These clips are from the podcast where should we begin?

I'm Esther Perel, and I am a couples therapist

For the past 35 years I've been helping couples and people navigate the challenges of

relationships and

Until not too long ago. There was no such a thing as a couples therapist

Basically you got together with somebody you married, and that was it you were stuck for life

If you didn't like it well you could concern yourself with an early death

It was till death do us apart

Not as we have it today as till love dies

Never before has the survival of the family dependent on the happiness of the couple and

This has made the couple such a central unit

also

The unit of relationships that is probably undergoing the most changes in a very short amount of time

Never have we invested more in love and

never have we divorced or broken up more in the name of love I

Imagine a world in which we can experience

our

relationships with a sense of vitality and aliveness and vibrancy

Because I live with one perennial truth

the quality of your relationships is what determines the quality of your life and

The bonds and the connections that we make with other people that we established with them

Gives us a greater sense of meaning of happiness of well-being than any other

human experience

So let me ask you just for a moment

How many of you are in a relationship at this moment a romantic relationship, let's put it like that

And how many of you would like to be in a relationship

And now I would like some more light on the house for the next question

How many of you would like to be out of the relationship that you're in at least sometimes

You can leave the lights on at this moment

So we we can actually really relate to each other to

Do here what we're talking about

Relationships at this moment are undergoing such a massive shift

The norms are literally changing under our feet, and we have to make up the rulebook as we go

You know for a long time

Our relationships were pretty simple because they were dictated by rules

Religion had clear strictures, and it had structure and it had incentives and it had

prohibitions and

Social hierarchy was also very clear and it told us

how parents had to talk to the kids how children had to

Respond to adults her husband's had to talk to their wives and how wives didn't have to answer their husbands

Things were clear

All the decisions were made for us the big decisions

Who was going to be the breadwinner?

Who was going to wake up at night to feed the baby? Who has the right to demand for sex?

What you did is what you father did and at this moment we

have unraveled this system, and we have created a world of options and choices and

unprecedented freedom

But as a result we have to negotiate everything. It's all up for grabs

It's no longer clear who's gonna be the breadwinner in fact whose career is gonna

Take priority at this time who's gonna wake up tomorrow morning to feed the baby

Who's responsible for anything sure initiating sex next time who's going to plan the date?

What gender should I be dating how many people should I be dating at the same time?

Should I tell them about the others?

Am I ready to have children do I even want to have children should I move east should I move West?

Where am I going to go on vacation next

Am I in mind my needs, but getting met in this relationship?

Am I happy am I happy enough?

All these big decisions that have burdened the selfs like never before we have to figure it all out and

because of that

Conversations have become the heart of relationships

We have to talk about stuff that we've never talked about that

We don't know how to talk about that we don't have the vocabulary to talk about and most of the time

We've even never said it to ourselves

Are we up for the right people

So I want to unpack this conundrum with you

and

The way I think is this I'm imagining you sitting there saying so what is she going to tell me?

What are we going to do?

You know and I'm gonna tell you right up front so that you can relax in your anticipation

I do not have three easy steps for what you need to do

And I don't feel bad about it

because as you may have heard I have an accent which means that I'm not from here and

one of the things that non Americans sometimes say is that for some reason Americans think that every problem needs to have a solution and

I don't have a solution because many of these things are not a problem that we have to solve

but these are paradoxes that we need to manage.

For me to understand the confusions and the pains that we are experiencing in our relationships at this point

Demands that I kind of put it in context. How did we get there? What has happened?

What have been the big social and cultural shifts that are directly entering our sheets at this moment?

So allow me to take you on a quick tour in history

For a long time as social animals we lived in tribes. We lived in villages

We lived in communities and in those villages

we were told what to do and things were clear in return for allegiance and for obedience I

Would get a sense of belonging I would get a sense of continuity. I would get a sense of identity I

Got a lot of certainty. I got very little freedom, but I was never alone and

We moved to the cities and in our urban lives

we are for the first time so much more free, but also so much more alone and

For the first time we are turning to our romantic partners

To help us with that aloneness to help us transcend that existential aloneness

We still want all the same things that traditional marriage was about we want family life some of us we want

Companionship we want economic support we want social status

but now I want you also to be my best friend and my

Trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot and all for the long haul and the long haul keeps getting longer

What we have created in a romantic ambition is one person to give us once an entire village used to provide

As I have sometimes said you don't solve this problem with Victoria's Secrets

And since there is no victor secret. We all know where the responsibility has lied

This shift from

The collective life where we had belonging

But very little freedom to where we have a lot of freedom, but everywhere we talk about relationships today

We hear about the fact that we no longer have a deep sense of

anchoring and belonging in rootedness like we used to have and that we are facing a modern massive epidemic of

Loneliness which in America today has become the number one public health crisis

more than obesity

A few other major changes took place in the old model when marriage was primarily an economic Enterprise

Intimacy had to do with sharing the life together you milked the cows you water the land. You'd raise the children

It was about economy

but today when I talk about intimacy I talk about it as into me see and

What I bring to you is not my dowry. It's not my

commercial assets I bring to you my inner life I

Bring to you my wishes my feelings my aspirations my anxieties and when I talk to you

I want you to look at me. No this (typing)

I want contact. I want connection. I want you to make me feel that I matter. I want you to reflect and

validate me and I want to transcend this life of growing atomization.

I also want you to

Help me or to help together actually

Achieve what is probably one of the most amazing

challenges of

Relationships today, this is where we want to bring under one roof

contradictory ideals and contradictory needs on the one hand our need for

security for rootedness for belonging for Anker for predictability for safety and on the other end our

Need for adventure and novelty and change and mystery every living organism

straddles this

polarity between change and stability

every person every relationship every company and

Thriving relationships are the ones who know how to reconcile these two fundamental sets of human needs

If you think for a moment all of you

Have grown up needing both

Security safety and adventure exploration

And some of you may have come of your childhood

needing more protection and

some of you may have come out of your childhood needing more space and autonomy and

If you think about how that enters into your relationships

You will notice that very often

in a couple

there is one person who is more in touch with the fear of losing the other and

One person who is more in touch with the fear of losing themselves

One person more afraid of abandonment and one person more afraid of suffocation

Reconciling security and adventure

reconciling love and desire in one relationship has become one of the great challenges

We today when we look for that person with whom we want to have everything we call that person the soulmate

Have you heard of the soulmate?

How many of you think that you're looking for a soulmate or have found a soulmate or are living with your soulmate?

You know the thing that really interested me about the soulmate is that

It's called the one the one and only all of that

But the soulmate was an interesting concept because for most of history the soulmate meant God

not another human being and

In our secularized society in the West we have basically taken romantic love

to replace the role of religion many times we look to our partners to give us transcendence and

meaning and

ecstasy and wholeness all these things that we used to look for in the perfect world of the divine and

Not only do we bring this zeal for the soulmate?

But the way we are looking for this soulmate is mired in a romantic consumption economy

I am going to look for the one and only

Through that thing where I have a thousand people at my fingertips

What does it mean to look for the one and only in the swiping culture in the village you have two choices?

Later you had six choices

Now you have a thousand choices

Do you know what it means to meet the one?

The one means that this is the one that's going to cure you of your case of FOMO

When I find you I no longer think I could do better

Phenomenal you know

For you my beloved I will delete my apps

Is the new ritual of commitment

And all these decisions by the way, you know that we have to make is it time to delete my apps and we study

Enough at this point. You know

If your parents didn't know any of this, but your grandparents. They would be turning around in their graves

you know

We have very few guidelines and a lot of options and all these options are giving us quite a bit of uncertainty

And quite a bit of self doubt as well

How do I know?

How do I know that I have found the one is a question that people ask me all the time?

When we talk about sex

Which is really an enormous series of changes that have taken place in relationships

First of all there are three primary sexual revolutions the advent of contraception

Without which women could never experience sexuality without women and men could never experience the freedom of

separating sex from reproduction

the women's movement

Which took on the abuses of power and the gay movement which introduced the concept of sexual identity?

For most of history sexuality was seen as a part of our biology

Today we have socialized it it is a part of who we are of our identity of how I see myself of how I

Express myself. It is a sovereign piece of my eye of who I am and for that matter it has become a fundamental human right

We no longer just have sex for reproduction neither is it in long-term relationships or in

Relationships that are with some some length

And it is no longer just a woman's marital duty today

sexuality especially after two kids if you have two or three which is the average Western thing, it's

basically for pleasure and connection no other motive

So it better be good

Because in order to want sex it needs to be sex that is worth wanting

This is really a major shift to have sexuality that is based only on my wanting

Which is the definition of desire is to own the wanting

And hopefully I want you and you want me and it happens to be at the same time

Tell other conditions to fulfill

But we have taken this now

Recently to yet another level a very very important and promising level

Because we are taking on for the first time

Again, maybe not for the first time, but again one of the oldest power dynamics

Related to sex and power

Where men have historically

leveraged their social power

in order to gain access to

sexual favors and

Women have leveraged their youth their beauty their sexuality which often was the only power they had

in order to access

Social power that was otherwise denied to her

This

examination of this power structure is

concurrently under intense scrutiny

And it is also giving us a unique opportunity to finally open up the narrow

boxes in which masculinity femininity

male and female have been locked up for way too long for

The last 40 years

We have done in the West and everywhere else a little bit of the beginning work, but very

significant work to help women

Find their power in their voice

But we have often left men stuck in a complete

definitional void of manhood

Patriarchy doesn't just hurt women

it hurts us all and

To take four year old boys and stop touching them less than we touch our daughters and begin this

Systematic dismantle ment of their emotional lives so that we can make the making of modern

masculinity highly performance-based

rooted in self-reliance and autonomy and

fearlessness and competition

All kinds of things that have actually made men way more vulnerable

Less likely to live long and not always the best partners

If we are going to work towards true equality

We will match our intense efforts in helping women find power and voice

With our intense efforts to help men be able to share their heart and their vulnerability