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Happy New Year, everybody! To get 2025 started off right, we're releasing the entire interview that we did with Esther Perel for you, micro-listener, as a New Year's gift, and honestly as a way to try to seduce you into subscribing to the Magnum. We recorded this in September, and this is just a taste of the kind of additional content that Magnum subscribers enjoy regularly. Let the seduction begin.
We're going to take a quick break from your calls to speak with someone that if you're a regular listener of the Savage Love Cast, you are familiar with someone who, if you are a regular listener of the Savage Love Cast, you probably already got her books on my recommendation and you've heard me quote her a million times, New York Times best-selling author and psychotherapist, Esther Perelle recognized,
Here on Zeph's Love Cast and Everywhere Else is one of the most insightful and original voices on modern relationships. In addition to writing her best-selling books, Esther hosts the podcast, Where Should We Begin and is about to wrap up her sold out national tour and evening with Esther Perel. Esther, how are you?
I am good. It's so nice to see you. Maybe I have a brand new listener today who hasn't heard me talk about you, about your books, mating and captivity, the state of affairs. There's something that you said once that just struck me and it's one of the things I repeat all the time to listeners and call us. And I just wanted to unpack it with you really quickly if we could before we talk about the art of desire. And that is the victim of the affair is not always the victim of the marriage.
I don't think there's anything that you've said that landed with quite the boom that that did, because the way we have been socialized to understand somebody touching somebody else with their genitals is that guy or that woman is the bad guy. And if everything we need to know about the problem in this marriage,
is that tells us everything that we need to know. And that simple statement of yours, recognizing your gears of experience, couples counseling, working with couples in crisis about infidelity, that the victim of the affair is not always the victim of the marriage. How did you come to that? And when you first said it, I think during your TED talk, did you feel like you were going to blow people's minds?
That is an amazing question. I could have guessed ten different other things I've said. I didn't think he would come up with that. But no, I did not. When I began the TED Talk, I was so much into this challenging...
Certain perceived notions that people kind of took us through, but they were only truisms, that by definition you look at infidelity from the point of view of a victim and a perpetrator, and that it is a symptom of a flawed relationship.
that the transgression is way more serious than any other relational betrayal that may have existed in the relationship before. And I remember thinking to myself, but relational betrayals come in many forms. In difference, neglect, abuse,
years of sexual rejection. Why are we not integrating that? Why do we single out the sexual infidelity as the ultimate betrayal, as the queen of all betrayals? And that is not to justify, and that is certainly not to promote, but that is to add layers of complexity here. That people would say, why didn't you talk about it? Why didn't you bring it up?
Seriously, people talk and people bring things up for years and can't get their partner's attention until nothing can compare to this. And I'm not sure these are helpful statements. And so I wanted to make a point which was to see an affair takes place in the context of a relationship.
The relationship lives at the center of the affair, and the affair lives in the shadow of the relationship, all the other way around. But it's a triad. And to just think that it's a dyadic thing, me and what I did to you, rather than, of course, I chose it, I carried the responsibility. I didn't absolve anybody. But I wanted to make a point that it's easy sometimes for the person
who is betrayed, who feels violated, who feels lied to, who feels deceived, to enter the role as if nothing before that preceded. And to say, you did this to me.
when the story is often 20, 30 years earlier, of so many things that have happened between us that give context. They don't justify, they don't condone, but they give context, layers, complexity, nuance, and we need all of this if we want to help the thousands of people.
that are living with the experience of infidelity and affairs. One of the things I love about your work is how nuanced and complex you can allow relationships to be. And when there is an affair, there is this impulse to look to if people are willing to look past the affair and look at the relationship to pathologize the relationship. If everything was going great, if these people loved each other, if this was a healthy functional relationship, an affair would not happen. You wrote a terrific piece,
cover piece for the Atlantic magazine. Why happy people cheat, I think, was the headline. And one of the things you addressed was the existence of people who are happily married, love their partners. They're not the victims of contempt or neglect or betrayal in other forms besides sexual ones. And yet they hadn't affairs. They cheated on partners that they have monogamous commitments, that they didn't want to hurt and don't want to leave and do love.
which seems an almost impossible thing for people to wrap their heads around, except if people sit down and read your work. But it was the most important finding. There are egregious situations where it's quite black and white. I'm not always thinking it's nuanced. Sometimes it just like you lift your heads and your eyes and you just say, wow, no context will add up to this.
The line I could hearing from people is, I love, you know how in mating and captivity people would say to me, we love each other very much, we have no sex. And I began to hear a parallel line in the state of affairs. I love my partner, I'm having an affair.
And I feel torn about it, and I don't know what to make of it, et cetera. But what they would say to me is, I feel alive. More than sex or anything, the experience globally, worldwide. The one word that kept repeating, I haven't felt so alive. The aliveness had to do with a lot of other dimensions of relationships. But what they would say, and what I got from it is this. Sometimes it's not that you want to leave your partner.
but you want to leave the person that you have yourself become. And it's not that you're looking for another person, but you're looking for another self or to reconnect with parts of yourself that have gone dormant for decades.
And those lines made it so no affairs are not always symptoms of troubled relationships. They actually are more existential sometimes. They request for something. They're an antidote to deadness. And they are not to blame on the relationship and certainly not on the partner. There's nothing wrong with you. It's not about anything having to do with you not being enough. And that sometimes is even more difficult for people.
is to think it has, you know, if at least it had to do with the relationship, we could fix something. But if it has nothing to do, then I am really at a loss here, completely helpless. So it was a complicated statement, but it is probably the most important statement in the book because the other affairs have been written about. I mean, it's not that they're not there. The narcissists and the serial adulterers and the like scalding, unforgivable betrayal. All of that.
It can't be anything but an attack on the desire to destroy your spouse. But this, I think, is something I wrestle with in what I do all the time, is that people have this impulse to have an affair for their own reason, to assert their individuality, to feel alive. And the way we've structured marriage and relationships and commitment, those things are in conflict.
It becomes ultimately betrayal, selfish. But how do we build marriages so you can have commitment, intimacy, but also have those adventures that make you feel alive? And of course, people in open relationships that are functional and some open relationships aren't, they seem to be straddling that divide or have resolved that tension.
that people who've made monogamous commitments and can't conceive of outside sex as anything but illicit or a betrayal can't quite do or get to. It's sometimes not even the, it's like when you, you know, you hear the stories and sometimes there has been sex months or twice in the course of two years because people are in different places. It's the plot. It's not even, I mean, I remember when you and I talk about this,
I think it's different in a heterosexual context than among men. But in many straight stories, the sex is the sexual energy, it's the possibility, it's the erotic charge that comes from even discussing movies and music. It doesn't come from touching anything. And that's what this alive thing was about. It's different parts of me are talking here that I haven't been in touch with.
the responsible caretaking, caregiving citizen of my drunken brother and my sick and demented father and my partners and my children and for the first time I'm thinking about me, you bet, it's selfish. You bet.
And I don't want to hurt, and I don't want to lie, and it has nothing to do with my marriage. And you listen to these things, and it's like you scratch your head a little bit. And you know that devastation can follow, and the kind of accumulated hurt that is going to happen. My God, the day this thing ends. And you sometimes even hope that, you know, let the thing die a natural death.
When people died younger and they didn't have devices, you know, you only found all of this after grandma was gone, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, when I hear what I'm listening to, I'm thinking about something else that you've written, which is to desire is to want, and in the context of a long-term committed, sexually inclusive relationship, the paradox of the problem is how do you want what you have? It's hard to want what you have. And I think there's this need in all of us
to be wanted by someone who didn't promise to want us all their lives, to have our desirability, our independence, our individuality affirmed, even if there's no acting on it, which is why you recommend, I recommend for people in monogamous relationships.
good flirting, good jealousy, to see your, you describe it in mating activity when you see your partner through the eyes of another who is desiring your partner, who may be hitting on your partner because they didn't look for the wedding ring or they don't care about the wedding, but you know your partner's going home with you, that that can revive
your ability to see what's to want your partner again, to want them back. And I do think that that's a powerful drive that we don't, we don't know what to do with, in committed monogamous, excessive relationships. Like how do you allow for your partner to want to be wanted by someone whose job it isn't to want them and make space for that and trust that you're not going to get cheated on?
I think there are two different questions here. You know, if you want an insurance policy, I can't give you. There's no fair proofing your relationship despite all the books that I've seen in the self-help sections. No, I don't. I think that ultimately what you hope is that when there is any temptation, I see your face approached from behind the screen and it kind of captures my eye in front of me and I just say, I would love to, but no, it's not worth it.
It's not, you know, I won't do this to you. And suddenly you experience the conflict between your desires and your conscience, basically. But you acknowledge your desires. And if you have a relationship that can be open enough to make space for those desires, then you even have a partner to whom you can say that. And you can talk about this. And that in itself brings air. Fire needs air. If you try to choke it down, you will get a flicker. You won't get a flame.
And so when I wrote about the eyes of the other, it goes a step further because if another can want your partner, then you never have your partner. Distilled that you actually have a challenge to want what you already have, presumes that you have. And any affair tells you that you don't. This notion is a contrived illusion of safety. We don't have our partner. They are forever.
Free agents, they can die, they can get sick, they can fall in love with someone else. As a result, invest the most and the best of you in your relationship so that you have more of them. But no, there is no guarantee. And that is an existential dread with which free love lives with. If you don't want that, go to traditional societies in which
There is no choice. You have been married to someone. You are in it for life. And it's a different conception of marriage. But if we want a marriage or a committed relationship that is rooted in free choice, then we have to live with the anxiety that that choice can be at times changed.
The gift of embracing that anxiety and living with it and living with the existential howling void of it, is it really does solve for something else that threatens relationships which is being taken for granted. If you know your partner can leave at any time, could fuck anybody else at any time, then you know that you kind of, and I say this to people and sometimes it makes people mad at me, you have to earn your partner every day.
That's right. I think there's something fundamentally transactional about all relationships and you pay in an intimate, loving, committed relationship with time, attention, affection, prioritization, sex, you pay in. And to earn all of that back from that person, you can't take them for granted or take what they're bringing to you for granted either. And so if you just embrace it, like, yeah, they're free to go at any time. And so I don't want them to go. And so I'm going to show up for them.
That's right. That's right. I say this so many times. You know, if you want a curse, if you want to put them down, if you want to be dismissive, if you want to talk to them with your face glued to your screen, don't think that there won't be somebody else out there who says, no, you know that I can't understand how they treat your partner treats you like this. I think you are a wonderful person.
You know, no, you're not at all a mess. I think you are so inspiring. No, I don't think you're a fuck up at all. I think you have really deep values. I mean, you know. I think your band is going to get signed. We've been talking for such a long time. We haven't talked about what you're here to talk about today, which is your new online course where I actually think we may have a point of difference or contention here that we could unpack a little bit.
two courses, one that is bringing back desire for people who are really stuck in a sexual rut in an impasse, can't talk about it or have really poor conversations about it, experience a massive discrepancy of desire with the pursuer and the distancer, and they just don't know where to get the flicker back.
The second part, playing with desire, and some people just go directly to playing with desire, is for people who feel like they've kept the flicker, but the flame is gone. And they would like to experience something more robust, more intense, more exciting. They feel like they're kind of slouched in complacency and laziness, and they don't know how to jolt themselves out of it. And to give a tool that is not just a book,
But that is actually one hour set of short videos with a great workbook. It's the workbook that never actually accompanied mating in some way. And that gives you practices, tools, ideas, conversations, interesting conversations, not conversations about the fact that we never have sex. And that's supposed to make us want to have sex by talking about how we never have sex. Now, how do you actually have rich sexual conversations that make you kind of
curious about each other, to the point of even being turned down to each other, even if it starts from the mind and not from your genitals. But, you know, it's that course for anybody, any age, any stage, any orientation, the whole thing, but who
who say, you know, it's hard to sit on the couch at night for the umpteen time where each of us is watching TV, scrolling on the phone at the same time, answering with that classic lag of, uh-huh, uh-huh, you know, well, somebody's trying to say something interesting, and suddenly say, I'd love to talk about sex.
You know, I'd love to talk about where we are at or I'd love to discuss something that's been really a part of my fantasy life. So, you know, how do you do that? So I have a card game that really promotes a lot of conversations between people and partners. But then I thought something more targeted that isn't therapy.
And you do amongst you that you can come back to that workbook for years and you pick one question out of it or one thing that says, I could use exploring that for myself, not just with my partner alone. I need to understand this thing about me, then maybe I can go and have a chat with you.
So when you do couples counseling, you're a psychotherapist, you work with couples, there have to be couples who come and sit down in front of you where you know you can tell instantly. One of them doesn't really want to be there, but it feels like they have to be there, that they have to go through the motions, that this is what is required of them, expected of them, it makes them a good person, that they're at least they're willing to show up and try to do the work, but they're not doing the work. Is that not also,
A version of that couple is going to come to this course where one person is done with sex doesn't want to have sex or doesn't want to fuck the person that they married anymore after 20 years. And what they're told by the sex and relationship industrial advice complex is that you can get that spark back if you just communicate. But what you can't communicate if you're the person who just doesn't want to fuck that person that you married 30 years ago anymore, you can't say that.
You can't. And so you'll go through the motions of pretending. You're saying it daily through your behavior. You don't have to put words to it. Yes, you're saying it through your behavior and saying, I don't know why this is a problem. The spark has gone out. But there's not going to be, in some cases, the part of both parties, a good faith effort.
to do this work. There's going to be the going through the motions on one person's part because we've been together 25 years. It's terrible. We're not fucking. We should be fucking. And we can get the spark back. There's a million books in the relationship self help section about getting the spark back. And where I've come to lately is like, I think what we need to say in addition to like, here's how you can get the spark back is for some of you motherfuckers, it's not coming back. Now what?
companionate marriage, open marriage, divorce, and everything that entails about like everything you are is a married couple after 25, 30 years. It's not just we fuck and we got married. We fuck with rings on. That's not what a marriage is after decades and decades and children and mixed finances. It's all those other things. And so if it's going to be a sexist marriage, how do we in the sex and relationship industrial advice complex who really do
Elevate this idea, hold up as a goal, like getting you too fucking again. How do we identify those couples where that's not just going to happen ever, especially help the one who still wants to fuck their spouse who doesn't want to fuck them get to a place where that marriage feels healthy and functional and loving and intimate again, even if the sex is never coming back as the spark is out permanently. I actually am completely aligned with you, but I have done this.
For many years, I say to people, you know, your relationship is primarily a scaffolding. It's what it gives you access to. But it's not necessarily what exists between the two of you. And that is a model. I say, you are an affectionate companionate couple. You are deep friends. You are no longer romantically involved. What do you want to do with that?
If both people say that I'm good with this at this stage, there's not much that we need to talk about. If one person said, I still want to feel this thing, will I ever get this back? Will I never be touched again? I mean, I can't live like this. I'm drying on the vine. Then you say to the other person, this is a power trip.
If you say no, but you can't have it anywhere else either, you're in a power struggle here. And the question is, what are you afraid of? You can't trap your partner into the desert to protect you from your fear of abandonment. Or you may not want to reach out anywhere else because you are afraid of the consequences of this. And we don't need to make a decision, but we do need to have a conversation about any of this.
This comes up all the time in Savage Love, where one person wants to not be a cheating piece of shit, wants to be ethically non-monogamous, a sexless marriage, like, haven't had sex for a decade, and goes to their partner and says, obviously I'm committed, I'm not going anywhere.
I'd like to have permission to discreetly seek sex outside the relationship, because our relationship isn't sexual anymore, and they get no. You made him an agamous commitment. You signed a, I guess, sex-life mutual construction power. But I did make a custody commitment. A monogamy commitment is not a chastity vow.
A monogamy commitment imposes on both sides. The assumption is I will meet your sexual needs, and only I will meet them, but I will meet them. But when you're done meeting them, people do have it in their head that monogamy in a sexist marriage means that you don't get to fuck anybody else, or get to fuck ever again if I don't wanna fuck you, that you have this power to unilaterally declare someone else's sex life over if they were fool enough to make a monogamous commitment to you. And these are where I get in trouble sometimes with my readers, because my catchphrase is do what you need to do to stay married and stay sane.
in that context. Like if you go to them and try to do the right thing and get the okay and you don't get the okay and it's still sexless and it's not something they want to work on. They don't want to take Esther Perel's Art of Desire course with you. I think you're freed from that commitment and you're allowed to take care of your needs.
When we did the course, this was a question that came up all the time. Who is it for, right? And who will benefit from this? And what do we say to the person who says, I've tried to get my partner to engage in this? Is it still worth it for me to take the course? And I say, you will learn a ton about yourself and you will learn about your limits and you will learn about
how important this sex to you, and I'm not talking actually just the fucking. It's being seen by someone, it's someone who looks at you and still notices that you have a body, somebody who touches you, somebody who, it's a sensuality, I actually broaden it. Because people can sometimes live even with the no fucking, but it's the entire erotic realm that disappears.
And that gives people a real sense of grief. What you're dealing with is not horniness. You're dealing with loss. You're dealing with grief. You're dealing with, you know, I am a cherished spouse or partner, but I am a famished lover.
That's the experience. It's like it is an experience of deadness. They can feel really loved and that's why it's so tormenting because they do feel deeply loved. They feel cared for. They know that there's no one who would be there for them the way that their partner will show up. But there is something about that sensual, sensuous touch, gaze, smile, lick.
flicker, you know? Can you get that from someone you've been married to for 30 years? Yes, yes, you can. But of course, you know, you can. But when you don't have it, when you have a person who says next to you, if I never had sex for the rest of my life, I wouldn't miss it. I don't want anything to do with this. My shop is closed or grind. There is a lot more exciting. Or when I am stressed, the first thing that goes is sex.
And the other one says, when I'm stressed, the place where I get relaxation and release is insects. I mean, when you have very different meanings of what sex does for you in your life, I think that sometimes it's beyond repair. And I think that sometimes it's about telling this person, you have a choice to make.
But just because it's beyond repair doesn't mean the marriage is over. It's about adjusting expectations, about contingencies, renegotiating the terms of the marriage. No, no, no, the marriage is not over at all, but the person has a choice to make. I've talked to people who
suffered from the kind of intimacy starvation that can come with the sex ending, where they're not touched, they're not held, and they just, their skin starved for touch and intimacy, who then made an arrangement to open the relationship, to seek sex outside the relationship, and their partner was getting sex outside the relationship, and then they felt comfortable being physically intimate again, because there wasn't this understanding that the initiation of any physical intimacy would
result in one person feeling pressured to have sex they didn't want to have. That because that sexual need was now being, the lawn was being mowed by somebody else. You got a gardener to do the work you didn't want to do. And people were able then, I've heard people were able then to reconnect in a loving, intimate, comforting way that wasn't sexual, but was erotic and met needs for touch.
that weren't ruined. The touch wasn't ruined by like one person wanting more and one person feeling like they're going to be a disappointment or they're going to have to shut it down. And I mean, yeah, sometimes I just think everybody should be non-monogamous after a while. But that's... Well, I don't think that the monogamy issue is the central, only the central thing. I think that there are other things that for me shift the mindset. So for example, it's very important for me to explain to people the difference between sex and eroticism.
I mean, everyone understands the difference between a relationship that isn't dead and a relationship that is alive. And I talk about eroticism as a quality of aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, an engagement with curiosity, playfulness, imagination, not just a repertoire of sexual techniques and urges and toys. And you can do a lot of sex and feel very little. And you can do very little.
And through your imagination, experience a level of arousal and excitement that is unmatched. But it's so important to have that feeling of possibility. That's right. And to have that in the context of a long-term relationship, I think it's deadly when people look at their spouses and think, there's the reason I can't.
whatever it is. Like, I can't go to the bachelor party. I can't, you know, he met my personal trainer at the gym and thought I was too hot and was threatened by that. Now I can't go to that personal trip. Like the ways people like box each other in rather than freeing each other. And it's so much better if people in a long-term relationship can look at their partner, even if it's monogamous, sexually exclusive, and think there why I can, that being with this person brings me.
Or for you, I will. The wording that you just had, which I think is so important, is that we don't really feel more secure because we establish a surveillance system. Intimacy is not a surveillance system. And when people feel free, they come back. Because they wonder, you know, who else is going to give me that kind of freedom? Who else is going to acknowledge me, see me, know me?
you know, want for me in that kind of way. And I'm not talking about the freedom just to have sex elsewhere. It's a lot of things that people restrict. I think that, you know, the other thing that is so central to me is to separate for people and let them know that sex isn't just something you do. It's not an act.
Only, it's a place you go, it's a journey you take inside yourself with others and that your deepest emotional needs are expressed in the language and the experience of sex. It's not just sexual needs and that once you bring those two together, you stop separating sex from intimacy.
We're never going to get to the calls because now I want to ask you about that, you know, relationships as police states, I'm constantly battling against the emergence of new microns. She won't let me. She won't let me. And sometimes relationships are police states in advance of anybody cheating or anything happening that shouldn't have happened.
because one person is jealous and controlling, but sometimes in the wake of an affair, a police state emerges, where somebody who is cheated on, I have to look at your phone, I can't trust you, I forgive you, but you have to live.
in this police state now where I am constantly policing you for evidence that you may have cheated again. And that relationship will not survive. You almost have to, having been cheated on and forgiven to spend your disbelief or reconcile yourself to the fact that cheating is a thing that sometimes happens in the context of a committed relationship. And it could happen to me again, but I'm not going to live with the fear of it every moment and police my partner
because that's just going to become what the relationship is. You're not the spouse, you're the stazzy, and it's not going to be healthy, even if you could maybe control for preventing an affair a decade later by creating a surveillance state, like you said. I think that what people feel when they've been betrayed, deceived, lied to is such a devaluation.
that I could be treated in such a way, that for me, the importance of the repair lies in your reclaiming the value of your partner. You're not cheating, but you not paying any attention to your partner or not being any kinder or not being any more loving or desiring
So you're not stepping outside, but that is not enough. And so instead of saying your surveillance, you're keeping all the passwords isn't really a way to be, I say, what you need and what you're trying to get, there's a better way to do it. Okay, Esther, nobody gets out of here with answering one of my listeners' questions, and this one fits what we've been talking about.
Hey Dan, I'm a female in my late 30s. My husband and I have a wonderful relationship. We have so much fun together. We support each other's careers. We have great sex. And we always said that if we felt trapped or bored sexually that we could come to each other and consider opening up the relationship or do other things to spice it up.
But obviously that's easier said than done. I just had our second baby. He travels for work a lot and long story short he cheated on me and I found out. He said he was having urges to hook up with someone he works with here and there.
But he didn't feel like he could come to me about it now because it would be pretty unfair and kind of cruel to ask to open up our relationship while I have a six-month-old baby on my boob and I've been sick and exhausted.
So yes, I'm scared and sad. I feel sick about this. But I also don't think this kind of cheating should be an extinction level event for a great relationship. And I think and I hope we'll get through it. But my problem is the way I process things is I talk through everything with my friends. I'm a crowd sorcerer. I'm an overshare. In this case, even my open-minded group of friends, they'd be really defensive of me.
They'd be really angry with him. I don't want more to change than it has to out of this shitty situation. You know, he would always be the husband who cheated if I told anyone. So I feel kind of alone in this situation. What do you think, Dan? Should I keep a secret? A stare, keep it secret or lean on your friends about this sort of an affair.
So I will start with the question, but I'm going to walk my way back because basically the first thing that she says is affairs happen in open relationships, too. Because relationships have rules. And if you trespass the rules and you betray them, you will be in a position of the transgressor. And so that's a very important piece to the story. The next thing is I do think
that it's very difficult to become the bearer of a secret that is now a secret. So you have a double layer of shame.
It's what he did and what you can't tell that he did, which now you have to live with. And so now you have a secret too. And this is really painful on people. It eats them from inside. I think that her concern about the friends judging him during a small town is valid, is real. But I do think that I always say to people, is there one or two people?
that you know and they may not be your closest people who you could talk to. And A, you know you can trust their confidentiality and B, won't give you advice. We let you figure it out. You are the only one who has to live with the consequences of knowing.
and the consequences of your decision. And everybody will project themselves into your story and tell them, throw the dog on the curb. Once a cheater, always a cheater or no, it's because you need to understand man or you need to understand. I mean, everyone is gonna give you every line that's been peddled around in our culture.
You want someone who can let give you the space to figure it out, to be loving and to be angry. Because if they start to be angry and hate him, you're going to protect him and you're going to defend him when you've just been hurt by this guy. And so you need to be able to be in touch with your anger and your resentment and your hopelessness and your love and all the cornucopia of contradictory emotions that are filling you up at the same time. Love me. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. Don't touch me.
Stay with me, get the fuck out of here. All of it, you know? And it's that mess that you need to be able to go through. Find one person if you can or only to, or even to, so that you can take the cork of the bottle and it doesn't fester inside like that and you feel like in every situation you are
you're in a status of lying and nobody knows what you're going through. And you just feel more and more dissociated through the veil and the shroud of secrecy. It's that that I'm addressing with her. It's not about, do I tell them, who do you tell when and what? Pick them carefully.
I wanted to tell everybody, but for selfish voted reasons. Not for me personally, I have no iron in this fire, dick in this relationship. But because when an affair ends the marriage, everybody hears about that affair.
because it goes public. Most often when a couple works through an affair, nobody ever hears about it. So we have examples in our life of many, many couples, loving relationships that we assume to have been successfully monogamous, to have never faced the betrayal, the scarring of infidelity, and it warps our
Excuse our perspective on what must end a relationship or destroy a relationship. Part of me wants to say, I completely agree with what you said, Esther. Find those couple of people who will listen and not talk to everybody if you want to keep this private, but you have to open up. Part of me is like, I wish everybody heard about the affairs that relationships survived too, because then people would see that affairs are something relationships can survive and routinely do.
Great. And I would welcome that if we were in a situation where people actually see the hard work of staying, repairing, rebuilding, reconnecting as something that is worthwhile to aspire to. But these days, it's the Clinton situation. If you once were ashamed to divorce, today you need to be ashamed because you're staying after your partner cheated on you.
Because if you have confidence and self-esteem and the ability to take care of yourself, you should be out of there. And that is a tremendous pressure on women that forgiving is weakness or that still loving is weakness. And when I say on women, I will say that in some parts of the world
just go down to the next neighbor country, Mexico, and the whole continent following its worst for men. Because the man who forgives, or the man who still loves her, the man who says, I stay with her because we have a whole world, and whatever is really a worse, who couldn't keep his wife in check. And I mean, you put that plot in a more majestic context, and it's even worse. So I wish people would see that
In long-term relationships, they're going to be betrayals, and sometimes this is one of them. And this secret will turn into a memory. And for many couples, it actually offered them an amazing reset. I mean, I actually always said there's three outcomes. There's the ones who stay together, but they're festering into a marital cell.
There's the one who stay together and who put the whole thing out and they never talk about it and they see it as a complete state of insanity that they went through and you know, and then there's the ones who say it was the worst thing that happened to us and it completely changed our relationship. For the good. For the good. I start. Thank you so much for coming for demeaning yourself by coming on my dumb podcast. I really appreciate it. Oh, come on. It's a pleasure to be here.
Check out all Esther Perel has to offer, including her courses on desire, her fabulous podcast, and her books at Esther Perel.com.
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