays with the kids. No, no, because it’s so- When I see my partner in their uniqueness, in their specificity, in their element, by definition invites a perspective and an ability to see their otherness.

42:40 When we are away, that was group number two. When we are away, when I’m away, when he’s away, when she’s away, when we reunite, always brought the notion that desire is rooted in absence and in longing. When she makes me laugh, when he’s dressed a certain way, when I see him vulnerable, when I see her vulnerable, which means that they usually are not, when we, it’s always elements of surprise, of novelty, of unexpected, of the unknown in the midst. So a couple listening right now, can they engineer those things to happen?

43:15 Can they put themselves in situations where they see that in each other? Go on any moment, at any moment, but you have to be comfortable if, when you say if I know your radiance, for example, is you’re going to the studio to interview me, and when you are interviewing your people now, if you’re, she’s watching right now and I say to you, have a fabulous time, you’re going to be great, you’re at your best there, I am talking about you, I am completely not in it with you, I’m just admiring, cherishing you, adoring it, encouraging you, but it’s a separate you. If when you say I’m going to the studio and I said again, why twice a week now you’re going to do it?

44:05 You didn’t have enough when you were just doing one. You really don’t want to be here, isn’t it? You would rather be with all these people than with me, isn’t it? It’s a very different departure and a different relationship and a different tension because the person who lives with somebody who says to them, go for it, have a fabulous time, you know, enjoy, goes, experiences the erotic as in they feel alive, they’re in their passion, they’re doing the thing they want to do.

44:33 Here you are doing this thing that’s your new endeavor and you’re really excited about it, and then you want to go home and talk about it. But the person who leaves because somebody just said, “You’re abandoning me again, you know, obviously everything is more interesting than me, why am I not enough for you,” and all of that, isn’t really eager to come home afterwards because it starts to feel suffocating. So you can actually engineer your own happiness by encouraging your mate to go do these things and be the best them, because you know you’ll be attracted to that and they will be attracted back to you.

45:06 Who doesn’t want to come back to someone who gives them freedom, who not just gives them freedom but encourages their freedom? You want to come back, because we need both. We need freedom and we need security. But when we are in the presence of people that open up the space for us, we want to come back to them. When we are with people who want to hone us in, we want to break out.

45:34 There’s another point you made in that talk, and that was how it used to be a village that would combine all of these relationships that we would have to, to grow old with, and these days to a certain extent it’s, it’s that one other that we expect so many things from, and it’s also the mother of our children and the person that provides and that cooks the meals and all of these pieces in this person, and then we also try to get desire from. What do we learn from that observation? It’s a poor model.

46:02 It’s a very poor model. We need belonging, we need identity, and we need continuity. Let’s put three essential elements that kind of are foundational for the, for the human being and for our life. Those three pieces used to be given to us by the community, and in the community was an institute where institutions, and these institutions were often religious institutions. Today the burdens of selfhood have never been heavier.

46:30 I have to decide how much I eat and what I eat and how much I sleep and how much I pray and how much I have sex and how much I work, and all of this is on me. So it’s a lot of wonderful freedoms, but it’s an enormous amount of burden to have to be the one who decides for themselves and then has to be sure that it was the right decision. People used to tell us what was right. Now it’s us. I was the oldest son, I knew what I needed to do.

47:01 I was the wife of so-and-so, I knew what I needed to do. My self-worth came from inhabiting the roles that the society and the community had bestowed upon me. Now I have to go find it, define it and evaluate it. That’s a lot on me. And with that I go into the world and now I’m going to find the person who is going to affirm all of that for me.

47:27 And since I’m not marrying at 22 in a cornerstone model of marriage, but I’m marrying at 29 or 35 in a capstone model of marriage, capstone being I’m already formed, I’m not starting out to form myself with you, I’ve done the forming, I’ve, I’ve acquired my career and my identity and my habits and my car and my hand- And now you are the one who is going to not help me become somebody, but you’re going to help me preserve what I’ve already become. And so now I’m asking you what traditional marriage always wanted me to ask from you, about family and social status and companionship and economic support, but on top of it you are the person who is going to recognize me and validate me and reflect back on me my image that I want to have of myself, my ideal image of myself, let’s put it like that, and you’re also going to be my confidante and my passionate lover.

48:29 It’s a lot of stuff to ask from one person. And that’s when I one day threw out that sentence that has become a bit of a landmark, that we are asking one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, in numbers of people and in multiple meanings, and I think it’s crushing us. It puts way too many expectations. The average American today has about one or one and a half person to turn to in times of crisis. That is tragic.

49:05 One to one and a half, that is tragic. Okay. That is tragic. That, that’s the level of people that we reach out to. It’s just not, we’re not made this way.

49:16 We’re not, you know, one person. You talk with your partner about certain things. There’s some things you should never talk about with your partner. That’s not what they understand, that’s not what they care about, that’s not who they are about. Find other people to talk about.

49:28 What do you say to people that say my wife is my best friend? I say sometimes, I see that is a wonderful thing, and I agree with Nietzsche, who said it isn’t the lack of love that destroys a couple, it’s the lack of friendship. At the same time, have a best friend and that’s not your partner. Have a best friend. Have a few best friends, actually.

49:53 Who says you need to have one? Have three or four best friends and have your partner be your partner, because with, if you want an erotic connection with your partner. What I will say is that it’s a correlation, it’s not a causation. It’s not that if your partner is your best friend they can’t also be your lovers, but let’s say that way too many couples where the erotic has died will tell me, “She is my best friend and we have no sex.” And I say, what do you expect?

50:25 We generally don’t have sex with our best friend. Our best friend is our best friend for a reason. So you encourage them to spend the time and build more relationships? Absolutely. Okay.

50:35 I think that couples that are well surrounded by a strong community of friends do much better. They are able to weather their crises because they have confidence around them, they have people who support them, and they sometimes, I will say, last longer than they should have because they were supported by people who so wanted them. You know, friends have an investment in our relationship. If they’ve known us as a couple, if they’ve taken us in under their tent as a couple, they, they are vying for us, and sometimes actually will make us last longer than we should have.

51:10 So it’s not always that, you know, many things are that and it’s opposite at the same time. What’s the biggest thing you want people to take away from that talk? Our conversation? No, no, from that first TED Talk, I mean. And, and is it- Oh, I think that, um, what I want.

51:29 Look, when I wrote Mating in Captivity, when I did a TED Talk about desire, what I wanted was to launch a conversation about relationships and about specifically about sexuality that isn’t either smut or sanctimony. Is to create a space where people can talk about these subjects in a respectful manner, in a thought-provoking manner, in a challenging way, and in a way that offers new options. And that space didn’t exist. That conversation wasn’t happening.

52:06 It’s either cheap advice, it’s either a lot of judgmentalness, and it’s either a lot of dirt, and there isn’t a place where people can really go and talk about which something they actually deal with on a daily basis, their intimate relationships, and that is male friendly. I wanted a conversation about relationship that isn’t colonized by women, even though I am one. I, I needed to address a way of thinking and a way of experiencing the world and a way of experiencing relationship that understands the position that many men are often in.

52:38 Why is that important for you? Because in my work as a therapist, well, I could start by saying because I had an extremely tight relationship with my father, and that gave me an opening and an ease maybe in listening and talking and being in conversation with men, but I would say that what that led them to is that I have often been the therapist of men. I often thought that when a woman shares something with you, it’s very personal and it’s very important, but you also know that she may already have shared it with her best friend.

53:18 And when a man talks to you, he’s often hearing himself say it for the first time, and there is something very precious and honored for me in being that witness to things that are coming into the world for the first time, and I have often felt very privileged to be that person. And that’s when I began to think, men don’t have a space for these things, and they often don’t have a language for it either. And when I would say it for them, certain things that I thought belonged to the male experience, if you want, I would, especially around sexuality actually, I would say I saw that even they had never thought of it in these terms, but now they finally understood something that had been so important for them for years and they never really could articulate it.

54:11 And that’s when I thought, we, they need a language, and then they need a language that is relevant for them, and then that helps them translate it. And I happen to be a bridge person, I think. In general, I’m a bridge person in cultures, in languages, in the countries I’ve lived in, and so I like to be a bridge between partners. It can be co-founders, it can be intimate partners, they don’t have to be a man and a woman, but there is something unique in the co-found- in the, the relationship, and the bridging of men and women, because um, they could still do a lot better in understanding each other and in supporting each other rather than fearing each other.

54:53 Well, thank you for creating that space, because it doesn’t feel like that there is that space sometimes as a man, because it feels like I’m either being browbeaten or being told that I’m doing it wrong, or there’s never a place where I can actually engage the logical side of my brain and have it connect with some of those emotions. It’s a very interesting mix to get me to engage with that, because it’s easy. So how do you respond when I talk on your TED Talks in here?

55:16 Yes, I think it’s fascinating. I, I have a hard time understanding why I didn’t see what you said before. You know, again, what you say, when you say it sounds very simple, but I never noticed these things before, although I noticed feeling that way. So when you talk about that distance, when you talk about watching someone, when you say it’s about, um, not them not being respected but being admired, that is a fascinating thing, because it isn’t, you’re right about just pure respect, it is admiration.

55:43 And that’s when you’re close, but as couples we’re taught so many times that you need to be like this all the time, and the best friend and all of that, and there’s so much pressure that it just becomes where there is no distance. And when you say that distance, desire only exists with distance, of course it makes much sense, but like I said, when you’re in a relationship it’s hard to deconstruct it. But I was in that place as well. It, this took me a l- many years of thinking and watching it, watching one couple after another for 30 years, 30,000 hours of couples therapy and watching, you know, desire fizzle out and people often do the opposite.

56:24 You know, so they would become very close and very affectionate and very familial, but nobody who has their head straight on their shoulders wants sex in the family. If I hear people say, I feel like my, I’m with my brother, I’m with my mother and with my father, I’m with my sister, I’m with my roommate. I know that you may have a beautiful, harmonious, loving, affectionate relationship, but it’s going to be affectionate touch, which is often a sexual appetite suppressor.

57:04 It’s a different touch, and the touch in the family is meant to be that touch, but we don’t want sex in the family. And the, an adult relationship that tries to do that today, and you know, in the past it was not so much of an issue, we didn’t try to have passionate marriages. It’s an oxymoron today. We want the family and the passion in the same place. Well, then you need to learn to straddle this thing.

57:29 Now it’s a dance. On some moments you want to feel like you’re with your family member, but on another moment you need to feel like you’re once again with a woman, with a man, or with two women, or two men, but you want that tension. And that tension is the opposite of the flattening of the cozy sofa. It’s the difference between my sitting like this, which is really comfy, but nothing’s going to happen. We’re going to have a nice night, we can watch Mad Men, we can watch Homeland, whatever.

58:01 We are friends and it’s great. That’s, I, the last thing I will do is devalue this, but if people say, how do I stay in touch with that other kind of spark, then the sitting is like this. This is a sitting that leans forward, that is curious. Curiosity is the essential ingredient of desire, not security. And you, so you need to recognize that about your relationship and make sure you’re constantly putting that.

58:30 You cultivate it? Yes, yes, it’s active cultivation, the same way that anyone who runs the company completely understands that they need to innovate company culture. They would pay attention to the company culture and innovation, but in relationships innovations are too much work. And how do you want it to stay from, I mean, is there another system that you ask to stay fresh while you invest absolutely nothing new? Same movies, same old, same restaurant, same pub, because it’s comfy and it’s known and familiar.

59:04 Great. But then don’t come and tell me you want spark. If you want, you understand it’s two separate things. If you like comfy, go for it. But if you also say, but I want edge and comfy, and I want new and familiar, and I- then you got to be able to straddle, and that means that on occasion you need to leave the comfy and you need to bring something new.

59:29 But in a relationship, when you bring new, we fear rejection, we fear judgment, we feel ridiculed. Huh, what are you doing? Why the- come on, you know. We have another person who’s going to say, stay the same, stay the same. That’s why it’s more difficult.

59:46 In our jobs we’re willing to take that risk. Speaking of risks, you have a very successful TED Talk, millions and millions of views, a lot of people would just retire with that, write another book, go to their private practice, but you decide to do another one two years later, which is fairly quick. Why? Because they asked me. Come on.

1:00:08 Yes, well, I’m sure they did. They came the first time and they came the second. Yes, they, you know, they, so it’s very interesting because they came the second time, and uh, you know, the decision was made less than two years after, actually, and I said the subject I would be interested in at this point is the topic of transgression, specifically infidelity, but the essence of it is transgression, which you could say is very much an interest of mine since I’m interested in breaking the rules, breaking the boundaries and all of that.

1:00:43 And I had a dinner and I explained my thinking and where I’m at and what I’m trying to write in my new book, The State of Affairs, and I was convinced after I left that they would never do it. I thought nobody will want to do a talk about this. Too radical? Yes. Not TED material?

1:01:02 Yes, that’s how I thought of it. I thought not because it’s, you know, I, I just don’t, and maybe I would say not in America, let’s put it like that. I thought no. And then they not only came back, but they said they remembered everything I had said, and they said, and we want those ideas included in the talk. Now those were in the talk, but many more were in the talk because by then I’m, I was really developing, and I said yes because I thought a TED Talk is a distillation of the essence and it will help me write my new book.

1:01:35 But I’m not sure I succeeded in that, because when you distill you really, really go for the essence, for the essence, but then when you write a book it’s the accordion back in the other side and you have to, now that you’ve set everything in its bare minimum, now you need to dress it up again and expand it and develop it. So I am much clearer. I think that the reception of the TED Talk has confirmed that I need not be afraid, that I think there is a new conversation that is needed about infidelity, and rethinking infidelity is one of the most important elements of rethinking modern love, and that I have a contribution to make that is worldwide, because once you do a TED Talk and it’s translated, you know, it’s a hundred thousand hits a day all over the world, you know that you’re not just talking to North America.

1:02:26 And that’s important for you? Yes, because it can, it affirms it, that it’s not just a Western thinking and a North American thinking, and uh, it, it gives it a sense that the thinking maybe will translate specifically into the languages and the cultures of the countries themselves, if you want, but that the general ideas fit the times we live in. Let’s talk about that. That TED Talk, you were telling me earlier that, you know, infidelity is something you must treat with seriousness, and uh, I guess, I don’t know if respect is the right word, but you know, your demeanor was much different in that second talk than the first talk.

1:03:05 The audience was different, the audience was bigger, but you were different. Your posture was different, everything was different about your dress, everything was different. Um, how did you approach that talk and, and how did you think about the way that you had to come across to get your message across? So there were five questions that organized my thinking. One was, who is this talk for?

1:03:29 And once I understood that the talk is not about if you’ve cheated or if you’ve been cheated on or if you were the lover in the triangle, but in fact that it’s for anyone who’s ever loved. If I ask an audience of 200 people or 2,000 people, which I will never do, have you had affairs of YouTube, nobody will answer you. But if I ask an audience, how many of you have been affected by infidelity, about 85 to 90 percent of the room lifts their finger. Their children, they were the children of the family divorced because of it, they had illegitimate children from the grandfather because of it, they had crying mothers because of it, their siblings, their bosses, their, it’s, it’s really huge, and that opened it up for me and made it become much more systemic rather than a story of two people.

1:04:25 What do I want people to feel when they listen to this talk? And to come to those three words, I want people to feel more understood, less hurt and less angry. Gave me a way of reaching everyone. Now I could speak to the people who have acted and to the people who have been acted upon. What do I want people to think?

1:04:49 Here is this one transgression that can rob you of your happiness, of your identity, of your life, of your entire marriage, and yet it’s so poorly understood. Now I had a frame, and what is the central idea? And as always, my idea is about finding the both/and. that yes, affairs are acts of betrayal, but they are not about betrayal. They are about longing and loss and yearning and seeking for happiness and love and all of that.

1:05:29 And if they can exist in the same sentence, where I can ex- What it meant to you and what it did to me, and these two come together, then I can speak to the phenomenon at large. And this kind of thinking was, it’s not the way I typically think. Typically I think about what are my ideas, what am I, what do I want to say. I don’t necessarily think about who am I talking to, what I want you to experience, what I want you to think, what I want to leave you with and all of that.

1:06:04 And so I did a lot of rehearsals at every dinner party. Would you give that? Is it the whole time I gave the talk, the talk even morphed as I would do the, and the talking at the stage was not the talk of the day before. In fact, I forgot the most important sentence of my talk on the stage, which was that it’s a beautiful quote of Alexandre Dumas that says that the bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry, and sometimes three. And that sentence went away, I forgot lots of other pieces, and I brought many new things in.

1:06:39 The talk is rarely twice the same, but in the talking to the friends I would say, I would ask them, what did you feel? What’s the one thing that you leave with? Where did I lose you? Where did I hold you? Those kind of things, and it’s that conversation that allowed me to, to do the talk.

1:07:02 And it’s very interesting because Mating in Captivity was written in a traditional way. I write the book and then you read it and then you comment on my writing, meaning reception and production are separate. But eight years later, ten years later, we are in a completely new space. I write while the conversation is happening in social media, and reception and production are completely influencing each other back and forth. I know what you’re reading while I’m writing it, even before I’m done writing it, and I am in conversation with you at a completely different level, and writing will never be the same.

1:07:49 And you felt that when you’re doing your talk, because you were constantly adjusting and you felt the audience even that day? Oh, the, the, you know, first of all, I improvised all kinds of jokes in the middle of the talk, and I, I saw how people were responding, and then, you know, uh, people came up to me afterwards. I mean, nobody knows you necessarily the day before, but I can tell you 10 minutes later, people come to you and tell you things. It’s, you know, suddenly it’s no longer, “Hi, I’m Brian, I run, you know, London Real.”

1:08:21 It’s, “Hi, I’m Brian, I’m married, I’ve been faithful, I’ve been unfaithful, I’ve had affairs, I’ve never.” It’s like, did I ask you anything? Ran out of the hall. So then you have a, I’m a walking confessional. And some of the big points in that talk were, one was affairs are less about sex and more about desire, that the affair sometimes are an antidote for death, that even happy people cheat, and you said the majority of couples with affairs actually stay together.

1:08:47 Yes. All very counterintuitive. Yes, of course. On the one hand we would, we know that infidelity is a leading cause for divorce, but there is much more infidelity than there are divorces, and so most people stay together, at least the first time around. But you see, this is the same logic as Mating in Captivity, right?

1:09:10 I didn’t write a book in mating for people who don’t get along and also no longer have any sex together. It’s the same about affairs. It would be easy to say, obviously people have affairs because they don’t like their partner and because they have miserable relationships. No, if they do, they actually divorce these days. If they have affairs, it’s because the relationship is good enough for many other things.

1:09:34 And the easy thing would be to say people have no sex because they don’t have good connections. People have affairs because they have bad connections. That’s true, but I see people up to people coming in and say, I love my partner, the last thing I want to hurt is hurt my partner, that I want to do is hurt my partner, and I’m having an affair. That’s a much more complicated question. Why would people risk losing everything for a glimmer of- What does this link back to your first talk?

1:10:04 Yes. Okay, there’s the same- It’s the continuation. Mating grapples with the dilemmas of desire on the inside of relationships, and Rethinking Infidelity looks at what happens when desire breaks free and away it goes, looking elsewhere. So it is a natural continuation. But the, of the, the logical thing is to say people do this because they have problems in the relationship.

1:10:29 It’s the symptom model. An affair happens because there’s a flawed relationship, rather than actually grappling with much more complicated imponderables of existential army and complexities of love and desire by which actually affairs happen. And sometimes they have nothing to do with the relationship, the relationship is actually perfectly fine, that’s not what it’s about. And then you enter into the question of transgression. After all, infidelity has existed since marriage was invented.

1:10:59 So marriage has changed continuously, and infidelity has a tenacious, tenaciousness that marriage can only envy, you know. And so that’s a lie that has become very, very clear, that there’s a robustness of infidelity. No single model of infidelity, of marriage, manages to outdo it. It’s like a race. No matter how much marriage tries to adapt to the times, infidelity tops it.

1:11:22 There’s always another way. So now we need to look at the power of transgression. What is it about us from Adam and Eve on that wants to break free out of the very constraints which we have sometimes created, which yesterday we thought were the ones we wanted? I wanted nothing more than this family and these children and this secure job and this big whole home I have and all of that, and then one day all of that feels so meaningless. It’s been, it’s been the shackles, it’s been the thing I wanted to break.

1:11:59 I have done always what was expected of me, and now I want to do what I really want to do. And that narrative goes back to what I talked about when I spoke about what people regret when they die. You know, it’s, you hear the conversation between the dutiful self and the selfish self, between the thinking about others and the thinking about me, and the places where they go together and the places where they clash. And so here is this thing called infidelity, which by definition is an act of entitlement and selfishness, but it has a lot more to do with what I do for me than what I’m actually doing to you.

1:12:41 And yet when it is uncovered, what it does to you is so shattering and so gutting, so painful, more so than it ever was, because socially it breaks everything down. You know, I was in Morocco last week and I had a conversation with a young group of young women and young men in their 20s from the villages actually who were working in the city, and at one point I said, you know, in America, in the West in general, the push today is that if a woman can finally leave, she doesn’t just have to stay there and bear her misery, she should just get out. And so one of the girls said to me, “Madam, if we had to divorce all of the unfaithful men, all of Morocco would be divorced.”

1:13:33 I just thought, here’s the difference. You know, I am fascinated by how we one day want certain things and how the next day those are the things that we think are imprisoning us, how we can have multiple loves, how we can have different kinds of loves, how we became one person here and then we remember that there are all these other parts of us and they suddenly manifest elsewhere, how sexual revolutions don’t happen at home, and how the same person who here is completely sexually shut down, in this other place is lustful and free and eager, and why they can’t bring it home, and all these imperfections. And some level you would say that infidelity is an imperfect compromise to imperfect lives.

1:14:30 Is it almost just something endemic of us as a society, as of setting up our own rules and then wanting to break them? But it has always existed, and we’ve always had rules, and we’ve always wanted to break rules. The rules change, and you know, let’s be very clear, fidelity was an imposition on women in order to know about patrimony and lineage. You know, now that we can’t, now that you can’t prove it by the children, you prove it by the exclusiveness, but it’s changed from an imposition on women to a dual gender conviction.

1:15:06 Instead of giving more freedom to women, we’ve taken the freedoms of men away. You could put it like that. What was the reaction to your talk, and what were you trying to get people to take away? The, I wanted a conversation that will embrace complexity, as always. I think I deal with subjects that are complicated and that people often want to simplify to the, to make them reductionistic and simplistic, and are often very polarized.

1:15:40 So the conversation about infidelity becomes a conversation about villain and victim and good and bad and perpetrator and saint, and I think it is not the truth, and I don’t believe that these kinds of conversations that are polarized, that are extreme, in which you take the extreme example and you make that become the norm and you think that if you don’t condemn, it means that you condone and if you try to understand, it’s as if you’re justifying. These kinds of discourses, they exist in politics, they exist in society, they exist in the conversation about infidelity, and they breed narrowness, judgmentalness and discrimination, and they don’t help couples and families and children, that’s for sure. So that’s what I see.

1:16:31 I see these all-or-nothing conversations and I’m thinking, that’s an example of an authoritarian discourse. of a rigid, narrow, and I get drawn there and I want to loosen this up, because it’s, it’s a lie. It’s dishonest, it’s a, it’s a dishonest way to looking at dishonesty. Right. And it doesn’t capture the nuances of the human heart, which is really what infidelity is about.

1:16:58 The question is not, is it good or is it bad? The question is, what do we learn about love, lust and commitment by studying infidelity? It is an amazing window, the same way that sexuality is a window, right? If you look at sexuality from a societal point of view, you would say that the most progressive aspect of a society in our culture lodge themselves around the changes that take place around sexuality: covering your head, abortion, nakedness, sexual education, homosexual marriage, all of these as around the sexual window.

1:17:39 And the most traditional, archaic side of the society also lodge themselves. If you want to control a population, control the women, control what they can wear, how much skin they can show, what comes, what kind of interaction they can have with men, and who has the education and the information of the children and the sexuality of children, who owns the sexuality of children, and how much does an adult have a right on the sexuality of children in an abusive way, and all of that. It is so foundational, it’s almost amazing how little we talk about it when you see how essential it is to progress and change and to tradition and rootedness.

1:18:21 And infidelity is right in there with that, because infidelity has been one of the ways we control sex. If there is a taboo against infidelity, is because somebody understood human nature. We are fickle, we are curious and we are greedy. We are not generally meant to stay put in one place. There would be no taboo if there was no sizable threat, and what’s more threatening than human nature?

1:18:49 What are some of the other myths about sexuality, but saying things that we don’t talk about or don’t understand? Oh, so many. Let’s go with the general one. Right. Men are creatures of biology in perpetual motion, always in search of an outlet, always wanting sex.

1:19:12 Male sexuality is not at all connected to the inner life of men, their depression, their anxiety, their low self-esteem. None of it has anything to do with the fact that they want or don’t want sex. Excuse me? Women are creatures of meaning, not of biology, and their conditions need to be just right, which they never are. Women’s sexuality is more subjectively driven than biologically driven.

1:19:38 Nonsense as well. Nonsense I wouldn’t say, but command, there’s always truth in some of this, but to present it like that- Excuse me, I mean, you want to look, you ask a man about when they, how they experience their sexuality, you will always hear them talk about how much they feel accomplished and performing and achieving and therefore deserving, and how much that gives them a sense of self-esteem, and how much their self-esteem is directly connected to their sexuality, in positive and in negative, in an affirming way or in a shaming way, but there is a connection. Don’t pretend that women’s, men’s inner life doesn’t have a con- a consequence on their sexuality.

1:20:24 Male depression doesn’t have a consequence on their sexuality. Men are just always just on an automatic thing. This is narrow and this is, it’s false representation. So that’s a set of myths there about the gender, and that causes us damage when we make those generalizations. Okay, another myth: that therefore women are less interested in sex, men are the stronger sex drive people.

1:20:47 How about we think that maybe women are more quickly bored with monogamy? It’s less interesting to them. It’s not that women are not interested in sex in the context of their relationship, they’re generally not interested in the sex they can have. You give them a new man and they’re perfectly interested in sex. So maybe the conclusion is not that women have less of a sex drive, but maybe that women are more quickly bored with monogamy, with habit and routine and all of that, and they, since they have a weaker drive, in order to stay interested they need it to be more adventurous, more risqué, more different than the usual routine, whereas he can stay interested without it having to be always a big new production.

1:21:31 That’s a very opposite way of the traditional way of thinking. Um, another myth: that it’s dangerous to let children know about sexuality, that we need to just pass on the censorship bureau rather than integrate sexuality as part of our overall health and look at sexual health and not just that sexual pathology, dysfunction and addiction. That would make us probably a better population at large. You speak very frankly with your sons about sexuality. You always have, right?

1:22:06 And you think we should be doing that more? Yeah, but, but more as in you don’t wait for the special moment which never comes, because you’re going to talk about that thing that stands out, that’s different, that’s ominous, that’s going to come on. You know, the sentence I’ve often spoken about was one when my older one was 13. It’s not like we spend our time talking about sexuality, of course, they, and by now sometimes they listen to me and it’s like background music, it’s like, you know, but I remember one of them asking me to cover the books when their friends would come home, and I said to them, I am not going to cover these books, no more than I would have been asked to cover books if I was writing about weapons of mass destruction.

1:22:53 Why are those books not to be hidden and these one? Yes, I will not contribute to the shaming nature of sexuality and all the consequence that then follow, which is generally, I’ve never seen a good thing come out of shame. I see violence, I see misbehavior, I see compromised situations. I won’t contribute to that. I said, we’re going to make this a comfortable topic.

1:23:22 Then I see him sitting with his friends, he’s 13, and then, you know, and then finally I hear one of them say, “How do you know that?” “Because my mother is writing a book about it.” And I thought, yes, you know, he had the knowledge. Yes, I started to come home and there’s all of the friends sitting, and then every time I go, “Mom, we have a question.” And I feel like, yes, have me or have anyone, doesn’t have to be just me, to whom you can actually ask a question and somebody is going to help you generate a conversation about it, and it’s a non-issue when it’s an integrated conversation.

1:23:59 It’s a non-issue. It’s only when it becomes hushed and hinted at and secretive and joked about that they feel your attention as a parent, and then it just, the cycle continues. That’s right. Right. Are you optimistic for us?

1:24:15 Do you see the younger generation, maybe the information generation, adopting these things more? Is it going to go that way, or do we really have to be on guard? Look, if more countries could opt for the Dutch model of education, where sexuality is integrated in the school system, and at the year, at four years old, we talk about the body and about anatomy and all of that, and at seven years old we talk about the gender awareness and all of that, and at 11 years old we talk about sexuality and relationships and attraction and seduction and all of that, then we have a sexual health model that doesn’t just look at disease, STDs, dysfunctions and dangers and risks.

1:25:00 We teach people to relate. But if we’re not going to do that, then we’re going to leave a vacuum in which from age nine on, if not earlier, most children are going to get their sex education from pornography. Pornography, which is no longer filmed in a beautiful studio with people who have made up, makeup and all of that, so that at least you know it’s a fiction. Pornography that now looks like it’s happening in the room next door and lets you think that this is what it is.

1:25:28 Pornography is many, many things, but one thing it’s not is good sex education. So we have a responsibility. I think it’s part of teaching about good eating habits, respect for other people, awareness of one’s own body, connection to one sense of pleasure and all of that, and it’s part of the education system, and the education system is the parents, the other adults, the television and the school system, one combined thing. If we don’t do it, we will be able to complain about the misuse of porn and all these other stuff without seeing that we abdicate it.

1:26:08 If you abdicate, you leave things to the extremes and to the fundamentalists of all kinds. Right. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, of course. You haven’t asked me that’s all I do.

1:26:20 I met you in California and I’ve watched your TED Talks and uh, and I, I see a woman on the top of her game, and I wanted to ask you, how do you stay on top of your game? How do you, you know, cause yourself to do the next TED Talk and to write the next book and to keep traveling and talking at the Founders Forum, and you know, what do you, what do you do that keeps you there? Because it would be easy not to do the next talk, because it could easily not be a success.

1:27:08 And on your own deathbed, when you look back at your successful life, are there things that come out? Would it be that your, your 12th TED Talk that was very, made you happy? What do you see as far as that life, or is it kind of what you just said? No.

1:27:28 When I was a child and I was very insecure, I appeared like now, but I was very insecure inside. I never knew if it was good enough. Now at least when it’s good, I know it’s good. I, I know it’s good. I can see this thing, I didn’t like that thing, I- didn’t like, but I can evaluate when it’s not good.

1:27:46 I know it could have been better, and I’m no longer crushed by it and I don’t sleep for three weeks and I’m like, knowing it myself, you know, that’s kind of the nice things with maturity. I often see, you know, if I had the confidence of today with the looks of then, but it didn’t matter. When you’re young, you’re young, you may look, it doesn’t matter, but inside you like, and I often had a fantasy of coming back after I die and hearing what people would say about me, you know, because I didn’t believe people really cared about me, so I wanted to see if maybe when I was dead they would finally care about me.

1:28:19 You know, that’s, I know that a lot of people know each other through me, that I am a very strong connector in the various cities of the world where I live. You know, yesterday I came to London and I brought eight friends together that are all important people to me and none of them had ever met, and I know that each of them left with one person from that dinner that they will stay in touch with, and this is my fingerprints. Okay, you like connecting people?

1:28:50 I love connecting people. I love connecting. I think it’s one of the, the, you know, to grow the network of social connections is an art, and it’s an art in which I like to see my fingerprints. And will you continue to work with couples until forever? You know, I’m very lucky, I have one of the few professions that doesn’t suffer from ageism.

1:29:14 Seriously, I mean, my journalist friends, my, my certainly people in business, maybe, I mean, they struggle for relevancy. Yeah, tech is really bad. Therapy is one of the few things where you, the more you age, the more you’ve experienced life, the more you can offer. And um, as long as my brain works and I remember your name when you’re sitting in front of me, I can do it. I think that the balance between lecturing all over the world, writing books, doing TED Talks or other, you know, I’m going to see that de la sideas now, which is 3,500 people in Mexico, it’s actually a very robust event of ideas like that too, and other ideas conferences where I’ve been answering patients.

1:30:05 It’s the combination of it that I really like. If I didn’t see patients, I feel it’s like you’re no longer in the trenches, you’re no longer in the place where you’re actually doing it, and if you just start to talk about it, you start to believe what you’re talking about. But when you really do it, it keeps you very, first of all it keeps you fresh, but it keeps you from thinking that you are right, keeps you from thinking that you know, it keeps you from believing your own constructs.

1:30:36 There’s something very authentic about it, and it keeps you from thinking that you’re so important. You know, get humble, very humbling, and I think that it’s a good thing to do when people are beginning to be fans of you, when they start struck a little bit and then you get standing ovations, and which are wonderful, you feel really like, man, you know, it, it went somewhere, and then you go back in your office and it’s quiet, it’s Zen, no phone, no computer, no ding ding, it’s the last techno-free environment, and you’re there just with people’s sometimes raw pain, life, fears, longings, hurts, and this is it. Now you’re with the raw material in your studio and you have to craft something and put things together that have sometimes been so badly broken, because people don’t come to a therapist if things are shining.

1:31:30 So you’re usually dealing with broken pieces, and now you have to think, which is the first piece I should lift and which one does that piece belong to, and can it ever be mended again? Now this will- Then what do I do and how do I tell people you done? You know, a couple is the most complex system. They can make each other in utter bliss and they can create hell. It’s the hardest kind of therapy and it’s the most useless kind of therapy sometimes too.

1:32:05 You’re an amazing line at the end of your second TED Talk, what you said, you say to couples that might have experienced an infidelity, you said, “Your, your old relationship is over. Would you like to begin a new one?” Something like that. Because that’s a conversation you have regularly, because I think that generally at this point in the West many of us are going to have two or three marriages. That’s kind of an obvious given, and then some of us will do it with the same person, meaning that some people will know to recreate, to reinvent themselves within their relationship.

1:32:41 I mean, we’re not going to marry in our 20s, maybe 30s, and stay till our 80s, 90s or 100 and think it’s the same relationship. Not a single company lives like that, not a living, living organism. A couple is a living organism. Like any living system, it needs stability and change, it needs growth and homeostasis. If it grows too much, too fast, it goes into chaos, like any system, like any economy, like any financial system.

1:33:14 But if it doesn’t change, if it doesn’t grow, it fossilizes and it dies. And how you straddle these two is the art of couples therapy. And um, I think that some couples are able to do it, many want, many want. 50 percent of first marriages end in divorce, 65 percent of second marriages end in divorce, in most big cities in the world at this point. That’s a lot of divorced people, that’s a lot of people that had a dream that shattered.

1:33:45 I think that’s more failure than companies, maybe, or I’d be curious actually what’s the com- the comparison between how many companies flunk versus marriages, you know. But those who are able to do it, what does it take? What does it take to on location renew, reinvent, re-engineer, regenerate, this re- And um, it’s a fascinating thing, what, you know, and there isn’t one answer, there isn’t just one answer. And is it always done together? I think sometimes people have to leave each other, go do this alone, to come back, and I’m beginning to see more and more people who’ve separated two, three, five years and then we come back together again.

1:34:36 That’s a whole new phenomenon, that’s a new talk, you know. So couples therapy is a, is a lens to which you look at social change again, like the sexuality, same thing. I like portal topics. I like a topic that looks like it’s just about itself when in fact it just is a lens onto big issues: economy, gender politics, body, sexuality, you know, romantic love, wow, when all of that comes together, parenting, all of this, and now it becomes an interesting subject.

1:35:13 And I think people don’t always think of it in such broad sense, you know, they look at it as, I mean, you know, to study the institution of marriage is a fascinating thing. It’s the, it’s the foundation of most societies, and economists are studying it now and educators are studying it, of course clergy and religion has always studied it and psychologists are studying it, and this little institution on which so much rests is a fascinating company to study. Indeed, it just doesn’t have stocks that you can invest in.

1:35:49 Esther, I always ask everyone that comes here a couple questions at the end. I’m going to hit you with these. Yeah. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old S there and give that young woman a bit of advice, not the one that was in front of the mirror doing the hit parade but a little bit older, what would you tell her, the 20-year- old? Make sure you surround yourself with people who believe in you even when you don’t yet.

1:36:19 There is nothing more important than mentors. They see in you what you don’t yet perceive, and this can happen when you’re 13 and when you’re 22, and I was blessed with mentors. I was blessed with people who just believed in me and when I wasn’t sure, and I will, and that during securities, all of that is developmental, and we live in a time where we are meant to be so confident at an age when we actually are not supposed to be confident. You know, because this competitive, individualistic, go-getting, you only have one chance kind of society is forcing us to jump stages.

1:37:09 It’s become a developmental, you’re supposed to be Mozart in utero and the math was at age two. We have lost the concept of developmental arc, you know, and there is something in nature too that has a developmental arc. And so surround yourself by those who can fill the gaps for you. That’s one. Two, um, don’t do too many things just because you want people to like you and, and then sell your soul for it.

1:37:40 Um, it’s impossible to do what you want and to be liked. Either you are liked but then you have to conform, either you do your thing and then you have to accept that people will come after you. One of the, you asked me about success before, and it’s a sentence that really has helped me because that, you know, with success comes criticism, hate mail, you name it, and, and I, I would, I like to be liked. I’d never thought that I was going to generate this kind of controversy, maybe naive on my part.

1:38:14 And so a colleague of mine, a mentor also, said to me that the size of your success is measured by the size of the boulder that is thrown at you, and it was very calming sentence. So I would say that, I would say, never forget the music that makes you smile, so that when you’re really, really down, you put that music on and you know that it just lifts your spirits, whatever the song was from when you were 15 or 18. It’s generally the periods where these songs are etched inside of you.

1:38:49 Travel with music. There is, you know, and dance, because you can cry when you listen to music, you can cry when you read, you can cry when you watch art, but you cannot cry when you dance, because the body that cries is a body that is contracted and hung over, and you can’t dance like that. You have to open up to dance. So there is, not to move, it doesn’t have to be partner dancing, but moving and dancing is what, it’s what opens the body, and when the body opens, the mind opens.

1:39:21 It’s interconnected. So those are the things I say to the young girls. And sex gets better with age, don’t let yourself be fooled. Sex drive is not the same as sexual satisfaction, because it gets better, and so does relationships as you become more confident, as you trust yourself more and as you accept yourself more. That’s what gives satisfaction, not making sure that the next Joe likes you.

1:39:53 What’s the best advice you’ve ever received, probably from one of your mentors? This was one of them, that sentence. I think the people who encouraged me to write in the beginning: you have something to say. Right. And you never plan on writing your book, and I was sex- And then I wasn’t, I didn’t think of myself as a writer at all.

1:40:15 It was people, it was because what do I have to say that hasn’t been said? It’s all been said. What, what’s new about this? Isn’t this obvious? This kind of a way that we have to, to, to make ourselves irrelevant or to diminish ourselves, it’s, it’s humble, but it’s not necessarily the right humility.

1:40:32 And you know, I don’t want to write a book that after 50 pages you know you kind of know what’s in it. If I don’t have something really, really important to say, then I don’t want to say it. And then somebody said, but what’s important is not that you have the idea that nobody ever thought about, it’s that the way you’re going to put it together because of who you are, because of all the places that you draw from and all the sources that you tap into, that’s what’s going to make it really interesting.

1:40:59 And so just be you, and that’s it. You don’t have to appeal to everyone. That was another major piece of advice. No, you will never appeal to everyone, but those that you will appeal to will find real inspiration in you, and that’s really good in itself. That was very, rather than, but what about this one, but what about that one?

1:41:25 No, if you have a real voice, the voice is very appealing, and the more appealing the voice is to some, the less appealing it will be to others. You can’t have it both ways. Right. All great art should be polarizing. Yes.

1:41:39 Right. Last piece of advice for that question to the, the 20-year-old is listening to us, watching us around the world, that, you know, wants to one day be on the TED stage like you, that wants their message to be heard. What advice do you give to them? I worked very hard for this. This is 30 years in the make.

1:41:59 I never thought of being successful at 30. I did the work, I learned, I went to study, I sought my mentors, I knocked on the doors, I was kind of fearless in that way, but I never was concerned with success. I was concerned- People often will ask me today, what is my three-year plan, my five-year plan? I chose things because they were fun, interesting or meaningful. That’s what drove me, and I didn’t expect it.

1:42:31 I didn’t think I deserve it, I didn’t feel entitled to it, and I think that that’s a piece that today people forget a little bit. Everybody wants to be the next, you know, PayPal founder and the next success person and the next Kickstarter and the next Google and this kind of star struck, you know, if it’s tech stars or, you know, rather than, than waiting for the process to unfold, and then maybe you will be that person and maybe you won’t, but you will still have had a meaningful life. I, I see a lot of 20-year-olds that want to jump stages.

1:43:11 Um, and like, they ask me, how did you get to the, that stage? What shall I do? I want to do a TED Talk, how do you do it? And I’m like, do you know how many years I weigh- I knew TED was watching me for five years, I think, before TED eva came to me, and I didn’t go knocking at their door. I just said, the day will come when I will be the person that’s next on the TED list for what they need and for what I can offer.

1:43:35 That doesn’t mean I sit passively, but there is a certain synchronicity that needs to take place. I didn’t go and just- You know, now maybe I’m that generation that just felt like things build over time and I missed something, but I see a lot of people who are constantly thinking that they’re missing out. I see an entire generation crippled by FOMO, you know, the fear of missed opportunity, and I’m not in the right place, and why don’t I have this, and I should, you know, and that breathes an enormous amount of misery, which then requires a lot of therapy and a lot of coaching and a lot of mastermind workshops and a lot of- You know, it’s like a problem that produces itself and looks for its solutions.

1:44:22 So I think a lot of the time I say that to people, I worked a lot for this and I stayed the course and I didn’t just expect it, even though I’m not surprised it’s happening. I did inside of meeting one day because I knew what I’m doing makes a difference, and it’s, but I didn’t just- I didn’t want to be successful. The success is the product of what I did. My goal was not to be successful. That’s not a goal, to be successful.

1:44:53 A goal is to do stuff that makes a difference in whatever field you’re in, and then the success is the outcome of that. I think that we have our priori- priorities a little reverse sometimes these days, that if you’re not successful, you don’t feel you exist. No, you exist and then you get to success, that is a proof of that existence. Same with happiness. We don’t do things that makes us happy.

1:45:20 We live a life that has all the elements of meaning and joy and connection and purpose, and then we feel happy. I think that’s what I would say. That’s what I actually do say when they come to me, because I have a lot of them coming to me, and when I have a young one that knocks at my door and says, I want to learn from you, you know, I want to shadow you, I want to learn, I want to be you one day, and if I see that they have that thing, then I say, okay, you can watch my supervisions, you can sit in my conferences and my trainings, shadow me, because I did that.

1:46:01 I knocked at the door of one of my main teachers. I said, I’m here in America, I don’t know for how long, and I want to observe you. And after 10 sessions he said to me, “You’re done observing this, but about that’s about as much as one can learn from observing, you know.” And I said, “No, no, but I need to observe, I don’t know how long I’m going to stay here and I’m going to go.” And then he said, “Okay, but you can stay a fly on the wall.

1:46:24 I don’t want to hear you, I don’t want to see you.” I said, “Okay, okay, okay.” And then I stand there, and then one day he had a case of a Holocaust survivor family, and we were watching behind the one-way mirror, and then he looks at me, “You there, don’t you know anything about this thing?” I didn’t even know how he knew. “What would you say to them?”

1:46:46 And I said, “I think that-” He said, “Go in the, up, go in the room and tell it to them.” And that was the first time I became a person, another fly on the wall, and the first time he came to therapist, and that’s when, and then he referred me about, you know, I’m anointed in a way by being trained by him, but it was, you know, I, I remember that moment so clearly. It’s like I waited. I, I never disappeared, but I knew there will be the moment where I will have the thing to say that is what is needed to be said.

1:47:19 Um, and I like the people who come to me and knock at my door and are not afraid and write to me. And um, I like the guts, I like the gutsy people. You might get a few after this. Um, it’s so true what you say about the work. When I, you know, I have so many people that I’m so fortunate to sit down and speak with, and people see the, um, you know, the two-minute YouTube clip and they see the media bias, but when I get to sit down, I look in and I see all the hard work, whether it’s a musician or a politician or, you know, anyone.

1:47:51 And so I think people really do need to remember that kind of the work comes first, and then that great TED Talk, which is a culmination of experience, work, speaking publicly, planning, practicing, and that’s how it comes out, it’s so fluid. And uh, thank you for reminding us of that. And thank you for cooking with me in California a few months ago, and I just want to send a lot of love out to Jason Gainer, Dev, Mastermind Talks, who brought us together, and because of that, um, uh, bonding afternoon, that’s why you’re here.

1:48:20 And um, thanks so much. Just there, I really appreciate it. It’s just, just preparing for you has been, uh, uh, made me think about my own relationship a lot and just thinking about all of the different pieces, and so thank you for your nuanced message. Thanks for trying to complicate things for us a bit more and make us really think about these pieces and not just throw a a polarizing, you know, good, bad. I’m a child of divorce.

1:48:45 It’s very easy just to shift the blame and then we never learn from our mistakes. So what’s one thing you took from this? Yes. Quite honestly was the, you know, was the relationship, the fact that you need to under- So professionally I, I understand that to be successful I need to be partially out of control. Um, Steven Pressfield says start before you’re ready, you know, there has to be risk on the line for you to grow, and so I hadn’t thought about that to keep a relationship continuing, is that you need to throw in all sorts of things you wouldn’t normally do, where you want to use it as that comfort base, like you said, you want to have your home base and then you go out and do this.

1:49:24 And it’s very easy for me as a business person to think, okay, in business you have to do that, but for a relationship to think that you have to constantly cultivate these pieces, otherwise it’s not going to happen by itself. And I can engineer my own happiness if I just take you know, a tenth of the time I would on the important things that my fellow men tell me to worry about and maybe think about my relationship, which is so important, and how I can, you know, put that distance there, you know, or watch my partner at her distance, or just think about those things. So, or tell your partner thank you.

1:50:05 I thank you, thank you for, for being there while I go out there and take on this whole new project, throw myself into something I’ve never done, try to. Thank you. I think that it’s an amazing thing how partners fail to thank each other for being there. They take it for granted, they’re perfectly quick to say when the other person is not there. You know, it’s a system that highlights the first piece I should lift and which one does that piece belong to and can it ever be mended again?

1:50:38 Now this will never, then what do I do and how do I tell people you done? You know, a couple is the most complex system. It’s the negative and often takes the positive for granted. So appreciation is huge. Yeah, that’s also John Gottman’s research.

1:50:57 But the other thing that is very, very important, I think, to add is when you say engineer one’s own happiness, most people, when they are alone, understand that they are responsible to make things better, but when they are in a relationship, nobody comes to couples therapy saying, I come to see what I do that I should change. They all come to tell you what their partner is doing that their partner should change. It’s like, and the beginning of a couple change is when people are finally taking the responsibility for themselves and they say, what can I do different, non-contingent about, if you were different then my life would be better, which is the way that couples often organize, and that’s something that you don’t see in a company.

1:51:50 So it’s a, another way of looking at this engineering, the, the happiness. It’s a, it’s an acknowledgement of what your partner allows you to do even when you’re not with them. She’s going to, she already loves you, now she’s going to love you more for this. This is to her, to all the hers and his that are not here. Thanks so much for being here.

1:52:16 Um, we’re going to watch you continue on your journey. As London Real, we say it’s about the journey, and so, uh, I just can’t, I can’t wait for your next book and just to see you, you know, continue on what you’re doing. It’s very refreshing, it’s fun, it’s fun to see you passionate and excited about what you do. So thank you, thank you.