Reignite Your Relationship: Esther Perel On Desire, Intimacy, Sex, & Long-term Love

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A lot of sexual conversations about sexuality, especially in the United States, is either smart or sanctimony. It's rarely just a natural conversation, an amazing window into the self. You can ask a couple, do you still have sex? That's not the same as, what is the role of sex in your life?

My guest today is Esther Perel, a psychotherapist, a best-selling author, and one of the most prominent and original authorities on relationships and sexuality. Esther is fluent in nine languages. Her TED talks have amassed over 40 million views. Her mega-best-selling books have been translated into 30 languages, and her podcast, Where Should We Begin, is a fly-on-the-wall immersion into her doctor-patient experience.

In a long-term relationship, everything that is spontaneous already happened. If you keep doing the things you are comfortable with and you enjoy and they are familiar, you strengthen the friendship dimension of a relationship.

But if you say, I want to feel alive in my relationship, then you need to do something different than just the familiar and the cozy. This is a conversation about modern love. In candid terms, we discuss sexuality, dating, navigating conflict, and how to maintain or resuscitate sexual desire in long-term relationships. A topic, let's just say, demands a certain level of vulnerability on my part.

Before we dig in, Esther was kind enough to offer all of you a discount on her newly launched course called The Desire Bundle. Enter code rich15 when you sign up at estairparale.com and save 15% now through December 2024. Esther is amazing and I think you'll find this conversation is packed with priceless, actionable insights.

Sexuality is a window into a person and into a relationship. People think of sex as something you do. You have sex. Rather than, it's an experience. Where do you go in sex? Tell me how you were loved, and I will tell you how you make love. Esther, it's a delight to meet you. Thank you for doing this today. I'm pleased to be here.

How was your event the other night? You had a big Los Angeles live event as part of this ongoing tour that you're on. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I'm on my first US tour.

It's an immersive experience with thousands of people. Now I'm starting the West Coast and I've been very used for so many years to be in my office, behind closed doors and four walls in very quiet.

confidential space. And then I decided I wanted to open the door and lower the walls to my office and invite people to actually come into the office and hear what are the stories and the transformations and the challenges that people experience there because most people have no idea what's really happening in the lives of others.

And then I thought, how about if I take the office outside and take it with me onto a stage and I recreate a communal experience?

of people about relationships. And so that's what it is. And here we were, you know, almost 5,000 people. And the most beautiful compliment I can receive is when people said, it felt like we were in the office with you. And I just thought, okay, that's exactly what I wanted to do. And so it's very moving.

That's no small feat to be able to create something intimate in a room that large with that many people. Like, how do you even approach that to make it interactive in a way where everybody feels like you're talking to them and you're part of just, you know, some version of that one-on-one experience? I mean, I would want to say you should come to know. I mean, unfortunately, it's totally so loud, but it's about creating interactions in the audience.

It's about finding out who are the people who came by themselves and know no one there, and then making sure that the people who are next to them introduce themselves. And you create connection in the here and now rather just than talking about connection, you make it happen.

It's about finding out who was dragged there and kind of showed up as a plus one but knows nothing about my work and is wondering where the heck did I land and just acknowledging them because I have a tremendous amount of respect for skeptics and for people who are in this space who this is really not their natural vocabulary. It's about

asking people if they are in a relationship or if they would like to be in a relationship or if they would like to be out of the relationship that they are in, or at least on occasion. Which I am to, and I think that kind of establishes a level of honesty. We're not just here to talk about perfection. We're here to talk about the real life experience of something that we all share. We are all born in relationships.

And we all have legacies and we all want to find ways to connect with ourselves and with the other. And I create a host of different interactions. I make people talk to strangers. I play the card game with the audience. I do a very long Q&A. It's half the talk, half the evening. And the Q&A is not just a question answer. It's really a way of weaving together the

the most important concerns that are available that evening. You take all the questions sort of in a row and then you kind of find ways to tie them all together into some kind of unifying principle. I think that unifying principle or the communality, sometimes this question is formulated very differently, but it actually goes at the same thing as that question, which was asked from a completely different point of view or starting point.

And in fact, both questions are aiming at something that is shared. And when you recognize that, you also create connections between people who didn't even know that they were thinking about the same thing. So you're weaving not just the questions together, but you're creating a community of questions. How do you describe what it is that you do as a psychoanalyst? And perhaps

What do you think it is about your approach to this world that makes you unique and different? I think it's two different questions. I'm not a psychoanalyst. I'm actually a systemically trained family therapist. I have had a predilection for working with couples, even though I see families and individuals. And so I more and more define myself that I primarily do relationship therapy.

The world of psychotherapies vast, and this is one area that I'm very much interested in. I think that I follow the trajectory of colleagues and teachers who all look at relationships in context. So we're looking at the socio-cultural dimensions of the relationship, we're looking at the family legacies that influence the relationships.

We're looking at the interpersonal dynamics inside the couple, and we're looking at the intro-psychic or the intrapersonal aspects into the individuals. It's four levels. It's multi-level. Michelle Shankman, who really were major influences on me. So it's not a very narrow lens. It's a very layered

you know, lens. And that's something that I prefer to ask people. Why do you choose me? Why do you listen to me? What inspires in what I say? Or in what way did I change the way that you dissolved your relationship or the way you allowed yourself to stay in your relationship? I mean, I think it's difficult to

to identify oneself, you know, what I hear people tell me. I think I have a very multicultural perspective. I speak nine languages and that probably have been around the world. I work globally. I understand that you don't look at relationships dogmatically, but you really look at them contextually. I think I am a rather non-judgmental person.

I think I like to look at a question underneath the question. I think I bring humor and creativity and curiosity to my work. I see psychotherapies as an art. I continue to practice. I practice two days a week. I think it's very important to stay close to the craft itself and challenged because

It's not an easy work. I think that I have a capacity to connect the dots of what I think is happening in society and how that influences what's happening inside your sheets, underneath your sheets. I mean, it's kind of macro-mickering. Right, right, right. I think that.

I mean, that last piece is for me what makes your work so palpable. I mean, I think there is a certain kind of non-judgmental jwadavi that you bring to it and a playfulness also to this landscape that is very inviting because it's intimidating and it's scary and we're all

you know, consumed by guilt and shame and fear and all these things that are barriers to even beginning the discussion or the conversation around these topics. And you create like a permissiveness around that where it feels like a welcome mat as opposed to like a danger Will Robinson sort of sign.

But all of it pivots around this idea of kind of navigating the vicissitudes and the landmines of modern love. And the word modern, I think, is very important in there. So how do you think about modern love as opposed to kind of love how we've always sort of conventionally or traditionally understood it? Like what's different about

this moment or these times that make love perhaps a little bit trickier and more complicated to navigate, at least. And I guess I'm speaking to a predominantly Western audience. Yes, but a romantic ideal has penetrated every small corner of the world. Sure. So even though that's what's quite interesting, literally as you're asking the question, I have like four different answers that

Maybe I could do like your live event and ask you like 10 questions and figure out how to synthesize it all. I would start actually with highlighting what I think is a very important change that occurred around the realm of relationships period. For most of history, relationships are organized. And when I say for most of history, it's in comparison to here.

for most of history and still today in many parts of the world. And as I say in my audience, and probably a lot of you sitting right here. Relationships are organized around loyalty and community, around duty and obligation. There's a lot of structure, there's hierarchy,

that describes to you what are the roles, the expectations, the gender roles. And there's a lot of certainty and very little freedom and very little personal expression. And relationships are tight nuts from which you don't extricate yourself very easily.

And we move to a model where structure is replaced by network and the relationships become loose threats that you can fluidly go in and out of. And we have unprecedented choices and options. And now at the heart of relationship is the individual. And this individual is in search of community.

Previously, there was a search of personal freedom. And at the heart of this individual are their feelings. And the dominant feeling is the feeling of authenticity. And authenticity is being true to myself. And in the name of being true to myself, today we forego relationships. To not betray me, I will

leave you and we have never been more free and we have never been more alone and we have never had more uncertainty and more self-doubt. So that's the ground of modern love. Does that make you reflect on

past paradigms of relationships with a sort of rose colored glasses, like was it better? I mean, obviously we're talking about to drill down on it. It's like, okay, in the past relationships were about class structure. They were about power and security, arranged marriages, et cetera. They were political and the furthest thing from kind of

freely chosen or about romance and love, right? Well, romance and love existed, special has always existed. But that wasn't the reason to get married. No. But no, I don't at all. I think I certainly wouldn't want to go back to the situation of my grandmother.

So that is, it's very simple. No, I think we have, when I say unprecedented choices, I cherish them, I value them, but I'm also aware that they come with a set of consequences. Modern love exists against the backdrop of emotional capitalism, where we are constantly urged to maximize and optimize our choices.

where we end up sometimes evaluating ourselves as products, where we have to deal with comparison as the thief of joy, and where we partake in a frenzy of romantic consumerism, where we sometimes are afraid to commit to the good for fear of missing out on the perfect. And we want to find a soulmate on an app.

This is modern love. And this soul made by the way which has always meant God until now is now a person. And with this person I want to experience wholeness and belonging and meaning and ecstasy and transcendence, all stuff that we used to look for in the realm of the divine. And all of this is changing the definition of modern intimacy. Modern intimacy is no longer about, I come to you with my dowry and my herd. Modern intimacy is I come to me with my interior life.

And I'm going to communicate with you. It's a communicative experience. And I'm going to open up and share with you my fears, my vulnerabilities, my aspirations, and you are going to reflect back and validate me and momentarily help me transcend my existential aloneness.

So modern intimacy is into me see. Yeah, it's a lot. The degree of difficulty is insanely high and the level of pressure that is shouldered by not only the seeker, but the sought.

is equally insane. And this is all set against a backdrop in which our culture is increasingly secular. We don't have our religious traditions to look for the divine anymore, so we look for it in other individuals. And, you know, particularly or acutely.

Yes, that's a newer thing. There's something acutely American also about the individual like sort of reigning supreme, right? It's all about me, what I need, what my needs are, and my individual happiness. And there's a lot.

that gets then projected on the sort of romantic candidate to fulfill a number of categories to be kind of worthy of playing that role. You want to list? Yeah, let's hear it. So I want all the things that I've always wanted in that we have always wanted in traditional relationships, companionship, economic support, family life, social status.

But I want you to also be my best friend, my trusted confidant, my intellectual equal, my efficient co-parent, my fitness buddy, my professional coach and my personal development guru.

And on top of all of that, I want you to be my passionate lover to boot for the long haul, by the way. And that long haul keeps on getting longer. It's amazing that any relationship survives this list of requirements. But many of them are crumbling under the weights of the expectations. I mean, this is an overburdened system with an under-resourced reality since the traditional support systems are not in place. And this is one of the challenges of modern love. Point.

So, I mean, that's like, how to even begin with that, right? Like, so how does one who comes to you, who is in a relationship dilemma? I realize this is very general, but... What's the first thing I say to both of you?

Okay, so here's all the things. Here's all the expectations that each person has on each side. There's no possible way that two people coming together are going to be able to meet that for each other. So with the understanding of that landscape, how does one figure out how to reframe that or come up with a different paradigm that's going to be functional and healthy?

I think one of the first questions I often ask is, who else is in your system? Who is part of this social system? A relationship exists in an ecology. It's an ecosystem. Who else is here? Who is there from the family of origin or from a chosen family or among friends or mentors or teachers? Who's supporting you?

You know, when I officiate at weddings, which I have to do sometimes, I say to them, you know, this is not just about we're coming to celebrate couple such and such. This is about you're offering your support as the witnesses to this couple for the rest of their life, because every person at this wedding is thinking about their own relationship.

while you're listening to these lofty vows. So that's the first thing, is to help people to not think about their relationship as a story of two. That's a concept, that's a paradigm shift. Thinking of it more broadly as

a communal dynamic in which there are, it's a multiplayer game. Correct. Yeah. And you may have all these needs. There's not, you know, people always say, so after these long lists, are we asking for too much? I say, no, we're not. I think it's beautiful what we are asking for, but we shouldn't ask it from one person.

What about the people that are part of the relationship in shadow only? You know, the people that live in our interior lives who might not actually be present, but the residue of past experiences with these people tend to show up and impact relationships in ways that maybe we don't fully appreciate or understand. Positive or negative? Both.

I think that is reality, right? Everybody has had people who took care of them or raised them or did not and should have. People have had people who have heard them in the course of their life and others who have inspired them, others who believed in them, even before they believed in themselves, access, lost children. I mean, we have a legacy, a relationship with loads of people who live inside of us.

So they appear in different ways. Sometimes they appear with an acute sense of loss. I wish my mother was here to see this. Sometimes they appear as a sense of hyper-vigilance. I let my ex get away with that. I'm not going through this again. Sometimes they appear as a deep sense of longing. I want to feel that freedom again that I used to have as a kid.

So they're associated with situations, emotions, and often yearnings. Or yearnings to not repeat, or yearnings to experience some of that once again. And the most important thing about it is to be aware of it. I think the shadow people

is our human existence. But sometimes we don't realize that they are shadow people and we think that the way I'm responding to you is because of what you are doing to me, when in fact I'm projecting onto you something that someone else did to me. Right, of course.

We all have those shadow people. And I think, I mean, that was very well said. My sense is that a lot of relationship difficulties could be avoided with adequate self-awareness on both sides of what you just said. And then also being able to talk that through because both parties are bringing all of that to this equation. And unless the other side doesn't really understand all of that with their partner, that stuff's going to come up.

and derail their relationship or create conflict where it's not even clear like why this conflict is occurring or what the way out of it is. Yes, yes. But I think that, you know, I was answering it kind of as you were asking you question. I also think that one of the most important things that often is missing is a sense of humor, a perspective.

Humor is a form of reinterpretation of what's happening. That's the perspective. And it creates a certain distance from it. It's a rewriting, giving meaning to something that is completely different than the literal meaning. And I think that what happens when people get into stalemates, gridlocks, impasses, conflicts, escalations, then you name it,

they often become extremely concrete and literal and serious. And that seriousness is what leads them to interpret their stories and to hold on so tenaciously to their stories as if it is the truth. Relationships are stories.

Sure, but when you're in that reactive mode or that cycle of conflict and resolution, it's hard to hold on to levity and humor. Humor feels like a far distant thing that can at times seem impossible. Yes.

Because you need to start much sooner. You don't do humor when you're already in the dark pit. You do humor when you say, oh, we've been there. We've been there so many... No, we're not going there. Come on. You know, you want to do number 63 again?

Number 63 is really a good one for us, no? And you join, you don't do sarcasm, you don't belittle, you don't degrade, you just say, oh, we are more important than just this. We're gonna do what, the toothbrush, we're gonna do this one, this fight, another one, every year the holidays come back and every year we have the same fight. And it's a kind of a, let's not go there.

It's meant to be a self, it's not to end a diffusing, and it's meant to say, we control the narrative rather than the narrative controls us. When people come stuck, which is mostly when they come to me,

The story rules them. They're no longer altering their own story. It just plays itself out in a split second. They hate where they are. They have no idea what they devolved there. What the hell is going on, you know? But they don't know how to get out of it.

The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and conversely, the stories we tell about who we think our partner is become so all powerful, right? Like, I'm this way because of this and here's what's important to me or whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is. We all have.

that story. And those then become predictors of behavior and rationalizations and excuses and the like, we can point to our past and say, well, I did this because of this or, you know, here's my wound. And, you know, you need to understand that. And a lot of these things get weaponized and projected onto our partners and become inflammatory rather than

a roadmap out of it, like we become entrenched in these stories and then we just repeat these patterns that ultimately lead to the destruction of relationships in a way that for many people, like they don't even know how they got there.

I mean, I often say, you know, that when I say people are stuck, stuck is made up of often two elements. One is trapped in increasingly rapid cycles of escalation of blame and defense, which means reactivity rather than curiosity and reflection. And number two is

The story that people tell, which is that the story becomes very rigid and we hold on to it. And the story is made up of two cognitive distortions often when it gets that fixed. The first one is that we get caught in confirmation bias. Yeah, confirmation bias is that once I have decided

that you don't care or you're selfish or you're a slob or you really didn't mean when you apologized or you don't value me or whatever of those things. Now this becomes the lens through which I see you and I seek evidence that reinforces my belief and I discard evidence that challenges it.

I have a whole course on conflict that I produced and this one is a very, very big one is to track yourself. What did I pay attention to? Sometimes I just tell people I want you in the course of the next few days. I know what you focus on. I know what you see. I know that you also engage vividly in what we call fundamental attribution error, which means that I am complex

and you are much more simple. If I'm in a bad mood, it's because something happened along the way and it really kind of influenced my mood today.

But if you're in a bad mood, it's because you're just a nasty person. Mind is circumstantial, yours is characterological. And so then I give the framework. And then I say, and I'll go out for the next few days, and I would like to just for you pay attention and write down every little thing that you notice that your partner is doing for the good of the community, for the good of the relationship.

as a way of breaking that denial. That self-reinforcing self-fulfilling idea, you know, because it's tenacious the way that the story wants to hold on. And so it keeps looking, you know, I mean, you never do this, you know, and this never means I would like you to do more.

But when you present it as a fact, it's a pseudo-factual thing. And it's okay to say, I would like you to do more of XYZ, but that's not the same as you never do this. And if I tell you you never do this, I promise you, you will find the one example to refute my argument, to prove to me that that's not true, because what about six months ago when you did this?

There was a comedian, I can't remember who it was, but he had this great joke, it's something like, my love language is my list of all the ways that you've wronged me. We hold on to that so tightly, and we seek out evidence to support it whenever we can. That is confirmation bias, exactly. But you know, the interesting thing is that at the same time as people do that, they yearn for it to be different.

But they don't know how they themselves are contributing sometimes to making it not change. Not change.

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Long time in recovery and as you know, one of the key tools in 12-step is performing the inventory, right? Which is basically like...

looking at your part in every equation and getting out of blame. And that is a very powerful tool in many contexts, not the least of which is this, like being able to step back and in a place of equanimity, like really get honest with yourself about the ways in which you're contributing to the unhealthy dynamic to kind of disabuse yourself of that cognitive bias. But you know why it's so important?

Because one piece is I take responsibility. I'm accountable. Okay. So I've checked myself and here are the ways in which I think I've done things that are not necessarily helpful to us. And here are things that I think actually I want to do or I am doing that I think are for the good of us. But beyond that, I think what's so powerful about the inventory or accountability as a whole

is that it really is the foundation for self-esteem and self-confidence. Because it says, this is what my friend Terry Meals always says, I am flawed.

But I can still hold myself in high regard. In order to take responsibility, you cannot sink into shame. I'm a piece of shit. I'm such a lousy person. You have to still respect yourself and have dignity. But at the same time, you know that you're capable of nasty, harmful, destructive, cruel stuff.

That's the whole spectrum of it, yeah. And that's what happens when you do the inventories, you say, because if you just say, I'm such a piece of shit.

then I feel so bad about myself that you no longer have any reason to be angry with me. Right, but there's a sort of indulgent narcissism with that as well. You can sort of go around saying that to people, and there's a performance aspect to that that's a little bit dishonest. You're saying that as much about reaffirming whatever your view of yourself is as a way of keeping people out of distance or kind of playing the victim.

Basically, you're not really seeing the other. You're still at the center of the universe. Right. You're making it about yourself. It's about you. It's about you. And that's why when you actually really make it about the other and you really own it, then ownership is freedom. That's what I mean by I'm flawed, but I'm standing tall and I own it. And by owning it, I'm free.

It's a very important concept. People think that by owning it, I'm the blame and I'm the bad person and I know. The way into that for me is to do my best to not get defensive, particularly in the heat of the moment, like if I can just hear it out.

and take a beat and then reflect on it and say, oh, that's, that's interesting. Yeah. I should look at that or let me look at that or tell me more about why you feel that way. Like from, you know, a 10,000 foot view, like if you can really extract yourself out of the emotionality, like the heightened emotionality, that seems to have served me well in those circumstances because we are instinct to just defend ourselves and get defensive and lash out and be aggressive. And of course that just,

creates a downward spiral. But sometimes we come with a predisposition, a propensity for defensiveness, but sometimes we are defensive because someone is attacking us. And instead of them saying, you know, this, for example, I wish you did more of this or less of that or acknowledged here or saw me there, we basically say, you never do, you never see, you never say, nobody wants to be defined by someone else.

It's a kind of a thing we want to have proprietary rights about is me. You don't tell me who I am. Stay out of that zone. And that's what triggers an instant defensiveness as well. So it's sometimes internal. I'm defensive because I instantly can feel bruised and criticized and et cetera, et cetera, and vilified and victim. And sometimes the defensiveness is relational.

Isn't everything relational though? Isn't this one of your big things? We are relationship animals. And although we reflect on ourselves and our own kind of like trajectory through life, we are who we are because of our relationship with other people.

I do tend to think like that, yes. I think we are who we are because our relationship with other people also influence how we see ourselves. I mean, I do think that in the presence of the other we discover ourselves. I think in dialectic terms, I don't think you can know happiness without having known suffering. I don't think you can, you know, know beauty without knowing.

Or good without evil. I mean, these things are inter-dynamically connected, and the same thing is true relationally. I can't know others if I don't really know myself, and I can't know myself if I'm just standing in front of my own mirror.

Right. So the monk who's been meditating alone in a cave for many years is one thing. But the true test of that person's sort of spiritual metal is when they go out into the world, right? Or in the A context, it's like, if you really want to get confronted with your character defects, get into a relationship, right? Because that's the engine for growth in many ways. Like you can only do so much by yourself. It's only in your connections with other human beings that

You learn what needs to change and how to grow. Correct. But some people choose to live more in relationship to nature. Some people choose to live more in relationship to the divine. So the monk may be less preoccupied with their relationship to other humans if they're living in a more insular way. I study people who are in relationships.

with parents and children, with friends. I'm very interested in friendship these days, colleagues, co-founders, creative pairs, all kinds of diets. And that's the field of study for me. So yes, we are relational, but we may choose to actually live in a different relationship, which is to beyond humans.

What is the biggest relationship issue that you find yourself contending with the most with your patients and the people that you see?

I think that they're various different things, and they also are generational and they're cultural. And everything is just one thing. I mean, yes, people often, if they are in relationships, come to say, we don't communicate. But that is a line that opens up an entire portal, you know, to a host of issues. So these days, people are way too much living in a contactless world.

in which they don't really need to leave their house for a lot of things to get food, to work, to exercise, to meet people. I mean, and they are more and more isolated and they become more and more disembodied and they lose a sense of attunement and physical attunement to others.

And they lose the capacity for nuance and negotiation because they also are influenced by algorithmic perfections which give them very polished answers so that you can bifurcate all the inconveniences of life and all the frictions and then they find themselves rather stumped when they have to deal with conflict or friction or differences. So they polarize and they cut off.

That's one narrative. Is that part of why you're so interested in friendships right now? Yes. Because I mean, also, you know, you get questions and then the questions sent to me begin to tell me of a concern that is growing in the society. Friendship breakup. I don't remember 20 years ago having this question at my door as frequently. That doesn't mean that they were not breakups among friends and certainly among brothers and

But this is a very important piece because this is how tensions in the culture and the political systems at large are literally fracturing relationships between people who once cared about each other deeply. I think this description that I just gave you is quite generational.

but of a great concern to me. It's more and more interested. I see more and more people in my office who carry over the expectations for perfections that the algorithmic perfections are giving them and those become their expectations for relationship. It shouldn't be hard. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be this. It shouldn't be that. So that's why I create courses on conflict and on sexuality because it is. Maybe it shouldn't, but it is. It's part of relationships. It's intrinsic to relationships.

I think that contempt is a major issue. You know, the gutments have what they call the four horses of apocalypse.

I agree. I think indifference, criticism, defensiveness, and contempt are major breakdowns of relationship. So they don't call it that. They call it we don't communicate, but underneath we don't communicate at these four. And once you reach that stage of contempt, it becomes very difficult to walk it back. Contempt is often seen as the hardest of the moment. Well,

We're in a very deranging time. Loneliness is another big issue. Inside relationships. This is another piece. Say more about that. I mean, it's not like people haven't been lonely in their marriages, okay?

Communities they went to, neighborhood associations, churches, synagogues, temples, you know, workplaces where they spend a lot of time. So that they support groups of all sorts that were not designated as support groups, but that's what they offered. So you could spend a lot of time in relationships with other people rather than just have to confront your partner all the time. But now,

It's a thing that I've come to call ambiguous loss. Have you ever heard that term? Ambiguous loss is actually a term that was coined by a psychologist Pauline Bus. And she originally created it to describe situations of unresolved mourning. When you don't know if the person is still there or not there. So you can have somebody who is physically sitting right next to you, but they are emotionally or psychologically completely gone, like Alzheimer or dementia.

They don't remember your name, they don't know they exist. But you can also have situations where the person is physically gone, but they are emotionally or psychologically, completely vivid, deployment, disappearance, hostage taking. And in both situations, you don't know if the person is there or not there.

And these days, you find two people sitting at home on their sofas, watching television, scrolling on their phones, trying to say something to each other, where the other person basically says, aha, aha, and you know that they're not really listening, and that that personal thing you just shared kind of evaporated in mid-air, and you experience that incoherent sense of

aloneness next to somebody. That ambiguous loss is, I think, one of the very interesting things. I look at these people, I say, and you came to talk to me about not having sex. I mean, should we talk about sex, or should we talk about this situation first? Being alone in a relationship. Yeah. And doing things that are by their very nature

keeping people not just separate, but immersed in other worlds while they're sitting on their couch together. Now, you could say that, what's different if two people are sitting and reading a novel? Certain things are not that different. They are in a fantasy world, they elsewhere, et cetera. But this thing, on an everyday basis, where people see that they're dinner tables and their faces are in their screens,

And their communication is on WhatsApp. There is something that is freeing at the edges. Sure. Yeah, we're running this gigantic social experiment that I think at this point we know is not in our best interest.

that is uniquely deranging for a whole variety of reasons. One of which is these devices that we're all holding are all bespoke to us and us alone. Like what we're seeing is completely unique and we could be in partnership with someone else and they're looking at their phone, but what they're looking at is, you know, like you're moving apart from each other because you're immersing yourselves in worlds that might not overlap entirely until one day you wake up and you don't know who that person is.

Meanwhile all our interactions socially are through the device and it gives us this illusion of being connected when in fact it's creating more and more loneliness and layer on top of that the increased suburbanization of the world and work from home and all of these things where,

the opportunities and the occasions for being with other people in real life are fewer and far between. And of course, there's going to be a decline or a denigration in our skill, our emotional intelligence, our ability to navigate conflict to be in social situations. And the less we do it, the more intimidating it becomes, the more fearful it is.

You know, I see this with young people and my younger children and they just, they don't want to text. They don't want to get on the phone. They don't want to tell you, like, they don't know how to talk to somebody. And it's like, you have to learn these things, right? It's almost like I have to push them into the world in order to, you know, make sure that they're developing those skills. But all the friends are doing it. And it's like, what is this going to reap for this generation? It's called a rise of artificial intimacy.

Everybody talks about artificial intelligence. It's like, yeah, it's not headed in a good direction. It's headed somewhere that I cannot imagine and predict, but what I do know is this thing about artificial intimacy, it's changing our expectations.

And I hear very often people who are very, very moved that someone sends them birthday wishes on a text rather than on DM. And that means that they were really paying attention to them. And I'm thinking they couldn't pick up the phone and sing a song. And I mean, you really don't ask for much, isn't it? You can have a thousand virtual friends.

and no one to feed your cat. When modern loneliness masks as hyper-connectivity. And then nobody to pick up a prescription at a pharmacy. And then we confuse friends with friendship. That's part of why I was also interested in friendship these days. It's like, what is friendship and how do people cultivate that? Do people know how to cultivate friends, supposedly? But it's two different things. Talk a little bit more about that.

This is such a rich topic, French. I would, I would, one day I'll just talk about friendship alone, but friends accompany you to phases of life or through your entire life. Good friends hold you accountable.

reckon with you. They hold you when you're about to collapse. It's like they have their hands underneath you so that before you hit the ground, you're in their hands and they won't let you fall. Friends believe in you when you're, you know, fretting. Friends, they're also to tell you when you should get out of a relationship that seems to really not be very good for you. Friends, basically sometimes say, stop acting like a jerk.

Friends play with you. Friends discover the world with you explore, travel, like curious. Friends are erotic experiences and they are the only mutually chosen.

I mean, you cannot be friends with someone who is not friends with you. You can love someone who doesn't love you back. But that level of mutuality is a friendship and reciprocity is absolutely unique. Friends is the first relationship that you choose as a child, that is a free choice.

Yeah, I've never thought of it that way, but certainly it's a dynamic that requires effort and work, right? There's a difference between somebody you call your friend because you text each other on the internet occasionally versus the person who's gonna show up in your moments of need. Arthur Brooks calls it the difference between deal friends and real friends. We're chatting via text with a bunch of people, but that's very different qualitatively from a real friend.

Look, I think it's a piece of it that is also very cultural. I mean, English does not have many middle words. It has acquaintance, friends, good friend, best friend. French has a few words in between. But I do remember that when I arrived to the United States, I had to learn that people often say, I have a friend, but that would be someone they hadn't seen in 10 years.

And I just thought, that doesn't exist. What is the French word for that? I know someone. I met someone. I know someone. I used to have a friend. And this is because of mobility. This is because people move here a lot. I'll tell you one thing that is very interesting about friends. And I don't know how it is today, but it was a thing I experienced as a mother.

When my youngest child was in kindergarten, he had a very close friend. And we thought it was a beautiful relationship, these two boys. And it was obvious that they should be together in the same classroom in first grade. And the school basically told us,

No. What's important is that they learn to make new friends, that they be agile, adept at new relationships, because they're about to move around anyway for the rest of their life here. They better know how to create new friends each time.

This was the opposite culturally of the way that we had learned about it in Belgium. When you had a good friend, you made sure to have the kids stay with their best friend because it meant that they were entering into this new phase of life first grade with building support. And that you looked at friendship as how do you reinforce continuity rather than how you reinforce replicability.

Yeah, that seems like a violent act to like engineer a friendship breakup under the idea of like instilling resilience. Yes, but it was that idea. Yeah.

Back to the AI thing. I'm imagining a not too distant future in which there is like a herd device and people can engage with an artificial intelligence that sounds and feels very human and says all the things that you want them to say and you feel seen and heard and understood. But that artificial intelligence is just that it lacks a soul, it lacks a consciousness. And it's a dynamic that's

one-sided because it's engineered specifically to meet your needs. And so what it's teaching you is that

You don't have to worry about your partner's needs because this is a computer, right? And so when that person goes out into the world, they're being programmed into this mentality that they don't need to worry about meeting another person's needs. And any successful relationship is a balancing of meeting each other's needs.

correct and then we're going to get artificially engineered partners. Yeah. Who will provide exactly that kind of. And you're going to have to open up a new part of your practice to like deal with these people and all the dilemmas that they're going to experience. I think that it is a central question. I mean, Sherri Trokel's work on artificial intimacy is really studying that thing. It's like

Relationships are ironed out. Relationships are not just about how the individual gets their needs met in a rather narcissistic way, which means all with the arrow turned to with me. Relationship involves reciprocity, mutuality, attunement, empathy. Those are all experiences that have the arrow pointed towards the other.

And in the machine, you get an order that doesn't have a subjectivity. That order doesn't have a reaction to what you do, even though that will become programmed at some level. And this is a big, big debate, is what kind of lessons for a relationship is this development producing. You talk with

people in AI or people who are very techno optimistic and they always, not always, but they often answer you not yet, it will happen, you know. And if you question that, you know, you're often seen as not necessarily going with progress, so to speak. I think, look, I'll give you another, an example of the opposite of this AI thing, right? I ask a question in the tour.

Just really one of these simple questions, but it tells me so much. How many of you grew up playing freely on the street? Did you? Sure. Any of you kids? Do they play freely on the street? Did they? No, because we live on a busy sort of road where it's not safe to just go out and run down the street.

which is something I've thought a lot about. So last night, you asked me about the show here in LA. I asked these thousands of people and the hands were high up when I said, did you grow up? And when I said, how many of you have children or no children that are playing freely on the street, it was a trickle. What does that mean? It means that play, which is such an important ground for experimentation and learning and development,

Free play used to be this ground for social negotiation, where kids learned to make friends, to make peace, to have enemies, to make wars, to broker agreements, to make rules, to break rules, and this whole ground for unprompted, unmonitored, unscripted negotiation is gone.

And that, to me, is an essential piece of what we are talking about here, when you're talking about the AI that only has one direction. You are programmed to say what I want to hear. It's not a relationship. It's a pacifier. It's inevitable also.

I mean, I live with the developments, you know, but at this moment, I do meet people who enjoy, you know, even I sometimes think my robot's a farmer reliable than my husband, you know.

I mean, but I also- These are all problems born of, I guess at some point, good intentions. Like, you know, the idea that- I'm not gonna be- Kids don't go out and play what? No, I was gonna say I'm not gonna be- AI is extremely important. Sure. It's been a ton of great things, but in the realm of relationships.

Of what? Oh, it's terrible. We can say it. I'm in total agreement with you. I was thinking back to kids and play, like the idea that we need to protect our kids came about at some point where we were all meant to be very afraid of the world.

We're putting helmets on kids for everything in the pads and are kind of projecting a fear onto them that the world is a very dangerous place that has put a damper on you know this kind of free range idea of kids being out in the world and as a result we've sacrificed not only what you mentioned but

kind of the awe and wonder of going on adventures and stretching your own independence, which are, of course, also important skills that you need in the world. And how does that translate into what kind of adults these people become when they internalize that fear and approach the world from that place of thinking that we should all hermetically seal ourselves from it rather than

Embrace it and welcome it and skin our knees and have those experiences which create that resilience and that ability to navigate conflict and difficulty and deal with obstacles as they come.

I agree. Yeah. I've been with my wife for a long time, 25 years or something like that. So I would be remiss and not, you know, exploring what you might be able to share with me that might be helpful in my own marriage. And I would say that I have a very successful marriage and I still, we love each other very much. And I think we're really good at

communication and navigating conflict. We have four kids and they're on the older side now. But I think like a lot of couples who've been together for a long time, you know, relationships are a constantly evolving thing and we go through phases with it.

And now with the kids older, it's sort of like, okay, who are you now? And like, where are we with this whole thing? And how can we get back to some more of the intimacy that was so integral to our relationship in the earlier years and do it from a perspective of

playfulness, right? And so we're, we're in this process of finding our way back to that place, like it's an exploratory phase. And it's fucking hard, man. You know, like it's, this is not an easy thing. And it brings up like so much stuff. And you know, it's hard to talk about this stuff when you've been with somebody for so long. Stuff means what? Yeah, good question. Stuff, what does stuff mean? Having to confront the ways in which

old patterns continue to resurface and lead to conflict, ways in which

Old traumas continue to rear their heads and create conflict, I suppose. And also everything's good, right? Like we can just continue on our way and we're both kind of fulfilled and happy in what we do. And it's easy to kind of perpetuate that and not acknowledge like, hey, we could be more together than we are currently and how do we find our way back there. So stuff, what is the stuff?

I guess there's a lot of stuff, but one would be just allowing things to continue as they always have. Complicency. Yeah, complacency. That was the word I was looking for. I can easily fall into the illusion that it's a static thing when, of course, it's not. It's an always evolving dynamic.

Are older children out of the house? So you still have some living with you. Yeah, so we have a 17 year old daughter and a 20 year old daughter and they're both out of the house. One is in boarding school and one is in college. And then we have a 29 and a 28 year old and they moved out before the pandemic and they were living on the other side of town doing their thing. And then when COVID happened, they moved back and they're still at home, but they're like, they have their own lives. Like they live at home, but like,

You know, it's not like I have to worry about picking them up or where they are on a day to day basis. So it's not quite an emptiness situation in that traditional sense, but it is a moment in which we're attempting to kind of reconnect with each other in a more meaningful way. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot to say about this, but I tend to think

I like that this is a framework that I have often found helpful is that most of us today in the West will have two or three adult relationships or marriages in our lifetime. Some of us are going to do it with the same person. So this is your transition. Are you going to have another relationship with each other?

And that often involves a lot of ritual. I find ritual is an extremely important and undervalued experience in relationships. And the ritual sometimes is about saying goodbye to your first marriage.

and having the opportunity to create a second marriage. It may involve writing new vows, it may involve having a ceremony with friends, it may involve having a ceremony alone, but it involves a ritual, something that is symbolic, that declares the intention, that puts in the investment, that articulates it, that throws things in the ocean, in the water, burns it on the mountain, whatever it is,

The beauty of elevate. You are this ritual. It's a routine that is infused with creativity and intention.

And what you're talking about is how do you break the routine? Well, by turning it into a ritual. So that's first thing. My wife is all about ritual. Like this is the conversation that we've had, you know, and she's somebody just for context, like very much lives in that kind of heart centered space where I get lost in my mind and sometimes we miscommunicate because we're speaking different languages and that's a result of many things. But she's all about that.

Well, just tell her, take me. I mean, because the take me is I'm curious, I'm open, I'm receptive to something new. I know my ways. I know I can be complacent, I can be lazy. You know, I can admire myself in routine. Number two is this. This is the research of Eli Finkel that is very useful.

If you keep doing the things you are comfortable with and you enjoy and they are cozy and they are familiar, you strengthen the friendship dimension of a relationship, which is huge. But if you say, I don't just want to survive, I want to feel alive in my relationship. I want to infuse that erotic energy, erotic as in aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, curiosity, playfulness, that.

Then you need to do something different than just the familiar and the cosy. And that means no experiences. It's like generate new cells. No experiences that involve risk, an active engagement with the unknown and the novel.

curiosity, playfulness, all of that. For some people that's travel, for some people that's getting into a thing together that they never did, for some people it's what is the thing that you've always wanted to do and never got to. For some people it's

journeys together for some, I mean, it's different things, but they involve a meeting with yourself and with the other in a new context that reveals new things about yourselves and about each other. And that means risk. Playfulness is when risk and uncertainty are fun. What long-term relationships need to be willing to let go of is the illusion of safety and certainty as if it can continue forever.

Because there is a difference, this is so important between surviving and thriving. And some people don't need to do the thriving. It's not for everyone. But with those who say, I want to feel that energy, that connection, that vitality, that, again, it doesn't happen on its own. A culture that becomes invisible dies.

A relationship that doesn't do the things that maintain its aliveness and freshness becomes cosy and familiar and familiar, and that is beautiful. But that is not going to give you the prickle that you say you would like to feel on occasion.

and the risk and the uncertainty. There's no risk to the relationship. Sure, sure, sure. But that's premised on a foundation of trust. Like you have to have trust in order to take the risk. So that is a major debate in the trust research field. Tell me more. Do you need to trust in order to take risks or is risk taking what builds trust?

Oh, interesting. This is the big debate in the trust research field. And trust is when... I mean, Rachel Botsman says it's beautiful. Trust is an active engagement with the unknown. It's a leap of faith, trust. If you need assurance upfront, then you're not trusting. And it's not trust. Right. Right. That's a bit of a mindfuck.

No, it's just a different way of looking at it. No, when I say risk...

It means that that risk-taking will in and of itself is meant to strengthen the trust and develop a different kind of intimacy. It's an intimacy of adults. It's an intimacy that doesn't go straight through the role of parents. It's a different level of engagement where two people get to rediscover each other and themselves at a different stage of their relationship.

Sometimes it's new friends. Sometimes it's new horizons. Sometimes it's a new house. Sometimes it's a new job. The world new stands in front of everything. The show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

As we enter this season of gratitude, it's important to remember that this month is all about appreciation. It's about giving, it's about gratitude, but amidst the chaos, the pressure, there's someone we often forget to thank, and that is ourselves.

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You know what I learned from hosting this podcast for the past 12 years? I've learned that professional development isn't just about climbing the ladder. It's about understanding how we work and how we interact. That's why I'm super excited to tell you about work life with a brilliant Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and just one of my favorite thinkers. Adam brings together experts and leaders who share fascinating insights about improving work, from making meetings productive to building remarkable teams.

want to make your work life not just bearable but actually meaningful. Listen to work life without them grant wherever to get your podcast. I think what my wife is looking for most is intimacy and feeling like she's truly being seen. And I think my

predisposition or my preset is to lose myself in my own mind and go out into the world and pursue achievements as a proxy for love. I think part of my wounding or my wiring

is around love being a transactional thing and my worthiness or my deservedness for love being a function of, you know, kind of how I show up in the world and do things like under this idea of like specialness. And so I'm doing those things, thinking that that's the path of love. How many years have you been saying this?

Well, many years. This is a story. And this gets to the stories that we tell ourselves about our childhood trauma or whatever it is and what aspects of that are informative in terms of self-awareness so that you can heal them and move forward. And where do we get stuck in them as a story and just get into a whole drama around it?

Yes. It's like, how helpful is this story? Yeah. I mean, it's good for self-awareness. And then when I do something, I'm like, oh, maybe I can make sense of why I'm doing this. But it doesn't help me in terms of like resolving it. No. The minute you start telling me to me, I'm thinking, and this is his canned story. Yeah. He's so used to that story. Yeah. It's so, like, he just pulls it out of his... Uh-huh. And that doesn't mean it's not true. That doesn't mean it doesn't have tremendous validity. But it is utterly stale.

And it doesn't justify anything at this moment in your life. At this moment in your life, keep your story. But if you say, I want to make sure that my relationship gets a new trust of energy.

of breath, of expansion, then go do the things that you know will make a difference. To just say, she bonds this and I'm more than I'm in dinner, it's self-serving and it's a little stale, if you allow me.

You know, she wants to be seen by, I'm sure by now, after 25 years, you have a certain idea of which way she likes that. Of course. And decide, I'm going to put her in the center of my, go for, think of five days, three days, but I'm gonna once,

fully, fully, fully satiate this wish of hers. I'm going to be there complete. Don't even take my phone with me. Nothing. I want her one time to be radiating in the center of my universe. What else should I do? Okay. Well, start with that. That's good. Then the second thing you do is, I mean, that's not in order, but when you were talking, I thought,

I couldn't see you write a letter. I'm very big on letter writing because I think that writing gives you a chance of being with yourself while you talk to the other and reading a letter is being with the other while being with yourself. And I think you should write her a letter and just say, you know, I was talking to this woman on the podcast.

And I found myself saying, this is what you would like. And I just answered in the same usual defensive, tried out story of why I won't do something that would just probably be a risk for me and something unfamiliar and something that is not my comfort zone. And I realized how often I must have told you that story and how much that story is kind of holding me back.

And here we are after 25 years, and I'm thinking, man, at whatever age I am, I'm still telling the same thing. How true is this now? And how much does it serve me to actually not make changes? And I just thought that you should know that I know.

I'm not impervious to this. And I know that that story has probably kept me away from you many times. And it also makes me lazy. And it also, and try to try and just own that. That's where we started our conversation with responsibility. I think when people get that letter, there's suddenly a real sense of shared reality. What I've been trying to tell him is not

Delusional, I get it, I see it, I know it, I feel it. And when he confirms it, we're in a shared reality. This may be true in other directions for other things, you know. And from there, you make a commitment to something, a commitment to the fact that, you know, every system straddles stability and change.

continuity and innovation, security and freedom, every living organism, every relationship as well. So when you raise kids and you stay together, you emphasize the stability, the predictability, the reliability, the security, the anchoring dimensions of life.

But at the stage that you're entering or are have entered, if you want that relationship to not just be a scaffolding, but really a relationship, then you want to bring back the playfulness, the vitality, the risk taking, the novelty, the engagement with the unknown, curiosity. Replace comfortable with curious. To feel seen, she need to feel your curiosity. Yeah, she said as much.

OK, tell her that I never met her, but we have somehow report back to you. Absolutely can. I love that. I mean, it's so doable. That's the thing. Like, I can do that. You know, I can do that. Like, what has helped me back from that?

I mean, the good news is I'm in, like I'm not like, I want to have that. But you can be in with us of experience. Like, you know, I don't want to have just a normal thing and I don't want out of the marriage. Like I want it to be the best that it can be. But that means that means being in is nice, but you don't want to be in with minimum effort.

You don't tell your children to do minimum effort. You probably tell them a lot of things about how to go for things. And the same thing is true. So there's something about that coasting. And that, you know, the thing holds on its own without nurturing. You know, when you talk about performance and work and this and that, it's like, I see a lot of people who bring the best of themselves to work and the leftovers home.

the attention you're paying me in this conversation here, where you're focused on everything I say, do you have that focus when she talks? Right, right, right, right. Or do you come home and you say, I'm done working, and I can kind of put my attention on the contract. Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting. And also just the human mind's capacity to delude ourselves around the static nature of things.

whether it's a relationship or anything else. Like in AA, it's sort of like everything you do is moving you towards a drink or away from a drink. There is no coasting in sobriety. There's no coasting in relationships. And yet we tell ourselves, like, this is a static.

locked in thing. Maybe we do that because it feeds our need to feel like we have control over our lives and in a world in which we actually have no control. I don't know why we do that, but I'm constantly having to remind myself that things are not static. It's a contrived illusion of safety. Because if we're not in control, then we're not safe. For some of us, yes, for most of us.

Talk a little bit more about your definition of... You do know that when you just said this in Swallowd. What does that mean? Come on. It means that it's a sentence that means a lot to you. And what it means is not full here. Yeah. All right, I'm going to reflect on that.

I want to talk about sexuality a little bit. You mentioned the word erotic, and you have a very specific definition of that that's different from sex. So can you elaborate a little bit more on what you were talking about earlier?

Sexuality is the instinct, it's nature, it's the base. But eroticism is sexuality that is transformed by the human imagination. It's what gives sex meaning. And we are creatures of meaning.

Modernity has brought these two together as if erotic means sexual. Turn on arousal, this, that. But eroticism exists in every spiritual tradition, and it is really about the quality of a liveness.

of vibrancy, of vitality and engagement with serendipity and the unknown, curiosity, imagination, creativity. Those are the essential ingredients of the erotic. You can have a lot of sex and feel absolutely nothing. Women have done that for centuries, by the way. But in the erotic, you can do very, very little.

and feel a tremendous amount because the central agent of the erotic mind is the imagination. And I think it's a very important distinction because when people come to me and they say, they often want more sex, but they always want better sex.

And this better is in the quality of engagement, in the attention, in the intimacy, in the freedom, in the surrender, in what is being communicated by these bodies. So I'm very interested in the erotic because I'm interested in not just having relationships survive and not die. I'm interested in relationships feeling alive. And that's the opposite of what you call the status quo.

It can be really hard to talk about this for cultural reasons or just the way that we were raised where these are verbotan subjects. And then as adults, we don't have the vocabulary or we're so captured by guilt and shame around our own innate sexuality that it creates challenges in terms of communication between partners around this terrain.

You know, I wrote mating in captivity almost 20 years ago, and I have had conversations with thousands of people all over the world about the very thing that they had never spoken about.

And I began to think beyond just coming to my office, how do I provide people with exercises, language, vocabulary, perspectives, tools to actually have these conversations? It's one of the things that I'm most interested in is helping people have difficult conversations.

Conflict is a difficult conversation. Sexuality is a difficult conversation. And I'm creating, it's releasing next week, but it's a

of course bundle, it's called the Stemporal Desire bundle. And it's two courses on sexuality. One for people who are really stuck and just want to even talk about it and not derail each time. And one for people who really want the flicker to just ignite a little bit more into a flame. And it's called playing with desire, the second one. And it's all that. It's very concrete tools to help you

have, A, understand your own sexuality and understand how I think about sexuality, which I'll say in a moment. And then how to play, how to have conversations. And my card game does the same. I've looked for multiple ways to give people ease, comfort, fluidity, playfulness, to talk about these things without going all, you know, all icky and tense.

Right, because like in a card game, it's all fun. Like the stakes are lowered, right? But you can reveal a lot. You know, play is when risk is fun. So you can reveal a lot of things because you're in the midst of play. You know, a lot of conversations about sexuality, especially in the United States is either smart or sanctimony.

It's rarely just a natural conversation, an amazing window into the self. Sexuality is a window into a person and into a relationship. The traditional, the common way people think of sex is that something you do. You have sex. Rather than, it's an experience. Where do you go in sex?

What kind of place do you enter? Is it a space for deep connection, for notiness, for playfulness, for mischief, for spiritual union, to surrender, to be taken care of, to be safely powerful, to be vulnerable, to finally abdicate all responsibility of good citizenship? I mean, what's the space you enter? What parts of yourselves are you connecting with? Which sense is most alive in the erotic experience for you?

If you really understand sexuality and you know that it's a coded language for our deepest emotional needs, not for what turns you on, that what turns you on and what you experience there is actually, you know, what are the deep needs, wishes, wounds, fears that you bring

from your emotional life into your sexual life and your fantasy life is the ultimate secret code. Your prevalent fantasies reveal your deepest needs because a fantasy, a good fantasy, states the problem and offers the solution.

You understand, that's a Michael Bader line. A good fantasy is to subvert the fears and the inhibitions that roll inside of you and turn them into play.

Once you enter the sexuality from that point of view, once you understand that people have erotic blueprints and that they're how they were loved, how they connected, how they learn to experience pleasure, how they learn to receive. You know, that all these emotional experiences translate in the physicality of sex. Tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make love.

That's the blueprint. And so you give people a set of questions and they begin to answer them. And I know, I mean, I know because I've done it a thousand times and now we're doing it through the course. And I hear people just saying, we never talked about any of this.

It's like I'm discovering this person, or I never thought about that for myself. And this opening up, this unlocking of that conversation, because people often can do sex but can't talk about it, and certainly not with the person they're having sex with. And why is that? Like, what's at the crux of that? A lot of different things, you know. I mean, one is this is a subject that we learn to be silent and secretive about.

In the past, you had to feel ashamed if you had sex. Now you have to feel ashamed if you don't have sex. Men typically lie by exaggerating. Women have typically learned to lie by under-representing.

When I say men, women, I mean, it's also men identify, they're women identify, but the structures that are in place is that male sexuality is rather fixed, men are always interested, they always want it, they're, you know, in perpetual motion, in search of an outlet, it's spontaneous, unprompted, they don't need any help, it just, you know, they come ready.

And women's sexuality is more diffuse, more subjective, more rising on the lattice of emotion, more contextual. And it is a tremendous amount of myth and wrong ideas that are just filling people's heads. And the beginning of the course is really to demystify a whole bunch of things.

that are utterly not the case. I mean, it is clear that male sexuality is no less influenced by the internal life. A guy who's depressed or who is anxious or insecure, feuding that doesn't influence their sexuality in one way or another, but it does.

It's not true that men just exist in their, you know, groins. And that women, actually, it may be all about the supposed idea that they have less interest sexually, but in fact, maybe women are getting bored with monogamy much sooner than men. And what keeps them interested is a lot more. Risky activity, creativity, interest, being seen and all of that. And that's why they're not interested. It's not that they're not interested in sex, it's that they're not interested in the sex they can have.

At least make many men. Right. So for somebody who's listening to this or watching this, who has struggled with initiating this type of conversation, I mean, they can take your course and we'll put links to all of that in the show notes and there's the board game, etc.

What would be like a tool to kind of confront that fear and take on that risk and take that leap and ask that first question or create an environment where that conversation can take place, maybe for the first time?

It's either you just go straight up and you just say, I listened to this conversation or shall we? I mean, what is a podcast doing? What does my podcast do? You listen to couples having those sessions where they do exactly what you just asked me. And as you listen to it together, you just turn to your partner in the car and you say, have you ever thought of that? Is that ever been a question that you ask? Is that something you've ever wanted?

That's basically how a podcast becomes a transitional object. And we're talking about the podcast, but in fact, we're talking about ourselves. So much of where should we begin has been about that. People listen to another couple. The more intensely they listen to these other relationships, the more they see themselves, and the more it gives them the words and the courage to have the conversations that they want to have.

So I have done it through my podcast, I have done it through my card game, and I am doing it through the courses because those are three and three doors that I think one of them you will find accessible. If I say to you go talk to your wife like that,

Not really, but if I say you know there's an episode I think that it would really be interesting it's also a couple that's been together the kids are leaving they want to reconnecting it. Then you listen to the story it's like watching a movie reading a book your soft pedaling your way into it.

Okay, if I say a group of friends come, you don't necessarily start playing with your partner alone, and you say, I got this card game, you know, and I actually saw this woman or this people play, but you don't start with the most difficult questions. You put two cards underneath everybody's plate,

and you don't do the whole game and you just say, thought we should have it first, you know. I have yet to ever see people have the courage, the guts to just simply say, I want to do something else tonight. I saw this card game and I want to try it out and I said, and I think we know each other enough to do so. And then they realized that man, this is so much more interesting than most of the chit chat they ever always have.

I mean, I have literally yet to see someone who says this was a complete flop. Sometimes it takes a bit of time till it gets going, but when the stories become interesting, you're like, I thought I knew you did. When did that? It's interesting. I just did it with 5,000 people, so I can tell you, I take a few of the questions that are gentle. Don't start with sex questions per se.

I begin with questions, a risk I took that changed my life. Of message I fantasize receiving. If I could whisper something in the ears of my younger self, a guilty pleasure I savor is.

Stuff like that. Right, and then you sort of slowly tiptoe into it. No, then you go afterwards, they leave your friends, and then you go with your partner, and then you say, I have a few other questions I thought we could try. And then you say, you know, we never talk about this stuff, and it's weird. It's like, why not? I mean, what are we talking about? You know? Death, sex, and money. It's three subjects we never talk about, and yet they're present in everyone's life.

The podcast is so great because you're truly a fly on the wall, getting the eavesdrop into the way you work with couples who are going through problems that we can all relate to. And I think its power is in kind of modeling what those conversations look like and what they can be, especially for somebody who has no

previous experience in a therapeutic modality. It's really empowering and they're almost like they have three act structures to them. Like there's a beginning, middle, and end like you're on a journey with these people as you hear their, you know, innermost thoughts and working through these problems. Yeah. It's a, and, and there is a whole series on work. The idea in my head was as you listen, you will

find the tools and the language needed for the conversations that you need to have. That is the idea, because these days your best friend can come and tell you that they're breaking up and you never saw it coming. People don't really know the truth of other people. It's happening in a therapist's office, you know, confidentially. And that leaves a lot of people wondering, is this only happening to me? Am I the only one who can't talk about this with my partner?

Everything I do is about cultivating relational intelligence, helping people have difficult conversations, finding the vocabulary, understanding what certain things mean to them first, creating exercises and structures that give them a way to start. How do I think about this? Before I even how I talk about it, how do I think about it? What does it mean to think about sexuality?

And you know, it's different. You can ask a couple, do you still have sex? That's not the same as what is the role of sex in your life? What do you like to experience in sex? How do you connect? You know, what's the sense with which you experience sensuality the most? And how so? I have 150 of those questions, not like it's only five or six, but it's like

Wow, this is what you talk about. You know, in our pornographic world, those things have kind of vanished, you know? And so to make this actually a very rich, intriguing, you suddenly see people being like, you know, you think you know the person next to you and you don't. And because you don't, they actually remain interesting. That is a part of what keeps a relationship right. Right, the mystery.

You know, the presumption that you know the other person right next to you, and that is nothing left to discover, is really boring and precludes, in my opinion, a certain kind of hopefulness.

If you can never be surprised anymore and you think the whole person is like the inside of your pocket, that's the contrived illusion of safety. Don't give me novelty in a place where I want to think that I already, no surprises can happen to me. And then you complain of boredom. Well, you can't have it both ways. It's so true how this subject is divided in this binary way between the salacious and the puritan. And when I think of

My own education, my own sex education, there was basically nothing and you're just sort of trying to figure it out as a teenager yourself. And then the younger generation with just the level of access to porn everywhere and the lack of sex education and the lack of

anybody like yourself who is helping young people develop a vocabulary and a confidence to have these kinds of conversations. This is not a healthy dynamic for how to kind of emerge into the world and be able to have healthy sexual relations.

No. We need to like change the whole system around this. There's a lot of ignorance, there's a lot of myth, there's a lot of misunderstandings and perfectionist ideals because of the algorithms in the social media. Yes, or even romantic.

ideals that have been propagated through movies in which everybody is always just instantly ready, exploding, throwing themselves at another person. Nobody sees maintenance sex in a movie. You only see passionate sex.

While maintenance sex is extremely important in erotic couples. You know, not everything is always a big production. Not every meal is a four-course meal. Some meals are just very simple, home-cooked food, but they know less pleasurable.

And so what we see is just creating a set of rather unrealistic expectations. Not everybody starts sex after 18 years together just from being a desirous and aroused and turned on. Sometimes you start from being willing and just open and we'll see what happens. You're not always eating because you're hungry. Not everybody runs to the gym because they can't wait. But I've never seen somebody come back from the gym and regret.

And sex is no different. And sex is no different. And we have a kind of an exceptionalism around sex, as Martin Klein says, that is really problematic. And exceptionalism because of just the imagery that we're exposed to. No. Because it was so forbidden for so long.

Sexuality was primarily for procreation. Sexuality was a woman's marital duty. You needed to have 10 children, for which you needed to have 12, because two were not going to survive. So you had a kind of intrinsic motivation.

children had a very different meaning in the family than they have today. And we switched gradually from this sexuality that had a goal and that was sanctioned religiously around that goal to a sexuality that went from duty to desire.

We took sexuality out of the realm of nature and we socialized it. Sexuality became an element of our identity, not just an element of our condition. It's not just what we do, it's who we are. And we completely gave a new definition to sexuality, to its meaning, culturally, relationally, socially.

And we freed it. And once we freed it, we said it's natural. And once we said it's natural, we began to think that it just would pop up at 11.30 at night after you finished cleaning up the whole house out of nowhere.

And that is kind of one of the evolutions. It may be more natural than what we thought, but that doesn't mean it is just there ready to burst spontaneously. In a long-term relationship, everything that is spontaneous already happened.

If you wanted to happen, committed sex is premeditated, willful, conscious, creative sex. And then people say, oh, but that means you have to schedule it and plan it. I said, you don't schedule birthdays, you don't schedule your tennis game, you don't schedule, of course, do you think that it takes something away from your tennis game because you scheduled it? No, nobody thinks that. But somehow, this sex, God forbid, should have to be thought about. And that,

Myth of spontaneity is actually revealing how uncomfortable people are with sex. They want it to just happen so they don't have to actually claim it on it. That's a revelatory point because there is this stigma that if you're scheduling it, that it isn't actually real sex because it didn't spontaneously emerge. That is such a minefield.

Seriously, the spontaneous myth is a subterfuge for people's challenges to actually openly willfully acknowledge that this is important to them and they are going to make sure it happens, that they give value to it. Right, and to show up for that appointment as scheduled, whether you're in the mood or not, is confronting, right? Because if you have to then

channel yourself or get yourself into a state of receptivity and giving when you're not just spontaneously feeling it. That's part of what it means to tend to this important thing between two people. Do you ever book a nice restaurant to go for dinner? Sure. Okay. Do you ever that whole day not think about the restaurant because you have a whole bunch of things to do?

Then you come home and you start to gradually think about the fact that you have this reservation. Then you take a shower, you change, you dress up maybe because you think it's kind of nice to be dressed up to go to this place. Then you're still somewhat in a rush thinking about all the things that you need to finish. But you don't cancel your reservation because you're actually on some level looking forward to finally sit down. And does all that preparation make you feel like you shouldn't go to the restaurant? No.

or that the experience that you just had was less worthy because you put it on the calendar. When you think about what you're saying about how sex is supposed to happen, we're not surprised that it doesn't happen nearly as often as well as people would like. This bill in the mood, the mood comes. The mood is something you cultivate.

The mood comes with the attention, with the focus, with the presence, with being available. The mood is not, you know, don't always eat because you're hungry, but suddenly it smelled good. And then you said, oh, wow, what is that? Then you tasted. Then you took a little plate. Then you even ate more than you cared for. Then you really enjoyed it. And then you said, but I wasn't hungry.

surprising. That's what happens with sex too. Being in the mood, this notion that desire precedes everything and comes out of nowhere is a complete misunderstanding of how we connect sexually for sure in long-term relationships.

Let me read it this way. Sex is never spontaneous. It's just that when you are in the beginning, or when you're single, you prepare yourself alone first. In your mind, where we're going to go, where we're going to eat, what music, what... You always build the plot. And nobody thinks at that moment that this is...

work that you shouldn't have to do. When a painter starts to print and they prepare their materials, they're not busy thinking, ha, boring.

No, they're thinking as they're preparing the colors or they're not thinking, they're actually trying to not think, whichever process they're engaged in, but everyone understands ritual to prepare a site or to go and put your skis or whatever you golf clubs or your tennis racket or your baseball meet them.

dress a certain way, you put your accoutrements, you bring your tools, your accessories, and nobody thinks this takes away from the experience. Everybody understands that that's what that is the ritual of going to this activity. That's beautiful. From hikers to bikers, everybody has a set of rituals, tools. Nobody says, oh, bike toys.

Right. I think we have this, when you say ritualize or ritual, we have a reductive notion of what that is. It's candles and fireplaces and things like that, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that, but it is a way of

marking it and readying yourself and honoring. It's mindfulness. And in fact, I'm putting my mind, my attention onto this thing, because I am creating anticipation. And anticipation is the mortar of desire. Anticipation is the mortar of desire.

If I'm about to travel to Paris, I'm anticipating this trip. I bought a ticket. I have a suitcase ready. I've prepared certain clothes that I can imagine wearing there. I'm looking up for places I want to visit. I'm anticipating it's an imaginary experience with which I'm projecting myself in Paris.

And sex is no different. And sex is exactly the same. If sex is a foregone conclusion and you know in advance what you're going to get, why would you be interested all the time? Some of us are, but many of us are not. It's the curiosity. It's the whatever's going to happen. And then if I go to Paris, it's not a foregone conclusion. Even if I've been ten times. Yeah, yeah. Or you could go and be disappointed.

You can do that too. But people don't come to get my help for disappointments. Can we talk about dating a little bit? My lens on dating as somebody's been married for a long time is through the adventures and misadventures of my boys. It's through my...

my friends and peers who are divorced and down on the apps and it's through like friends of my wife. And the narratives go something like this at least.

With respect to young men, this is a game that's stacked against us. Unless you're rich and powerful or unbelievably handsome, there's no incentive for any of these women to take a chance or commit to me. That's one story. For the divorced men, it's a similar story.

For the women, it's like, where are all the good guys? Like I've been on these apps, I've been on a million terrible dates, and I just can't find like just a decent person that I feel like investing my time and energy with. Those are stories you must hear, quite a bit. Yes, I echo your stories.

I have two sons too. I have a long-term relationship. I hear the same things. I don't know that I have really original things to say about it, in the sense that we're in the midst of this. We're watching this. At first, updating allowed people to meet who would otherwise never meet. Updating is really very, very helpful to affinity groups.

But something began to happen around the apps that became a complete commodification of people. You know, the kind of ubiquitous ghosting that can take place. And people stopped being caring and careful of the feelings, the hearts, the brittle responses of other people.

It's rough. It's rough out there. If I don't have to look at you in the ass when I say, I don't think we're going to continue or I'm not sure I'm interested or I met somebody else or I really wish you well but I would rather be friends or, you know, it's easy to just disappear.

or when the courage to be vulnerable with someone is met with the wrong reaction or disappointment. So I have a lot of questions about how many times, you know, how much time I always find out. How long have you been writing before you meet? Did you call or did you see each other before you met? What did you do on your first date? A lot of first dates.

are often kind of akin to job interviews. I suggest to people to do something very different than to go and sit in a noisy place and ask each other questions. I think that is not the way you meet. And then while you ask questions, you wait to see if you're experiencing any butterflies. I think what often happens is that people go on the dates,

if they go on the dates, and they live their life.

I can't see you tonight, they say to their friends, because I have a date. I have a date Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week. I have dates. And they leave their life to go on those dates, and those dates don't materialize into anything, and then they have to go back to their friends to say nothing happened, and they feel this kind of emptiness in their stomach. The thing is set up that I date, I meet you, maybe we continue, and after a few months when I know we're steady, then I introduce you to my community.

Something about this feels off to me. You have a date, you have plans with your friend, bring your date to the front. Let's figure it out in some hermetically sealed vacuum. In the meantime, when you're outside of your life and you're in that artificial world,

You're both projecting idealized versions of yourself onto each other, and you're running a checklist in your mind on that list that you kind of opened with. Like, is this person going to satisfy all of these requirements that I have? And then you compare that to this perfectionism ideal that you see on social media, and it's a setup for disaster, predominantly. Is it not? Like, how can anyone survive that?

I've been basically people get into it, they do it for a few months, they either meet someone and then that goes into one direction or they don't meet, they get exhausted, they feel degraded, they feel flattened out and then they stop, they get off the app.

And then they go for a few months in their life. And then they kind of get the courage to go back on the app. And it's this revolt. And then they see the same people sometimes that they had seen months back. I think that don't leave your life to go dead. That's my first advice to a lot of people. Bring the dates to your life. But I don't want to have to tell that it didn't work. I said, just say, I just met somebody. It's the first time I'm seeing them, I'm bringing someone along. They're your friends.

You know, there will have a lot to say and you will have a ton of data points. If I'm seeing this person interact with your people in your life, you know, integrate it so that you don't cut off from your life to go, you know, put yourself in the petri dish. So that's one thing. The second thing is don't sit and interview and ask questions. Go do something you enjoy doing.

and bring that person along so that it's in multiple ways I'm thinking, how do we integrate this thing? Something is off in the complete cut off. It's like isolation texts in which these days take place. And asking questions isn't going to tell you much. So there's a whole new generation of people who are off the apps and they're going speed dating. How do you feel about that? Is that a good thing?

I think we need to try a lot of different things. People are often starved. They want to connect. They don't meet enough people. The workplace is somehow no longer a place where they don't go to work many times. They spend the whole day at home.

So, you know, this is this contactless life. So, any situation where you are in person with people, and not just you sit in lines, you know, facing people two minutes, two minutes, you create activities. Some people use my card game, they do questions, there's an engagement, there's an experience that is created.

and you will leave with someone whom you're talking and you will maybe even see that person again and that person may become a friend or may become a date or may introduce you to someone else. There is something dynamic about it and 3D and embodied, embodied. I think that that's the real thing here. I have yet to hear people who've gone to the speed dating and say it's a horrible experience.

It's interesting, because it sounds like a nightmare to me. Because you're thinking of it as being in a supermarket and having to look at a shelf and decide which box you want to take off the shelf. It sounds like the ultimate sort of job interview type dynamite. But it's not done like that. People come into little groups, they have a question, they play a game. I'm talking about the ones I've heard that I've done thisfully, but they're springing up all over the place.

Oh, that's interesting. It's almost like an, it's an antidote to the apps on some level to like create collisions, you know, create a dynamic in which people have to like interact with each other. That's so interesting. And all the ones who are there say the same thing. I wanted to meet in person, but I wanted to have a context for it, a framework. I don't want to be alone. There's also a thing about a lot. There's a lot of people. Right, right, right. Which kind of lowers the, the stakes a little bit, I guess.

One of the things that I see in older people who have had many relationships, maybe multiple marriages, et cetera, is the older you get, you know yourself better. You also know what you like and you don't like. And it's very easy. Yeah, you just be very inflexible. You're like, this is the way I like my life. And I want to have a relationship, but I'm really not interested in anybody who's going to challenge that way of living that I like and that I'm so accustomed to.

You're sort of dead out of the gate, right? Especially if you're gonna be dating somebody who's in your age bracket because they're probably coming to it similarly, right? And so somehow these people need to, you know, kind of embrace a little more flexibility around that kind of thing if a relationship is gonna have a shot. Yes, I mean, basically, sometimes people will say, I would like to be in a relationship but I prefer the one I have with myself. Okay? Then stay with yourself.

It's okay. I mean, you don't go to be with somebody else to stay unchanged. Part of what you experience by being with someone else, does not just in a romantic relationship, is to actually discover yourselves anew differently, things about that you didn't know you may like. So if it's to stay static,

And you kind of say it up front, don't move me, don't budge me, don't shake me, don't intrude on me. Then you kind of want to ask, what happened? What made that become such a prerogative for you? Did you feel like you lost yourself too much in the previous relationship? Is this a way of holding on to the previous relationship? What is the meaning of this static quality that you seem to claim?

You know? What is it that you may be afraid of? What is it that you're defending against even before the halting even started? And who tells you that someone is going to, you know, that that's what people come to do, you know, the renovation project. They've already done their homes.

So, what are we talking about? And that's my conversation when I hear that dialogue. But I think the first question often is, how have you been in your previous relationships? I think that we don't pay enough attention to how relationships end. And I think that when they end, we tend to think that they failed.

when in fact, longevity is not the only marker of success. And I think that some relationships were very good for what they were meant to be. And if people could understand that the ending doesn't mean they failed, then they could take with them a very different story about what they bring to the next relationship. Because we come with our accumulated memories and lessons of the relationships we've been in.

Yes, some relationships run their course and were successful for what they were, but are no longer viable. And that's not a failure. That's a success, right? For a certain stage of life. You grew up together. You build homes together. You took care of your aging parents. You have been there to help each other begin your professional lives or you've raised kids together. You've done a lot of things. These are not small things.

These are not failed relationships. Maybe at this moment, developmentally, you need something else. This is why I say we will have two or three relationships.

And some of us will do it with the same person. And some of us will need another person to create something new. Some people can reinvent on location and reimagine themselves. And some of us will leave. We leave twice as long. And that means that longevity means something very different. And at different stages, you will see these developmental tasks

of family life for many is no longer at the center. So what do you have together? And some relationships will stay because there's a real deep connection between the two people and the quality of the relationship is what really holds them. And for some people, they will stay together because it's a very powerful scaffolding. It gives them access to all kinds of things in the world. That is what the relationship provides them.

And it's a lifestyle and resources and people, and that is the meaning of the relationship. Nothing wrong with that.

And it's up to the people in the relationship to make up those rules and what that contract looks like. It doesn't have to adhere to our conventional understanding of what a relationship needs to look like. I also think that it's okay to want other relationships. Romantic relationship is not the only one for us to stay connected. There are people who are wonderful siblings, friends, bosses, mentors,

they do not shine in the romantic sphere. But they are the friends you dearly want to have. And we have so attached the word love and intimacy to the romantic relationship, when in fact there is deep love and intimacy in friendships, for example. And there's a tremendous pressure about that romantic relationship. But maybe for some people that same person that says, I like my habits and I

Be my guest, you know, maybe have some sexual partners, maybe have close friends, maybe have people with whom you like to travel, maybe have people with whom you enjoy being together, but you don't want to merge homes and you want to be a lot or living apart together. We either accept that there's a multiplicity of models and there isn't a one-size-fits-all, but that being connected

and having intimacy and meaningful relationship is essential to our survival and to our well-being, and not to put all of it into one type of relationship. Think that that's the more important piece, is we need connection. We're socially wired. Relational health is essential to physical health, to our overall sense of well-being, but it doesn't just have to take place in the romantic relationship.

I could talk to you for hours and hours more, but we have to bring this to a conclusion. Thank you for coming here today. I really appreciate it. I think your work is vital and I applaud and salute you for the way that you show up in the world and how helpful you have been to millions of people because relationships is a universal thing. We all have our struggles and challenges with it.

And you have been just a wealth of information and inspiration and education in that regard. So thank you. Thank you. Yeah. You have a couple courses that are going live soon, playing with desire and bringing desire back.

which I believe are dropping on September 17th, which is very exciting. And as a gift to our audience, you are offering a reduced price on that. If you use the code rich15 at checkout, you get 15% off. And for people who want to learn more about those courses, where should they go?

It's that simple. All right. Thank you. I hope you'll come back and explore more. I had tons more I wanted to talk to you about, but this was a real treat. So. Yes. Thanks.

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