She draws enormous crowds, both online and in person, and is a good friend of the school of life.

She recently came to talk at our branch in London, and she'll be back again in December.

Parole recognizes the distinctive moment we're at in history, where we now get into relationships not primarily for status, security or Children, but in order to be happy, an enormous challenge for which we need a little bit of help.

So welcome to my office.

You have just entered the space of a couples therapist.

And you know, there wasn't too long ago that there was very little couples therapy.

But couples therapy became really important.

Once a very important shift took place, which is that this is the first time that the survival of the family depends basically on the happiness of the couple.

That's why we do couples therapy to help people experience a different quality of connections between them.

We are literally making the playbook as we go, and instead of having rules what we have today's conversations, everything is a freaking negotiations everything is negotiating.

Who's gonna wake up to feed the baby and whose career actually matters and who's gonna plan for the next date?

And am I happy?

And am I happy enough?

And should I do this, or should I do that?

Should I did this person?

Should I date only one person may be a few.

What gender should they be?

You know, it's an enormous amount of things.

I'm just, you know, you used to choose between two people in the village.

John and James.

That was it.

Mary and Rebecca.

You know that?

Was that this this new thing here, you know, you know, this is phenomenal.

I mean, I have options like I've never had, but how am I going to combine market economy, commodification of people and romantic consumerism?

It's partly because our expectations are so high that we suffer so much in love.

We feel entitled.

And when we are resentful and when we get upset in our relationships is because we are grappling with our sense of entitlement.

I was promised this thing.

You owe me this thing.

You told me that you would make me happy.

That was the story of romantic love.

A lot of our unhappiness in love has come to focus on sex duty.

Was the organizing principle of sexuality in committed relationship, not desire.

But we made an enormous change around that, you know, primarily due to the demo.

Thanks to the Democrat ization of contraception, we could shift duty to desire.

We could for the first time, separate sex from reproduction.

Everybody talks about communication, but we have to talk about things that we've never had to talk about, and it's often difficult to talk about them with the person that we are closest to.

I don't have to tell you, surprisingly, that many people find it much easier to talk about sex with anybody but the person they're having sex with, part of what kills relationships according to parole, is the feeling that you own your partner.

Desire is also rooted in absence and in longing.

The essential question of desire is, Can we want what we already have?

And I think the couples who have an erotic spark are couples who never live under the illusion that they have each other.

They don't think their partner belongs to them, and they think they're partner is at best on loan, with an option to renew.

That's they can tolerate that truth because you can always lose your partner.

But you can create mechanisms to deny the truth because it's really anxiety producing.

But that moment of anxiety that little bit of anxiety is actually where desire resides because it makes you keep wanting because you don't really feel that you have.

We asked peril why people have affairs.

What really interested me is the fact that actually affairs do happen in good relationships to in satisfying relationships.

That is much more interesting.

Why do people still doing?

And the majority of people that therapists anyway work with are not chronic philanderers.

They are often people who have been faithful for decades and then one day across the line that they themselves never thought they would cross.

So then you ask for a glimmer of what?

Why would people risk losing everything they have billed for what, and that's when this thing about desire and the power of the erotic becomes so powerful and the best way I understood it, that one word all over the world that people kept telling me when they would interview those who had affairs, I feel alive and what it meant.

Waas.

That there was a sense of deadness that had crept up inside of them, not the responsibility of the other person, not even the responsibility of marriage, just often in a way that they had allowed themselves to disappear.

And they began to say to me this very unusual sentence.

It's not that I wanted to leave my partner.

It's what I wanted to leave who I had become.

Por El wants us to be open minded about the sort of relationship that might work for us.

What we need is emotional connection, but that might mean all kinds of arrangements.

Sexually.

Do we want connection?

Yes, we want connection.

There is something about us that doesn't leave well alone.

And how these connections will manifest is up for, you know, for some of us, it will take the model of the traditional relationship long term, one person, the whole thing, and for others of it's going to be a serial monogamy.

And for others, it's going to be a consensual non monogamy or polyamory.

The most important thing is that if there isn't a one size fits all.

And at this point there is one model, and if you don't succeed at it, you divorce.

And divorce is not for the disillusion.

Divorce is for the true idealists because they believe in the model.

Just just think that they chose the wrong person and they'll do better next time by choosing a better person, Not by, you know, So check if the model works for you.

It's like innovation has entered every space except for marriage, you know, disrupted a little bit.

As they say.

What we need above all is to expand the sort of conversations we're having around sex.

Sex is not something you do.

It's a place you go and then you ask yourself, Where do you go?

Insects.

Is it a place to be naughty?

Is it a place to be toe abdicate responsibility?

Is it a place to be taken?

Care off?

Is it a place to be safely dominant?

Is it a place to surrender?

Is it a place for spiritually union?

Is it a place to be aggressive and finally be able to just command your wishes but playfully playfully and ask yourself what part of me connects with my sexuality.

Where do I go?

Insects don't think act, don't think performance and don't think the kind of narrow, male focused Gen.

Italy modeled off sex of four minutes of foreplay before the real thing and the rial thing is intercourse, and it ends with an orgasm.

And then when he's done, it's done.

Parole is not pessimistic about love.

She merely thinks that if we toe honor our hopes, we're going to need an emotional education.

Thankfully, with people like her toe hand, we can now start to get one.

Esther Perel is coming to talk at the School of Life in London on Tuesday, December 4th.

For more information and tickets, please click the link on screen now or in the video description.