Relationships Matter
A friend introduced me to Esther Perel, a Belgian-born New York psychotherapist who is the guru on relational intelligence and whose mantra is that the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives. She explores what she calls the tensions between our need for security (love, belonging and closeness) and our need for freedom (erotic desire, adventure and distance) in our relationships.
She is a fascinating, articulate and unapologetic story teller about the things we are too squeamish to talk to our friends about and the things that are too loaded to talk to our partners about. She is most famous for her book Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence and her Ted Talk, The Secret to Desire in a Long-term Relationship, and, Rethinking Infidelity. While her erotic intelligence theories are the headline getters, her work on connection and communication through `thoughtful talking´ and ´hardcore listening´, creating boundaries and managing expectations, vulnerability, building trust and empathy, and revealing the patterns and paradoxes in our relationships is where we create the foundations of real intimacy that allow Eros to flow.
Best place to find her is driving alone in your car. Her podcast, Where Should We Begin, lets us be flies on the walls of her therapy room where she counsels couples in real-life situations, which allows us to see our dilemmas in action.